Learning Task Embeddings for Teamwork Adaptation in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
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Abstract (arXiv)
Successful deployment of multi-agent reinforcement learning often requires agents to adapt their behaviour. In this work, we discuss the problem of teamwork adaptation in which a team of agents needs to adapt their policies to solve novel tasks with limited fine-tuning. Motivated by the intuition that agents need to be able to identify and distinguish tasks in order to adapt their behaviour to the current task, we propose to learn multi-agent task embeddings (MATE). These task embeddings are trained using an encoder-decoder architecture optimised for reconstruction of the transition and reward functions which uniquely identify tasks. We show that a team of agents is able to adapt to novel tasks when provided with task embeddings. We propose three MATE training paradigms: independent MATE, centralised MATE, and mixed MATE which vary in the information used for the task encoding. We show that the embeddings learned by MATE identify tasks and provide useful information which agents leverage during adaptation to novel tasks.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 36 of its 53 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2022.
Builds on
36 of 53 references.
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2022: 2; 2023: 2; 2024: 0; 2025: 1.
5 papers.
- 2022Generating Teammates for Training Robust Ad Hoc Teamwork Agents via Best-Response Diversitycited by 17
- 2022Deep Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Agent Interactioncited by 3
- 2023Learning Embeddings for Sequential Tasks Using Population of Agentscited by 0
- 2023Learning Top-k Subtask Planning Tree based on Discriminative Representation Pre-training for Decision Makingcited by 0
- 2025Toward Adaptable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: An Assumption-Aware Reviewcited by 0
- 2025Toward Adaptable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: An Assumption-Aware Review14 Jul 2025
- 2023Learning Top-k Subtask Planning Tree based on Discriminative Representation Pre-training for Decision Making18 Dec 2023
- 2023Learning Embeddings for Sequential Tasks Using Population of Agents5 Jun 2023
- 2022Deep Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Agent Interaction2 Aug 2022
- 2022Generating Teammates for Training Robust Ad Hoc Teamwork Agents via Best-Response Diversity28 Jul 2022