aiqbench analysis
G2MAF introduces a test-time refinement framework for offline multi-agent reinforcement learning, using critic gradients to correct frozen joint actions without requiring further environment interaction. The method demonstrates significant performance gains across standard benchmarks like MPE and SMAC while incurring minimal latency overhead, offering a practical solution for deploying robust cooperative policies.
G2MAF: Test-Time Gradient Guidance for Multi-Agent Flow Policies
arXiv:2609.31286v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) learns cooperative policies from fixed datasets without further environment interaction and a learned policy is frozen at deployment. Such a frozen policy typically proposes a single joint action and executes it directly at deployment time. However, this one-shot deployment often commits to a suboptimal proposal, even when better nearby alternatives remain consistent with the behavior data. To address this issue, we propose Gradient Guided Multi Agent Flow (G2MAF), a refinement framework for optimizing joint policies at test-time. G2MAF applies one globally normalized, projected critic gradient to guide and coordinate all agents' corrections while keeping the action both feasible and close to the frozen policy proposal. Across 24 MPE and SMAC settings, its canonical variant improves 20 frozen settings, with mean relative gains of 9.2% on MPE and 8.9% on SMAC, with model inference latency increased by about 6% only.
Abstract:Offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) learns cooperative policies from fixed datasets without further environment interaction and a learned policy is frozen at deployment. Such a frozen policy typically proposes a single joint action and executes it directly at deployment time. However, this one-shot deployment often commits to a suboptimal proposal, even when better nearby alternatives remain consistent with the behavior data. To address this issue, we propose Gradient Guided Multi Agent Flow (G2MAF), a refinement framework for optimizing joint policies at test-time. G2MAF applies one globally normalized, projected critic gradient to guide and coordinate all agents' corrections while keeping the action both feasible and close to the frozen policy proposal. Across 24 MPE and SMAC settings, its canonical variant improves 20 frozen settings, with mean relative gains of 9.2% on MPE and 8.9% on SMAC, with model inference latency increased by about 6% only.
24 pages, including appendices. Project page: this https URL
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2609.31286 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2609.31286v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.31286 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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