Credit assignment is a fundamental challenge in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, particularly in embodied AI settings characterized by limited and delayed feedback as well as dynamically changing numbers of active agents. We propose MARS-RA, a framework that reformulates credit assignment as a rank aggregation problem using contribution-based pairwise comparisons among agents generated by large multimodal models.
arXiv:2601. 21523v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: To promote cooperation in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, the reward signals of all agents can be aggregated together, forming global rewards that are commonly known as the fully cooperative setting.
arXiv:2602. 08335v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools via multi-agent systems offers a promising new paradigm for decomposing and solving complex problems.
arXiv:2505. 08630v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training cooperative agents in sparse-reward scenarios poses significant challenges for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL).
arXiv:2511. 10687v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) in multi-agent systems (MAS) have shown promise for complex tasks, yet current training methods lack principled ways to connect system-level evaluation with agent- and message-level learning.
arXiv:2603. 21563v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Collaborative multi-agent large language models (LLMs) can solve complex reasoning tasks by decomposing roles, but reinforcement learning for such systems is limited by credit assignment: shared terminal rewards obscure individual contributions and can encourage free-riding.
arXiv:2601. 09236v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems.
arXiv:2608. 08491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reward models are a bottleneck for reinforcement learning in embodied AI.
arXiv:2606. 30072v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cooperative tasks in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) require agents to collectively maximize a shared return.
Multi-agent goal recognition asks an observer to jointly infer which agents act together and what each team is trying to achieve, so the hypothesis space grows combinatorially with the number of team partitions and goals per team. Real applications such as drone surveillance and collaborative robotics expose only the agents' trajectory, which forces the observer to rank team-goal hypotheses from behavior alone.
arXiv:2606. 25978v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent goal recognition asks an observer to jointly infer which agents act together and what each team is trying to achieve, so the hypothesis space grows combinatorially with the number of team partitions and goals per team.
ArenaFlow is a hierarchical credit propagation framework designed to improve reinforcement learning for open-ended agent tasks. It uses tournament-based relative ranking to generate trajectory-level rewards and structured reflective evaluation to identify pivotal success steps, reusable strategy skills, and skill usage attribution. The framework propagates advantages to high-confidence steps and maintains a global skill memory, enabling more targeted optimization and reusable skill priors for future exploration.
SIGMA is a hierarchical framework for cooperative multi‑agent reinforcement learning that addresses structured noise effects—local correlations in noise-induced decision impacts among agents with strong task dependencies. It groups agents into adaptive local structures using density‑based clustering, aggregates intra‑group representations to smooth deviations, and then applies inter‑group attention to integrate information while respecting heterogeneous contributions. Experiments on noisy‑observation StarCraft II tasks confirm that SIGMA improves robustness to observation noise without sacrificing performance in clean environments.