journal article·2025-09-24Open access

Group Attention Aware Coordination Graph

Ziyan Fang, Wei Liu, Yu Zhang

Applied Sciences· Volume 15· Issue 19

Abstract

Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) relies on effective coordination among agents to maximize team performance in complex environments. However, existing coordination graph-based approaches often overlook dynamic group structures and struggle to accurately capture fine-grained inter-agent dependencies. In this paper, we introduce a novel method called the Group Attention Aware Coordination Graph (G2ACG), which builds upon the group modeling capabilities of the Group-Aware Coordination Graph (GACG). G2ACG incorporates a dynamic attention mechanism to dynamically compute edge weights in the coordination graph, enabling a more flexible and fine-grained representation of agent interactions. These learned edge weights guide a Graph Attention Network (GAT) to perform message passing and representation learning, and the resulting features are integrated into a global policy via QMIX for cooperative decision-making. Experimental results on the StarCraft II Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) benchmark show that G2ACG consistently outperforms strong baselines, including QMIX, DICG, and GACG, across various scenarios with diverse agent types and population sizes. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of the proposed attention mechanism, demonstrating that both the number of attention heads and the number of GAT layers significantly affect performance, with a two-layer GAT and multi-head attention configuration yielding the best results.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Distributed Control Multi-Agent Systems · Advanced Graph Neural Networks · Neural Networks and Applications

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

College of Intelligence Science and Technology, National University of Defence Technology, Changsha 410073, China

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