{"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/learning-complex-teamwork-tasks-using-a-sub","title":"Learning Complex Teamwork Tasks Using a Given Sub-task Decomposition","arxiv_id":"2302.04944","date":"2023-02-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Elliot Fosong","Arrasy Rahman","Ignacio Carlucho","Stefano V. Albrecht"],"abstract":"Training a team to complete a complex task via multi-agent reinforcement learning can be difficult due to challenges such as policy search in a large joint policy space, and non-stationarity caused by mutually adapting agents. To facilitate efficient learning of complex multi-agent tasks, we propose an approach which uses an expert-provided decomposition of a task into simpler multi-agent sub-tasks. In each sub-task, a subset of the entire team is trained to acquire sub-task-specific policies. The sub-teams are then merged and transferred to the target task, where their policies are collectively fine-tuned to solve the more complex target task. We show empirically that such approaches can greatly reduce the number of timesteps required to solve a complex target task relative to training from-scratch. However, we also identify and investigate two problems with naive implementations of approaches based on sub-task decomposition, and propose a simple and scalable method to address these problems which augments existing actor-critic algorithms. We demonstrate the empirical benefits of our proposed method, enabling sub-task decomposition approaches to be deployed in diverse multi-agent tasks.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04944v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.04944v2.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":"learning-complex-teamwork-tasks-using-a-sub","repo_url":"https://github.com/uoe-agents/medoe","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"multi-agent-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2302.04944","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2302.04944","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}