{"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/option-critic-in-cooperative-multi-agent","title":"Option-Critic in Cooperative Multi-agent Systems","arxiv_id":"1911.12825","date":"2019-11-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jhelum Chakravorty","Nadeem Ward","Julien Roy","Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert","Sumana Basu","Andrei Lupu","Doina Precup"],"abstract":"In this paper, we investigate learning temporal abstractions in cooperative multi-agent systems, using the options framework (Sutton et al, 1999). First, we address the planning problem for the decentralized POMDP represented by the multi-agent system, by introducing a \\emph{common information approach}. We use the notion of \\emph{common beliefs} and broadcasting to solve an equivalent centralized POMDP problem. Then, we propose the Distributed Option Critic (DOC) algorithm, which uses centralized option evaluation and decentralized intra-option improvement. We theoretically analyze the asymptotic convergence of DOC and build a new multi-agent environment to demonstrate its validity. Our experiments empirically show that DOC performs competitively against baselines and scales with the number of agents.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.12825v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.12825v3.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":"option-critic-in-cooperative-multi-agent","repo_url":"https://github.com/Jhelum-Ch/On-policy-Distributed-Option-Critic","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1911.12825","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}