Policy Search in Code Space for Multi-Agent Pathfinding

Matthias Eder, Pantelis Emmanouil, Vivek Farias, Fabian Fischer, Adam Jozefiak +5

Developing coordination policies for complex multi-agent systems relies on either labor-intensive algorithm design or opaque task-specific reinforcement learning. With recent advances in autonomous coding agents, we show that policy search directly in code space offers a compelling third path that combines automated optimization with explicit interpretability. We investigate a human-directed workflow in which coding agents iteratively propose, implement, evaluate, diagnose, and eventually refine algorithms guided by simulation feedback and explicit correctness verification. We conducted two case studies and found that this workflow robustly outperformed any manually engineered solutions. On a challenging map in the 2024 League of Robot Runners competition, a two-day search discovered a policy that exceeds the stronger locally reproduced competition entry by 35.0% on the densest instance and generalizes to unseen map instances. In simulated real-world warehouses with irregular lanes, continuous robot geometry, and asynchronous motion, a week-long search discovered an entirely new class of multi-agent pathfinding algorithm that outperforms a calibrated proprietary solution in…