Value factorization is a popular and promising approach to scaling up multi-agent reinforcement learning in cooperative settings, which balances the learning scalability and the representational capacity of value functions. However, the theoretical understanding of such methods is limited.

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (GoMARL), which learns automatic grouping without domain knowledge for efficient cooperation.

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 T emporal Macro-action Value F actorization (ToMacVF) is proposed to achieve fine-grained temporal credit assignment for macro-action contributions. A centralized training buffer, called Macro-action S egmented Joint Experience R eplay 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 Tempo ral Mac ro-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.

Overestimation arising from selecting unseen actions during policy evaluation is a major challenge in offline reinforcement learning (RL). A minimalist approach in the single-agent setting -- adding behavior cloning (BC) regularization to existing online RL algorithms -- has been shown to be effective; however, this approach is understudied in multi-agent settings. In particular, overestimation becomes worse in multi-agent settings due to the presence of multiple actions, resulting in the BC regularization-based approach easily suffering from either over-regularization or critic divergence. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method, Behavior Cloning regularization with Critic Clipping (B3C), which clips the target critic value in policy evaluation based on the maximum return in the dataset and pushes the limit of the weight on the RL objective over BC regularization, thereby improving performance. Additionally, we leverage existing value factorization techniques, particularly non-linear factorization, which is understudied in offline settings. Integrated with non-linear value factorization, B3C outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on various offline multi-agent benchmarks.

Value factorization is a popular and promising approach to scaling up multi-agent reinforcement learning in cooperative settings, which balances the learning scalability and the representational capacity of value functions. However, the theoretical understanding of such methods is limited. Based on this framework, we investigate linear value factorization and reveal that multi-agent Q-learning with this simple decomposition implicitly realizes a powerful counterfactual credit assignment, but may not converge in some settings. Through further analysis, we find that on-policy training or richer joint value function classes can improve its local or global convergence properties, respectively. Finally, to support our theoretical implications in practical realization, we conduct an empirical analysis of state-of-the-art deep multi-agent Q-learning algorithms on didactic examples and a broad set of StarCraft II unit micromanagement tasks.