Explicit Credit Assignment through Local Rewards and Dependence Graphs in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

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. However, global rewards are usually noisy because they contain the contributions of all agents, which have to be resolved in the credit assignment process. On the other hand, using local reward benefits from faster learning due to the separation of agents' contributions, but can be suboptimal as agents myopically optimize their own reward whi