Papers › Reducing Overestimation Bias in Multi-Agent Domains Using Double Centralized Critics

Reducing Overestimation Bias in Multi-Agent Domains Using Double Centralized Critics

3 Oct 2019arXiv:1910.01465archive 2025-07-28

Johannes Ackermann, Volker Gabler, Takayuki Osa, Masashi Sugiyama

Many real world tasks require multiple agents to work together. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been proposed in recent years to solve these tasks, but current methods often fail to efficiently learn policies. We thus investigate the presence of a common weakness in single-agent RL, namely value function overestimation bias, in the multi-agent setting. Based on our findings, we propose an approach that reduces this bias by using double centralized critics. We evaluate it on six mixed cooperative-competitive tasks, showing a significant advantage over current methods. Finally, we investigate the application of multi-agent methods to high-dimensional robotic tasks and show that our approach can be used to learn decentralized policies in this domain.

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Tasks

Multi-agent Reinforcement LearningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning ParticleEnvs Cooperative Communication MATD3 final agent reward -14 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

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