title: Offline Pre-trained Multi-Agent Decision Transformer
abstract: Offline reinforcement learning leverages static datasets to learn optimal policies with no necessity to access the environment. This is desirable for multi-agent systems due to the expensiveness of agents' online interactions and the demand for sample numbers. Yet,  in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), the paradigm of offline pre-training with online fine-tuning has never been reported, nor datasets or benchmarks for offline MARL research are available. In this paper, we intend to investigate whether offline training is able to learn policy representations that elevate performance on downstream MARL tasks. We introduce the first offline dataset based on StarCraftII with diverse quality levels and propose a multi-agent decision transformer (MADT) for effective offline learning. MADT integrates the powerful temporal representation learning ability of Transformer into both offline and online multi-agent learning, which promotes generalisation across agents and scenarios. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance than the state-of-the-art algorithms in offline MARL. Furthermore, when applied to online tasks, the pre-trained MADT largely improves sample efficiency, even in zero-shot task transfer. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to demonstrate the effectiveness of pre-trained models in terms of sample efficiency and generalisability enhancement in MARL.
authors: Linghui Meng Muning Wen Yaodong Yang chenyang le Xi yun Li Haifeng Zhang Ying Wen Weinan Zhang Jun Wang Bo XU
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