{"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/self-paced-multi-agent-reinforcement-learning","title":"Learning Progress Driven Multi-Agent Curriculum","arxiv_id":"2205.10016","date":"2022-05-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Wenshuai Zhao","Zhiyuan Li","Joni Pajarinen"],"abstract":"The number of agents can be an effective curriculum variable for controlling the difficulty of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) tasks. Existing work typically uses manually defined curricula such as linear schemes. We identify two potential flaws while applying existing reward-based automatic curriculum learning methods in MARL: (1) The expected episode return used to measure task difficulty has high variance; (2) Credit assignment difficulty can be exacerbated in tasks where increasing the number of agents yields higher returns which is common in many MARL tasks. To address these issues, we propose to control the curriculum by using a TD-error based *learning progress* measure and by letting the curriculum proceed from an initial context distribution to the final task specific one. Since our approach maintains a distribution over the number of agents and measures learning progress rather than absolute performance, which often increases with the number of agents, we alleviate problem (2). Moreover, the learning progress measure naturally alleviates problem (1) by aggregating returns. In three challenging sparse-reward MARL benchmarks, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10016v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.10016v3.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":"self-paced-multi-agent-reinforcement-learning","repo_url":"https://github.com/wenshuaizhao/spmarl","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"multi-agent-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"open-question","task_name":"Open-Ended Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"valid"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"speed","method_name":"SPEED"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2205.10016","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}