Settling Decentralized Multi-Agent Coordinated Exploration by Novelty Sharing
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Abstract (arXiv)
Exploration in decentralized cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning faces two challenges. One is that the novelty of global states is unavailable, while the novelty of local observations is biased. The other is how agents can explore in a coordinated way. To address these challenges, we propose MACE, a simple yet effective multi-agent coordinated exploration method. By communicating only local novelty, agents can take into account other agents' local novelty to approximate the global novelty. Further, we newly introduce weighted mutual information to measure the influence of one agent's action on other agents' accumulated novelty. We convert it as an intrinsic reward in hindsight to encourage agents to exert more influence on other agents' exploration and boost coordinated exploration. Empirically, we show that MACE achieves superior performance in three multi-agent environments with sparse rewards.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 41 of its 52 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2024.
Builds on
41 of 52 references.
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29 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 4; 2026: 2.
6 papers.
- 2025Wonder Wins Ways: Curiosity-Driven Exploration through Multi-Agent Contextual Calibrationcited by 4
- 2025Contextual Knowledge Sharing in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Decentralized Communication and Coordinationcited by 2
- 2025Focusing Influence Mechanism for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 2
- 2025Extending NGU to Multi-Agent RL: A Preliminary Studycited by 0
- 2026Large Language Models Explore by Latent Distillingcited by 0
- 2026MAGIC: Multi-Step Advantage-Gated Causal Influence for Multi-agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
- 2026MAGIC: Multi-Step Advantage-Gated Causal Influence for Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning3 May 2026
- 2026Large Language Models Explore by Latent Distilling27 Apr 2026
- 2025Extending NGU to Multi-Agent RL: A Preliminary Study1 Dec 2025
- 2025Wonder Wins Ways: Curiosity-Driven Exploration through Multi-Agent Contextual Calibration25 Sep 2025
- 2025Focusing Influence Mechanism for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning24 Jun 2025
- 2025Contextual Knowledge Sharing in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Decentralized Communication and Coordination26 Jan 2025