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Wei Zhang 0331

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ECAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

ToMacVF: Temporal Macro-Action Value Factorization for Asynchronous Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

  • Wenjing Zhang
  • Wei Zhang 0331

Existing asynchronous MARL methods based on MacDec-POMDP typically construct training trajectory buffers by simply sampling limited and biased data at the endpoints of macro-actions, and directly apply conventional MARL methods on the buffers. As a result, these methods lead to an incomplete and inaccurate representation of the macro-action execution process, along with unsuitable credit assignments. To solve these problems, the Temporal Macro-action Value Factorization (ToMacVF) is proposed to achieve fine-grained temporal credit assignment for macro-action contributions. A centralized training buffer, called Macro-action Segmented Joint Experience Replay Trajectory (Mac-SJERT), is designed to incorporate with ToMacVF to collect accurate and complete macro-action execution information, supporting a more comprehensive and precise representation of the macro-action process. To ensure principled and fine-grained asynchronous value factorization, the consistency requirement between joint and individual macro-action selection called Temporal Macro-action based IGM (To-Mac-IGM) is formalized, proving that it generalizes the synchronous cases. Based on To-Mac-IGM, a modularized ToMacVF architecture, which satisfies CTDE principle, is designed to conveniently integrate previous value factorization methods. Next, the ToMacVF algorithm is devised as an implementation of the ToMacVF architecture. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to asynchronous baselines, our ToMacVF algorithm not only achieves optimal performance but also exhibits strong adaptability and robustness across various asynchronous multi-agent experimental scenarios.

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ECAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

B2MAPO: A Batch-by-Batch Multi-Agent Policy Optimization to Balance Performance and Efficiency

  • Wenjing Zhang
  • Wei Zhang 0331
  • Wenqing Hu
  • Yifan Wang

Most multi-agent reinforcement learning approaches adopt two types of policy optimization methods that either update policy simultaneously or sequentially. Simultaneously updating policies of all agents introduces non-stationarity problem. Although sequentially updating policies agent-by-agent in an appropriate order improves policy performance, it is prone to low efficiency due to sequential execution, resulting in longer model training and execution time. Intuitively, partitioning policies of all agents according to their interdependence and updating joint policy batch-by-batch can effectively balance performance and efficiency. However, how to determine the optimal batch partition of policies and batch updating order are challenging problems. Firstly, a sequential batched policy updating scheme, B2MAPO (Batch by Batch Multi-Agent Policy Optimization), is proposed with a theoretical guarantee of the monotonic incrementally tightened bound. Secondly, a universal modulized plug-and-play B2MAPO hierarchical framework, which satisfies CTDE principle, is designed to conveniently integrate any MARL models to fully exploit and merge their merits, including policy optimality and inference efficiency. Next, a DAG-based B2MAPO algorithm is devised, which is a carefully designed implementation of B2MAPO framework. The upper layer employs PPO algorithm with attention mechanism to reveal interdependence between policies, and generates DAGs of agents which are used to produce optimal batch sequence through topological sorting. The lower layer trains two joint policies in parallel and minimizes KL divergence between them periodically. One joint policy is sequentially updated according to B2MAPO scheme with batch sequence, another derived joint policy is simultaneously updated by MAPPO. While decentralized execution, only the derived joint policy is adopted for decision-making. Comprehensive experimental results conducted on StarCraftII Multi-agent Challenge and Google Football Research demonstrate the performance of DAG-based B2MAPO algorithm outperforms baseline methods. Meanwhile, compared with A2PO, our algorithm reduces the model training and execution time by 60. 4% and 78. 7%, respectively.

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