arXiv Machine Learning By Amit Thakur, Mukesh Singhal

Turnover-Orthogonal Credit Assignment for Open-Team Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

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The paper introduces Turnover-Orthogonal Credit Assignment (TOCA), a method for open-team multi-agent reinforcement learning that separates the effects of agent actions, pure turnover, and action–turnover interactions in the team return. TOCA uses a permutation‑invariant centralized critic with event tokens to provide counterfactual per‑agent credit signals and a softly weighted interaction variant, TOCA‑β, for high‑variance environments. Experiments show that TOCA outperforms event‑aware MAPPO critics and that removing interaction credit degrades performance, especially in high‑turnover settings such as the Dynamic Spread benchmark.

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