{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/investigating-relational-state-abstraction-in","title":"Investigating Relational State Abstraction in Collaborative MARL","arxiv_id":"2412.15388","date":"2024-12-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Sharlin Utke","Jeremie Houssineau","Giovanni Montana"],"abstract":"This paper explores the impact of relational state abstraction on sample efficiency and performance in collaborative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning. The proposed abstraction is based on spatial relationships in environments where direct communication between agents is not allowed, leveraging the ubiquity of spatial reasoning in real-world multi-agent scenarios. We introduce MARC (Multi-Agent Relational Critic), a simple yet effective critic architecture incorporating spatial relational inductive biases by transforming the state into a spatial graph and processing it through a relational graph neural network. The performance of MARC is evaluated across six collaborative tasks, including a novel environment with heterogeneous agents. We conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis, comparing MARC against state-of-the-art MARL baselines, demonstrating improvements in both sample efficiency and asymptotic performance, as well as its potential for generalization. Our findings suggest that a minimal integration of spatial relational inductive biases as abstraction can yield substantial benefits without requiring complex designs or task-specific engineering. This work provides insights into the potential of relational state abstraction to address sample efficiency, a key challenge in MARL, offering a promising direction for developing more efficient algorithms in spatially complex environments.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15388v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15388v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"investigating-relational-state-abstraction-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/sharlinu/marc","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"graph-neural-network","task_name":"Graph Neural Network"},{"task_slug":"multi-agent-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"spatial-reasoning","task_name":"Spatial Reasoning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}