In many real-world cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) tasks, teams of agents can rehearse together before deployment, but then communication constraints may force individual agents to execute independently when deployed. Centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) is increasingly popular in recent years, focusing mainly on this setting. In the value-based MARL branch, credit assignment mechanism is typically used to factorize the team reward into each individual's reward -- individual-global-max (IGM) is a condition on the factorization ensuring that agents' action choices coincide with team's optimal joint action. However, current architectures fail to consider local coordination within sub-teams that should be exploited for more effective factorization, leading to faster learning. We propose a novel value factorization framework, called multiagent Q-learning with sub-team coordination (QSCAN), to flexibly represent sub-team coordination while honoring the IGM condition. QSCAN encompasses the full spectrum of sub-team coordination according to sub-team size, ranging from the monotonic value function class to the entire IGM function class, with familiar methods such as QMIX and QPLEX located at the respective extremes of the spectrum.

Due to its high sample complexity, simulation is, as of today, critical for the successful application of reinforcement learning. In this paper, we show how to factorize large networked systems of many agents into multiple local regions such that we can build separate simulators that run independently and in parallel. To monitor the influence that the different local regions exert on one another, each of these simulators is equipped with a learned model that is periodically trained on real trajectories. Our empirical results reveal that distributing the simulation among different processes not only makes it possible to train large multi-agent systems in just a few hours but also helps mitigate the negative effects of simultaneous learning.

When one agent interacts with a multi-agent environment, it is challenging to deal with various opponents unseen before. Modeling the behaviors, goals, or beliefs of opponents could help the agent adjust its policy to adapt to different opponents. In addition, it is also important to consider opponents who are learning simultaneously or capable of reasoning. However, existing work usually tackles only one of the aforementioned types of opponents. In this paper, we propose model-based opponent modeling (MBOM), which employs the environment model to adapt to all kinds of opponents. MBOM simulates the recursive reasoning process in the environment model and imagines a set of improving opponent policies.

Hedonic Games (HGs) are a classical framework modeling coalition formation of strategic agents guided by their individual preferences. According to these preferences, it is desirable that a coalition structure (i.e. a partition of agents into coalitions) satisfies some form of stability. The most well-known and natural of such notions is arguably core-stability. Informally, a partition is core-stable if no subset of agents would like to deviate by regrouping in a so-called core-blocking coalition. Unfortunately, core-stable partitions seldom exist and even when they do, it is often computationally intractable to find one.

We introduce the Multi-Agent Tracking Environment (MATE), a novel multi-agent environment simulates the target coverage control problems in the real world. Specifically, "cameras", a group of directional sensors, are mandated to actively control the directional perception area to maximize the coverage rate of targets. On the other side, "targets" are mobile agents that aim to transport cargo between multiple randomly assigned warehouses while minimizing the exposure to the camera sensor networks. We start by reporting results for cooperative tasks using MARL algorithms (MAPPO, IPPO, QMIX, MADDPG) and the results after augmenting with multi-agent communication protocols (TarMAC, I2C). We then evaluate the effectiveness of the popular self-play techniques (PSRO, fictitious self-play) in an asymmetric zero-sum competitive game.

Unconstrained and natural behavior consists of dynamics that are complex and unpredictable, especially when trying to predict what will happen multiple steps into the future. While some success has been found in building representations of animal behavior under constrained or simplified task-based conditions, many of these models cannot be applied to free and naturalistic settings where behavior becomes increasingly hard to model. In this work, we develop a multi-task representation learning model for animal behavior that combines two novel components: (i) an action-prediction objective that aims to predict the distribution of actions over future timesteps, and (ii) a multi-scale architecture that builds separate latent spaces to accommodate short- and long-term dynamics. After demonstrating the ability of the method to build representations of both local and global dynamics in robots in varying environments and terrains, we apply our method to the MABe 2022 Multi-Agent Behavior challenge, where our model ranks first overall on both mice and fly benchmarks. In all of these cases, we show that our model can build representations that capture the many different factors that drive behavior and solve a wide range of downstream tasks.

Collaborative perception can substantially boost each agent's perception ability by facilitating communication among multiple agents. However, temporal asynchrony among agents is inevitable in the real world due to communication delays, interruptions, and clock misalignments. To address this issue, we propose CoBEVFlow, an asynchrony-robust collaborative perception system based on bird's eye view (BEV) flow. The key intuition of CoBEVFlow is to compensate motions to align asynchronous collaboration messages sent by multiple agents. To model the motion in a scene, we propose BEV flow, which is a collection of the motion vector corresponding to each spatial location.

This is the first attempt at considering human influence in the reinforcement learning control of a robotic lower limb prosthesis toward symmetrical walking in real world situations. We propose a collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (cMARL) solution framework for this highly complex and challenging human-prosthesis collaboration (HPC) problem. The design of an automatic controller of the robot within the HPC context is based on accessible physical features or measurements that are known to affect walking performance. Comparisons are made with the current state-of-the-art robot control designs, which are single-agent based, as well as existing MARL solution approaches tailored to the problem, including multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) and counterfactual multi-agent policy gradient (COMA). Results show that, when compared to these approaches, treating the human and robot as coupled agents and using estimated human adaption in robot control design can achieve lower stage cost, peak error, and symmetry value to ensure better human walking performance.

Collaborative inference leverages diverse features provided by different agents (e.g., sensors) for more accurate inference. A common setup is where each agent sends its embedded features instead of the raw data to the Fusion Center (FC) for joint prediction. In this setting, we consider the inference-time attacks when a small fraction of agents are compromised. The compromised agent either does not send embedded features to the FC, or sends arbitrarily embedded features. To address this, we propose a certifiably robust COllaborative inference framework via feature PURification (CoPur), by leveraging the block-sparse nature of adversarial perturbations on the feature vector, as well as exploring the underlying redundancy across the embedded features (by assuming the overall features lie on an underlying lower dimensional manifold).

We study how an autonomous agent learns to perform a task from demonstrations in a different domain, such as a different environment or different agent. Such cross-domain imitation learning is required to, for example, train an artificial agent from demonstrations of a human expert. We propose a scalable framework that enables cross-domain imitation learning without access to additional demonstrations or further domain knowledge. We jointly train the learner agent's policy and learn a mapping between the learner and expert domains with adversarial training. We effect this by using a mutual information criterion to find an embedding of the expert's state space that contains task-relevant information and is invariant to domain specifics.