The Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Challenge
This addresses a gap in benchmarking for researchers in multi-agent systems, but it is incremental as it highlights an existing problem without proposing a new solution.
The paper identifies a lack of standardized testbeds for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (HeMARL), where agents with different capabilities must cooperate, hindering progress as current research relies on simple or weakly heterogeneous environments.
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a growing research area which gained significant traction in recent years, extending Deep RL applications to a much wider range of problems. A particularly challenging class of problems in this domain is Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (HeMARL), where agents with different sensors, resources, or capabilities must cooperate based on local information. The large number of real-world situations involving heterogeneous agents makes it an attractive research area, yet underexplored, as most MARL research focuses on homogeneous agents (e.g., a swarm of identical robots). In MARL and single-agent RL, standardized environments such as ALE and SMAC have allowed to establish recognized benchmarks to measure progress. However, there is a clear lack of such standardized testbed for cooperative HeMARL. As a result, new research in this field often uses simple environments, where most algorithms perform near optimally, or uses weakly heterogeneous MARL environments.