cs.AIJun 22, 2026

Safe and Generalizable Hierarchical Multi-Agent RL via Constraint Manifold Control

Authors: Zihao GuoJianing ZhaoLing LiHao LiangGiuseppe LoiannoYali Du

Organizations: 1King’s College London · University of California, Berkeley · 3The Alan Turing Institute

Abstract

Multi-agent systems are widely used in safety-critical applications that require coordinated behavior under strict safety constraints. Existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off: learning-based methods achieve strong empirical performance but lack theoretical safety guarantees, while control-theoretic methods enforce safety but often lead to overly conservative and inefficient behaviors. We propose a hierarchical multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that enforces hard safety constraints under mild assumptions at low level via a constraint manifold, while enabling effective coordination through high-level policy learning. Our approach provides theoretical safety guarantees in the multi-agent setting and yields stationary learning dynamics, thereby enabling stable and efficient training. Empirically, our method achieves competitive performance while maintaining nearly perfect safety rates, and generalizes effectively to varying numbers of agents and obstacles.

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