{"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/optimistic-multi-agent-policy-gradient-for","title":"Optimistic Multi-Agent Policy Gradient","arxiv_id":"2311.01953","date":"2023-11-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Wenshuai Zhao","Yi Zhao","Zhiyuan Li","Juho Kannala","Joni Pajarinen"],"abstract":"*Relative overgeneralization* (RO) occurs in cooperative multi-agent learning tasks when agents converge towards a suboptimal joint policy due to overfitting to suboptimal behavior of other agents. No methods have been proposed for addressing RO in multi-agent policy gradient (MAPG) methods although these methods produce state-of-the-art results. To address this gap, we propose a general, yet simple, framework to enable optimistic updates in MAPG methods that alleviate the RO problem. Our approach involves clipping the advantage to eliminate negative values, thereby facilitating optimistic updates in MAPG. The optimism prevents individual agents from quickly converging to a local optimum. Additionally, we provide a formal analysis to show that the proposed method retains optimality at a fixed point. In extensive evaluations on a diverse set of tasks including the *Multi-agent MuJoCo* and *Overcooked* benchmarks, our method outperforms strong baselines on 13 out of 19 tested tasks and matches the performance on the rest.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01953v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.01953v2.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":"optimistic-multi-agent-policy-gradient-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/wenshuaizhao/optimappo","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"mujoco","task_name":"MuJoCo"},{"task_slug":"q-learning","task_name":"Q-Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2311.01953","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2311.01953"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/wenshuaizhao/optimappo","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"130727a8c7030ab8","entry":"parse_args","repo":"wenshuaizhao/optimappo","repo_kind":"official","path":"scripts/train/train_mujoco_1.py","file_url":"https://github.com/wenshuaizhao/optimappo/blob/HEAD/scripts/train/train_mujoco_1.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"130727a8c7030ab8"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}