{"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/pmat-optimizing-action-generation-order-in","title":"PMAT: Optimizing Action Generation Order in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning","arxiv_id":"2502.16496","date":"2025-02-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kun Hu","Muning Wen","Xihuai Wang","Shao Zhang","Yiwei Shi","Minne Li","Minglong Li","Ying Wen"],"abstract":"Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) faces challenges in coordinating agents due to complex interdependencies within multi-agent systems. Most MARL algorithms use the simultaneous decision-making paradigm but ignore the action-level dependencies among agents, which reduces coordination efficiency. In contrast, the sequential decision-making paradigm provides finer-grained supervision for agent decision order, presenting the potential for handling dependencies via better decision order management. However, determining the optimal decision order remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce Action Generation with Plackett-Luce Sampling (AGPS), a novel mechanism for agent decision order optimization. We model the order determination task as a Plackett-Luce sampling process to address issues such as ranking instability and vanishing gradient during the network training process. AGPS realizes credit-based decision order determination by establishing a bridge between the significance of agents' local observations and their decision credits, thus facilitating order optimization and dependency management. Integrating AGPS with the Multi-Agent Transformer, we propose the Prioritized Multi-Agent Transformer (PMAT), a sequential decision-making MARL algorithm with decision order optimization. Experiments on benchmarks including StarCraft II Multi-Agent Challenge, Google Research Football, and Multi-Agent MuJoCo show that PMAT outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, greatly enhancing coordination efficiency.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16496v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16496v1.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":"pmat-optimizing-action-generation-order-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/nudt-bi-marl/pmat","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"action-generation","task_name":"Action Generation"},{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"management","task_name":"Management"},{"task_slug":"mujoco","task_name":"MuJoCo"},{"task_slug":"multi-agent-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"sequential-decision-making","task_name":"Sequential Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"starcraft","task_name":"Starcraft"},{"task_slug":"starcraft-ii","task_name":"Starcraft II"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}