Descent-Guided Policy Gradient for Scalable Cooperative Multi-Agent Learning

arXiv:2602.20078 · cs.MA, cs.AI, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-02-23 · Read on arXiv

cs.MA, cs.AI, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-02-23

Updated: 2026-09-26

Comments: 11 pages, 4 figures, 9 tables; plus 19 pages of appendices

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Actor — 25× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Sample Complexity — 19× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• Verification — 12× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Alignment — 9× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Reinforcement Learning — 9× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Core — 7× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Action Space — 6× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Entropy Collapse — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Nash Equilibrium — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Credit assignment — 4× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) — 3× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Reward Function — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Reward Shaping — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Score Function — 3× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Trace — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Additivity — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Consistency — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Energy Efficiency — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Exchangeability — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fidelity — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generalization — 2× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Homogeneity — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Multi-Agent System — 2× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Abstraction — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adam — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Computational overhead — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Convergence Guarantees — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Dec-POMDP — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Distribution Shift — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Gradient Flow — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Inverse Problem — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Q-learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Steering — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Structural Constraints — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Theoretical Guarantees — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transferability — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes

Sources

• Value-Decomposition Networks For Cooperative Multi-Agent Learning

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