SCALE-COMM: Shared, Contrastively-Aligned Latent Embeddings for MARL Communication

Effective communication is a cornerstone of distributed intelligence in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), yet ensuring that generated messages are both informative and robust to physical constraints remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces Multi-Agent Regularized Communication (MARC), a novel framework inspired by information-theoretic principles of conditional mutual information. MARC employs an attention-based architecture coupled with a unique message regularization mechanism designed to minimize uncertainty regarding future system states, thereby inducing the learning of highly representative communication protocols. Crucially, we evaluate MARC under stringent communication bottlenecks and lossy channels, simulating the real-world constraints of autonomous robotic networks and decentralized systems. Our results demonstrate that MARC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in complex cooperative domains. Furthermore, we provide a deep analysis of message characteristics, proving that MARC maintains high operational performance even under significant data compression, offering a scalable path for deploying intelligent agents in resource-constrained environments.

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) often relies on communication to mitigate partial observability, yet most existing protocols treat messages as flat dense vectors detached from the structure of the observations they summarize. This design overlooks an important source of inductive bias in many cooperative environments, where observations naturally follow a hierarchy such as groups and entities. We propose \textsc{HiComm}, a plug-in communication module that grounds messages in the sender's hierarchical observation. \textsc{HiComm} is receiver-driven: the receiver issues a query, and the hierarchy is resolved through a three-stage decoding process that first selects a group, then a sender, and then an entity within that group, returning the corresponding feature slice as the message. This converts communication from unstructured vector transmission into structured information retrieval over the sender's observation hierarchy. We instantiate this mechanism with Straight-Through Gumbel-Softmax for differentiable discrete selection and a lightweight shared projection design that attaches to standard MARL pipelines. Experiments across cooperative MARL tasks with different observation structures and coordination demands show that \textsc{HiComm} matches or outperforms representative learned communication baselines while reducing communication volume by up to $23\times$ per receiver per episode.

Communication is a key component in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for mitigating partial observability, yet prior approaches often rely on inefficient information exchange or fail to transmit sufficient state information. To address this, we propose LLM-driven Multi-Agent Communication (LMAC), which leverages an LLM's reasoning capability to design a communication protocol that enables all agents to reconstruct the underlying state as accurately and uniformly as possible. LMAC iteratively refines the protocol using an explicit state-awareness criterion, improving state recovery while narrowing differences in agents' knowledge. Experiments on diverse MARL benchmarks show that LMAC improves state reconstruction across agents and yields substantial performance gains over prior communication baselines.