SMAC-R1: The Emergence of Intelligence in Decision-Making Tasks
This work addresses the need for efficient and interpretable decision-making in multi-agent systems like StarCraft, offering a new direction for domain-specific LLM training, though it is incremental as it builds on existing LLM and MARL techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of training multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) models that require extensive environmental interaction and produce non-interpretable policies with weak transferability, by introducing SMAC-R1, a method using LLMs to generate interpretable decision trees with minimal exploration, achieving strong transferability across tasks.
StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) has been one of the most commonly used experimental environments in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where the specific task is to control a set number of allied units to defeat enemy forces. Traditional MARL algorithms often require interacting with the environment for millions of steps to train a parametric model, of which the resulting policies are typically non-interpretable with weak transferability. In this paper, we introduce SMAC-R1 which is based on the Qwen2.5-7B-Base LLM distilled from DeepSeek-Coder-v2.5-236B. Similar to online reinforcement learning after behavior cloning in offline learning process, in our pipeline, agents leverage the DeepSeek LLM to generate decision tree code by providing task descriptions, and the agents are further self-reflected using feedback from the rewards provided by the environment. Based on that, we augment the generated scripts to fine-tune a small LLM, Qwen2.5-7B-Base, to distill the decision-making ability via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and enhance the script generation ability by the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm. We conduct experiments in the original 23 SMAC tasks and 10 newly-designed tasks to demonstrate that our method can produce high-quality, interpretable decision trees with minimal environmental exploration. Moreover, these scripts exhibit strong transferability, successfully applying to homogeneous SMAC environments without modification. We believe this approach offers a new direction for solving decision-making tasks and domain-specific LLM training pipelines in the future.