Goto

Collaborating Authors

 coordination


AgensFlow: A Coordination-Policy Substrate for Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Multi-agent systems built on large language models (LLMs) require many coordination choices that are difficult to fix a priori: which skill protocol to invoke, which agent role should perform a subtask, which model to bind to each role, how roles should interact, when to use retrieval or verification, and when to omit a step entirely. These choices interact with task regime and operational constraints, so static pipelines and one-off model comparisons provide only a limited view of the design space. This paper introduces AgensFlow, an open-source framework that treats multi-agent coordination as an online policy-learning problem under partial observability. The framework makes coordination decisions observable and learnable from repeated trajectories, rather than treating skill, role, model, topology, and evaluation choices as fixed pipeline design. AgensFlow is evaluated on two corpora: distributed-systems incident tasks and security-advisory tasks. The evaluation shows three main results: learned routing reaches a higher-quality operating point than a fixed pipeline baseline on coordination-heavy classes; skip:X isolates topology compression as a meaningful part of the substrate; and warm-started policy graphs can reduce exploration cost while preserving plateau quality. Overall, the results support that learned, auditable routing can improve coordination-heavy multi-agent workflows over static wiring.


Optimal testing using combined test statistics across independent studies

Neural Information Processing Systems

Combining test statistics from independent trials or experiments is a popular method of meta-analysis. However, there is very limited theoretical understanding of the power of the combined test, especially in high-dimensional models considering composite hypotheses tests. We derive a mathematical framework to study standard meta-analysis testing approaches in the context of the many normal means model, which serves as the platform to investigate more complex models. We introduce a natural and mild restriction on the meta-level combination functions of the local trials. This allows us to mathematically quantify the cost of compressing m trials into real-valued test statistics and combining these. We then derive minimax lower and matching upper bounds for the separation rates of standard combination methods for e.g.


CODA: Coordination via On-Policy Diffusion for Multi-Agent Offline Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) enables policy learning from fixed datasets, but is prone to coordination failure: agents trained on static, off-policy data converge to suboptimal joint behaviours because they cannot co-adapt as their policies change. We introduce CODA (Coordination via On-Policy Diffusion for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning), a diffusion-based multi-agent trajectory generator for data augmentation that samples conditioned on the current joint policy, producing synthetic experience which reflects the evolving behaviours of the agents, thereby providing a mechanism for co-adaptation. We find that previous diffusion-based augmentation approaches are insufficient for fostering multi-agent coordination because they produce static augmented datasets that do not evolve as the current joint policy changes during training; CODA resolves this by more closely simulating on-policy learning and is a meaningful step toward coordinated behaviours in the offline setting. CODA is algorithm-agnostic and can be layered onto both model-free and model-based offline reinforcement learning pipelines as an augmentation module. Empirically, CODA not only resolves canonical coordination pathologies in continuous polynomial games but also delivers strong results on the more complex MaMuJoCo continuous-control benchmarks.




Nocturne: a scalable driving benchmark for bringing multi-agent learning one step closer to the real world

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce Nocturne, a new 2D driving simulator for investigating multi-agent coordination under partial observability. The focus of Nocturne is to enable research into inference and theory of mind in real-world multi-agent settings without the computational overhead of computer vision and feature extraction from images. Agents in this simulator only observe an obstructed view of the scene, mimicking human visual sensing constraints. Unlike existing benchmarks that are bottlenecked by rendering human-like observations directly using a camera input, Nocturne uses efficient intersection methods to compute a vectorized set of visible features in a C++ back-end, allowing the simulator to run at 2000+ steps-per-second. Using open-source trajectory and map data, we construct a simulator to load and replay arbitrary trajectories and scenes from real-world driving data. Using this environment, we benchmark reinforcement-learning and imitation-learning agents and demonstrate that the agents are quite far from human-level coordination ability and deviate significantly from the expert trajectories.



Integrating Suboptimal Human Knowledge with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Large-Scale Multiagent Systems

Neural Information Processing Systems

Due to the exponential growth of agent interactions and the curse of dimensionality, learning efficient coordination from scratch is inherently challenging in large-scale multi-agent systems. While agents' learning is data-driven, sampling from millions of steps, human learning processes are quite different. Inspired by the concept of Human-on-the-Loop and the daily human hierarchical control, we propose a novel knowledge-guided multi-agent reinforcement learning framework (hhk-MARL), which combines human abstract knowledge with hierarchical reinforcement learning to address the learning difficulties among a large number of agents. In this work, fuzzy logic is applied to represent human suboptimal knowledge, and agents are allowed to freely decide how to leverage the proposed prior knowledge. Additionally, a graph-based group controller is built to enhance agent coordination. The proposed framework is end-to-end and compatible with various existing algorithms. We conduct experiments in challenging domains of the StarCraft Multi-agent Challenge combined with three famous algorithms: IQL, QMIX, and Qatten. The results show that our approach can greatly accelerate the training process and improve the final performance, even based on low-performance human prior knowledge.


MADiff: Offline Multi-agent Learning with Diffusion Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies from pre-existing datasets without further interactions, making it a challenging task. Q-learning algorithms struggle with extrapolation errors in offline settings, while supervised learning methods are constrained by model expressiveness. Recently, diffusion models (DMs) have shown promise in overcoming these limitations in single-agent learning, but their application in multi-agent scenarios remains unclear. Generating trajectories for each agent with independent DMs may impede coordination, while concatenating all agents' information can lead to low sample efficiency. Accordingly, we propose MADiff, which is realized with an attention-based diffusion model to model the complex coordination among behaviors of multiple agents. To our knowledge, MADiff is the first diffusion-based multi-agent learning framework, functioning as both a decentralized policy and a centralized controller. During decentralized executions, MADiff simultaneously performs teammate modeling, and the centralized controller can also be applied in multi-agent trajectory predictions. Our experiments demonstrate that MADiff outperforms baseline algorithms across various multi-agent learning tasks, highlighting its effectiveness in modeling complex multi-agent interactions.