Agents
Appendix Gigastep - One Billion Steps per Second Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
In this section, we train policies for different scenarios to validate that the tasks defined in Gigastep can be solved with multi-agent RL algorithms. In particular, we use multi-agent PPO implemented in JAX. In competitive or adversarial MARL, an objective reward measure is not defined, as the collected reward inherently depends on the relative strength of the opposing agent's policy. Therefore, to measure the training progress, we compare the current policy with previous checkpoints of the same policy at earlier training iterations. Specifically, an improving policy should be able to outperform its previous counterparts.
AI needs a strong data fabric to deliver business value
A modern data fabric makes it possible to turn existing enterprise knowledge into a trusted foundation for AI. Artificial intelligence is moving quickly in the enterprise, from experimentation to everyday use. Organizations are deploying copilots, agents, and predictive systems across finance, supply chains, human resources, and customer operations. By the end of 2025, half of companies used AI in at least three business functions, according to a recent survey. But as AI becomes embedded in core workflows, business leaders are discovering that the biggest obstacle is not model performance or computing power but the quality and the context of the data on which those systems rely. AI essentially introduces a new requirement: Systems must not only access data -- they must understand the business context behind it.
Learning to Communicate with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Jakob Foerster, Ioannis Alexandros Assael, Nando de Freitas, Shimon Whiteson
We consider the problem of multiple agents sensing and acting in environments with the goal of maximising their shared utility. In these environments, agents must learn communication protocols in order to share information that is needed to solve the tasks. By embracing deep neural networks, we are able to demonstrate endto-end learning of protocols in complex environments inspired by communication riddles and multi-agent computer vision problems with partial observability. We propose two approaches for learning in these domains: Reinforced Inter-Agent Learning (RIAL) and Differentiable Inter-Agent Learning (DIAL). The former uses deep Q-learning, while the latter exploits the fact that, during learning, agents can backpropagate error derivatives through (noisy) communication channels. Hence, this approach uses centralised learning but decentralised execution. Our experiments introduce new environments for studying the learning of communication protocols and present a set of engineering innovations that are essential for success in these domains.
Last-Iterate Guarantees for Learning in Co-coercive Games
Chandak, Siddharth, Tamizholi, Ramanan, Bambos, Nicholas
We establish finite-time last-iterate guarantees for vanilla stochastic gradient descent in co-coercive games under noisy feedback. This is a broad class of games that is more general than strongly monotone games, allows for multiple Nash equilibria, and includes examples such as quadratic games with negative semidefinite interaction matrices and potential games with smooth concave potentials. Prior work in this setting has relied on relative noise models, where the noise vanishes as iterates approach equilibrium, an assumption that is often unrealistic in practice. We work instead under a substantially more general noise model in which the second moment of the noise is allowed to scale affinely with the squared norm of the iterates, an assumption natural in learning with unbounded action spaces. Under this model, we prove a last-iterate bound of order $O(\log(t)/t^{1/3})$, the first such bound for co-coercive games under non-vanishing noise. We additionally establish almost sure convergence of the iterates to the set of Nash equilibria and derive time-average convergence guarantees.
Long-term Causal Effects via Behavioral Game Theory
Panagiotis Toulis, David C. Parkes
Planned experiments are the gold standard in reliably comparing the causal effect of switching from a baseline policy to a new policy. One critical shortcoming of classical experimental methods, however, is that they typically do not take into account the dynamic nature of response to policy changes. For instance, in an experiment where we seek to understand the effects of a new ad pricing policy on auction revenue, agents may adapt their bidding in response to the experimental pricing changes. Thus, causal effects of the new pricing policy after such adaptation period, the long-term causal effects, are not captured by the classical methodology even though they clearly are more indicative of the value of the new policy. Here, we formalize a framework to define and estimate long-term causal effects of policy changes in multiagent economies. Central to our approach is behavioral game theory, which we leverage to formulate the ignorability assumptions that are necessary for causal inference. Under such assumptions we estimate long-term causal effects through a latent space approach, where a behavioral model of how agents act conditional on their latent behaviors is combined with a temporal model of how behaviors evolve over time.