TransAM: Transformer-Based Agent Modeling for Multi-Agent Systems via Local Trajectory Encoding
This addresses a practical limitation in multi-agent systems for applications like robotics or gaming, though it is incremental as it builds on transformer architectures.
The paper tackled the problem of agent modeling in multi-agent systems without access to other agents' trajectories, proposing TransAM to encode local trajectories into policy representations, which improved episodic returns in various environments.
Agent modeling is a critical component in developing effective policies within multi-agent systems, as it enables agents to form beliefs about the behaviors, intentions, and competencies of others. Many existing approaches assume access to other agents' episodic trajectories, a condition often unrealistic in real-world applications. Consequently, a practical agent modeling approach must learn a robust representation of the policies of the other agents based only on the local trajectory of the controlled agent. In this paper, we propose \texttt{TransAM}, a novel transformer-based agent modeling approach to encode local trajectories into an embedding space that effectively captures the policies of other agents. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method in cooperative, competitive, and mixed multi-agent environments. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach generates strong policy representations, improves agent modeling, and leads to higher episodic returns.