CoFlow: Coordinated Few-Step Flow for Offline Multi-Agent Decision Making

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zou, Guowei, Wang, Haitao, Zhang, Beiwen, Zhang, Boning, Wu, Hejun
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Zou, Guowei
Wang, Haitao
Zhang, Beiwen
Zhang, Boning
Wu, Hejun
author_facet Zou, Guowei
Wang, Haitao
Zhang, Beiwen
Zhang, Boning
Wu, Hejun
contents Generative models have emerged as a promising paradigm for offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), but existing approaches require many iterative sampling steps. Recent few-step acceleration methods either distill a joint teacher into independent students or apply averaged velocity fields independently to each agent. Unfortunately, these few-step approaches hurt inter-agent coordination. We show that the efficiency-coordination trade-off is not inherent: single-pass multi-agent generation can preserve coordination when the velocity field is natively joint-coupled. We propose Coordinated few-step Flow (CoFlow), an architecture that combines Coordinated Velocity Attention (CVA) with Adaptive Coordination Gating. A finite-difference consistency surrogate further replaces memory-prohibitive Jacobian-vector product backpropagation through the averaged velocity field with two stop-gradient forward passes. Across 60 configurations spanning MPE, MA-MuJoCo, and SMAC, CoFlow matches or surpasses Gaussian policies, value-based methods, transformer policies, diffusion models, and prior flow baselines on episodic return. Three independent coordination probes confirm that CoFlow's improvements arise from inter-agent coordination rather than per-agent capacity. A denoising-step sweep shows that single-pass inference suffices on every configuration. CoFlow reaches state-of-the-art coordination quality in 1-3 denoising steps under both centralized and decentralized execution. Project Page: https://guowei-zou.github.io/coflow/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_01457
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CoFlow: Coordinated Few-Step Flow for Offline Multi-Agent Decision Making
Zou, Guowei
Wang, Haitao
Zhang, Beiwen
Zhang, Boning
Wu, Hejun
Artificial Intelligence
Generative models have emerged as a promising paradigm for offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), but existing approaches require many iterative sampling steps. Recent few-step acceleration methods either distill a joint teacher into independent students or apply averaged velocity fields independently to each agent. Unfortunately, these few-step approaches hurt inter-agent coordination. We show that the efficiency-coordination trade-off is not inherent: single-pass multi-agent generation can preserve coordination when the velocity field is natively joint-coupled. We propose Coordinated few-step Flow (CoFlow), an architecture that combines Coordinated Velocity Attention (CVA) with Adaptive Coordination Gating. A finite-difference consistency surrogate further replaces memory-prohibitive Jacobian-vector product backpropagation through the averaged velocity field with two stop-gradient forward passes. Across 60 configurations spanning MPE, MA-MuJoCo, and SMAC, CoFlow matches or surpasses Gaussian policies, value-based methods, transformer policies, diffusion models, and prior flow baselines on episodic return. Three independent coordination probes confirm that CoFlow's improvements arise from inter-agent coordination rather than per-agent capacity. A denoising-step sweep shows that single-pass inference suffices on every configuration. CoFlow reaches state-of-the-art coordination quality in 1-3 denoising steps under both centralized and decentralized execution. Project Page: https://guowei-zou.github.io/coflow/
title CoFlow: Coordinated Few-Step Flow for Offline Multi-Agent Decision Making
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01457