Papers › Exponential Topology-enabled Scalable Communication in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Exponential Topology-enabled Scalable Communication in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

27 Feb 2025arXiv:2502.19717archive 2025-07-28

Xinran Li, Xiaolu Wang, Chenjia Bai, Jun Zhang

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), well-designed communication protocols can effectively facilitate consensus among agents, thereby enhancing task performance. Moreover, in large-scale multi-agent systems commonly found in real-world applications, effective communication plays an even more critical role due to the escalated challenge of partial observability compared to smaller-scale setups. In this work, we endeavor to develop a scalable communication protocol for MARL. Unlike previous methods that focus on selecting optimal pairwise communication links-a task that becomes increasingly complex as the number of agents grows-we adopt a global perspective on communication topology design. Specifically, we propose utilizing the exponential topology to enable rapid information dissemination among agents by leveraging its small-diameter and small-size properties. This approach leads to a scalable communication protocol, named ExpoComm. To fully unlock the potential of exponential graphs as communication topologies, we employ memory-based message processors and auxiliary tasks to ground messages, ensuring that they reflect global information and benefit decision-making. Extensive experiments on large-scale cooperative benchmarks, including MAgent and Infrastructure Management Planning, demonstrate the superior performance and robust zero-shot transferability of ExpoComm compared to existing communication strategies. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/LXXXXR/ExpoComm.

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ExpoCommSAgent lxxxxr/expocomm/src/modules/agents/ExpoComm_agent.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 2a9ca679046896ed · report
extract_alg_name_from_config uoe-agents/epymarl/plot_results.py community ran · our draft was wrong Apache-2.0 (permissive) · fa9a1eda0ac523d2 · report
extract_env_name_from_config uoe-agents/epymarl/plot_results.py community ran · our draft was wrong Apache-2.0 (permissive) · cf0832c848510d11 · report
load_results uoe-agents/epymarl/plot_results.py community ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 73de3ace29add240 · report
extract_alg_name_from_config identical code first harvested elsewhere ran · our draft was wrong licence of this copy not recorded · 868161eada09b424 · report
extract_env_name_from_config identical code first harvested elsewhere ran · our draft was wrong licence of this copy not recorded · b23d20b93b147852 · report
load_results identical code first harvested elsewhere ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted licence of this copy not recorded · e8a91a919b93f3e1 · report

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Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

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