mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

HARL-A: An Extensible Benchmark Framework for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Adversarial Reinforcement Learning in IsaacLab

arXiv 2510.01264 ↗First posted 26 Sep 2025cs.LG cs.ROcited by 1

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Progress in adversarial multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for robotics has been hampered by a lack of shared, extensible infrastructure that supports heterogeneous agent morphologies in high-fidelity physics simulation. Existing frameworks either focus on cooperative tasks, rely on simplified physics engines, or provide isolated implementations that are difficult to extend. We present HARL-A, an open-source, actively maintained framework built on IsaacLab that enables scalable training and benchmarking of adversarial policies across morphologically diverse robot teams with any number of teams and any mix of robot morphologies per team. HARL-A extends the HARL algorithm library and IsaacLab with adversarial multi-agent support and contributes three components: (1) a modular software architecture that reduces the engineering overhead of defining new heterogeneous adversarial environments, (2) a suite of three benchmark environments---Sumo, Soccer, and 3D Galaga---spanning contact-rich pushing, ball-skill competition, and pursuit/evasion, (3) over ten pretrained policies spanning homogeneous and heterogeneous team configurations, released publicly on Hugging Face to enable immediate exploration of adversarial learning dynamics without retraining from scratch. We demonstrate the framework across multiple competitive scenarios, showing that it reliably produces learned adversarial policies and emergent role specialization. All code environments, trained policies, and documentation are openly available at https://github.com/DIRECTLab/IsaacLab-HARL.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 17 of its 24 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2025.

Builds on

17 of 24 references.

References · 17

  1. 2017Multi-Agent Actor-Critic for Mixed Cooperative-Competitive Environmentscited by 1,519
  2. 2019Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,084
  3. 2017Robust Adversarial Reinforcement Learningcited by 439
  4. 2019QTRAN: Learning to Factorize with Transformation for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 372
  5. 2020Curriculum Learning for Reinforcement Learning Domains: A Framework and Surveycited by 350
  6. 2019Emergent Tool Use From Multi-Agent Autocurriculacited by 308
  7. 2020Emergent Complexity and Zero-shot Transfer via Unsupervised Environment Designcited by 260
  8. 2023Orbit: A Unified Simulation Framework for Interactive Robot Learning Environmentscited by 239
  9. 2019Adversarial Policies: Attacking Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 209
  10. 2023Real-World Humanoid Locomotion with Reinforcement Learningcited by 132
  11. 2017Emergent Complexity via Multi-Agent Competitioncited by 117
  12. 2022Towards Human-Level Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation with Reinforcement Learningcited by 113
5 more
  1. 2021From Motor Control to Team Play in Simulated Humanoid Footballcited by 87
  2. 2023Heterogeneous-Agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 67
  3. 2019From Few to More: Large-scale Dynamic Multiagent Curriculum Learningcited by 36
  4. 2021Deep Latent Competition: Learning to Race Using Visual Control Policies in Latent Spacecited by 20
  5. 2024MARLadona -- Towards Cooperative Team Play Using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 6

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.