aiqbench analysis
This preprint uses an LLM to write reward functions for cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, aiming for one reward program that transfers to unseen scenarios without redesign. The reported gains on Overcooked and SMAX are substantial, but they come from a single arXiv preprint, and the comparisons depend on matched budgets and specific baselines. Readers should check whether the transfer holds beyond these benchmarks before treating reusable LLM-designed rewards as a general solution.
GARDEN: Generalist Autonomous Reward Design Through Evidence Navigation for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2610.37926v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) enables teams of agents, such as robots and autonomous vehicles, to learn coordinated behavior, but what such teams learn is largely determined by their reward function. Because task success alone provides too little guidance for learning, intermediate rewards are usually designed by hand, and this effort must often be repeated whenever the environment or the team changes. Large language models (LLMs) can automate the effort by writing reward functions as code, yet the resulting rewards are typically designed and tested in a single setting. To enable their reuse across settings, GARDEN (Generalist Autonomous Reward Design through Evidence Navigation) is proposed, in which one reward program is developed for a family of related scenarios and transferred, unchanged, to scenarios that were not available during its design. During development, environment code, training records, and agent behavior are investigated by an LLM reward engineer, and draft rewards are tested in trial training runs, while the learning algorithm and the rule for selecting the final reward are held fixed. On unseen scenarios of the Overcooked and SMAX benchmarks, task returns were increased by 58.2% and 52.5% over the default rewards on two kitchen layouts, and the mean win rate in two combat scenarios was raised from 51.0% to 89.9%. Under matched candidate and probe budgets, this exceeded the 84.2% and 79.2% obtained with fixed diagnostic feedback and Eureka-inspired reward reflection. These results show that a single autonomously engineered reward can be reused effectively across related cooperative scenarios.
Abstract:Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) enables teams of agents, such as robots and autonomous vehicles, to learn coordinated behavior, but what such teams learn is largely determined by their reward function. Because task success alone provides too little guidance for learning, intermediate rewards are usually designed by hand, and this effort must often be repeated whenever the environment or the team changes. Large language models (LLMs) can automate the effort by writing reward functions as code, yet the resulting rewards are typically designed and tested in a single setting. To enable their reuse across settings, GARDEN (Generalist Autonomous Reward Design through Evidence Navigation) is proposed, in which one reward program is developed for a family of related scenarios and transferred, unchanged, to scenarios that were not available during its design. During development, environment code, training records, and agent behavior are investigated by an LLM reward engineer, and draft rewards are tested in trial training runs, while the learning algorithm and the rule for selecting the final reward are held fixed. On unseen scenarios of the Overcooked and SMAX benchmarks, task returns were increased by 58.2% and 52.5% over the default rewards on two kitchen layouts, and the mean win rate in two combat scenarios was raised from 51.0% to 89.9%. Under matched candidate and probe budgets, this exceeded the 84.2% and 79.2% obtained with fixed diagnostic feedback and Eureka-inspired reward reflection. These results show that a single autonomously engineered reward can be reused effectively across related cooperative scenarios.
8 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables. Code: this https URL
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA); Systems and Control (eess.SY)
arXiv:2610.37926 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2610.37926v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.37926 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 357 words
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