Optimizing Team Behavior via Extremum-seeking Control in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

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Article Summary

In cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), agents must learn to coordinate their actions to achieve shared objectives. A key indicator of effective coordination is behavioral diversity, i.e., the agents' potential to enact distinct yet complementary control policies given the same set of observations. Although behavioral diversity can enable role specialization and richer joint behaviors, its appropriate level is highly context- and task-dependent and often costly to tune. We propose Adaptive Diversity Control (ADiCo), a two-timescale framework that adapts behavioral diversity online during training. On a fast timescale, Diversity Control (DiCo) regulates system diversity toward a target value. On a slower timescale, an Extremum Seeking Controller (ESC) adjusts this target using only mean episodic returns, without requiring an explicit model or analytical gradient of the diversity-performance landscape. We evaluate ADiCo on six configurations across two cooperative MARL tasks, where it maintains task-appropriate diversity levels: low diversity when homogeneous policies are beneficial and higher diversity when heterogeneous policies are required. Through this adaptation, ADiCo matches or exceeds the mean performance of DiCo (best grid-searched diversity target) and Unconstrained DiCo (diversity allowed to emerge without target regulation). These results demonstrate that incorporating classical feedback control into MARL training enables effective coordination by providing a systematic alternative to task-specific manual selection of the diversity target.

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