Entropy-Augmented Multi-Objective Policy Optimization in Multiagent Systems
Authors: Jamie Santos, Ayhan Alp Aydeniz, Raghav Thakar, Kagan Tumer
Organizations: The Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA
Abstract
Autonomous agent teams deployed in settings such as marine and extraterrestrial outposts must coordinate actions to achieve optimal outcomes across multiple competing objectives. Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms such as NSGA-II optimize for diversity in the objective space, but neglect diversity in the behavior space, possibly leading to premature convergence and a collapse in behaviors that may differentiate policies in different external conditions. To address this, we introduce an entropy-augmented policy evaluation strategy that incorporates an entropy bonus into agent fitness scores, discouraging behavioral homogeneity across the evolving population. By augmenting policy evaluation with a behavior-space diversity signal while preserving the underlying Pareto optimization framework, our method is designed to encourage exploration of behaviorally distinct policies in multiagent domains. We evaluate our approach across rover-domain experiments with qualitatively distinct reward structures and observe hypervolume improvements of up to 48% relative to the NSGA-II baseline, suggesting that behavioral diversity is a promising and underexplored direction for improving multi-objective multiagent evolutionary optimization.
Effective multi-agent cooperation requires agents to adopt diverse behaviors as task conditions evolve-and to do so at the right moment. Yet, current Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) frameworks that facilitate this diversity are still limited by the fact that they bind fixed behaviors to fixed agent identities. Consequently, they are ill-equipped for tasks where agents need to take on different roles at very specific moments in time. We argue that, to define these behavioral transitions, the missing ingredient is events. Events are changes in the state of the system that induce qualitative changes in the task. Based on this view, we introduce a framework that decouples agent identity from behavior, capturing a continuous manifold from which agents instantiate their behaviors in response to events. This framework is based on two elements. First, to build an expressive behavior manifold, we introduce Neural Manifold Diversity (NMD), a formal distance metric that remains well-defined when behaviors are transient and agent-agnostic. Second, we use an event-based hypernetwork that generates Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules over a shared team policy, enabling on-the-fly agent-policy reconfiguration in response to events. We prove that this construction ensures that diversity does not interfere with reward maximization by design. Empirical results demonstrate that our framework outperforms established baselines across benchmarks while exhibiting zero-shot generalization, and being the only method that solves tasks requiring sequential behavior reassignment.
Cooperative multi-objective multi-agent reinforcement learning (MOMARL) models team decision making under multiple, potentially conflicting objectives. In this setting, conflicts arise not only across objectives but also across agents with different observations, roles, and contributions. We propose Preference Coordinated Multi-agent Policy Optimization (PCMA), which learns coordinated agent-specific preferences to enable complementary trade-offs among agents. Theoretically, we formulate cooperative MOMARL as a team-optimal game and show that, under suitable conditions, preference diversity can induce team improvement through a first-order improvement decomposition. Experiments on multiple cooperative MOMA environments and a practical traffic-control scenario show that PCMA improves both performance and trade-off coordination.
LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have emerged as an effective paradigm for complex and long-horizon tasks. However, in real-world tasks, MAS often exhibit various failures during execution and such failures are difficult to eliminate during design. This motivates experience-driven MAS evolution, where a system improves based on its own execution experience. Yet such evolution is challenging because MAS experience is prolonged and intricate, interleaving multiple agents' execution chains and communication messages, which makes it difficult to identify what should be improved. To address this challenge, we propose Meta-Team, an experience-driven MAS evolution framework based on collaborative self-evolution. Meta-Team preserves the execution context of each agent and coordinates post-task communication, enabling agents to exchange distributed evidence for evolution. Building on this design, Meta-Team conducts multi-scale self-evolution, transforming execution experience into reusable improvements to agent behaviors, inter-agent coordination, and team-level organization. Across six long-horizon agent benchmarks, Meta-Team consistently outperforms single-agent systems, hand-crafted MAS, and prior MAS evolution methods; further analyses demonstrate that Meta-Team enables more reliable and scalable MAS self-evolution.