GARDEN: Generalist Autonomous Reward Design Through Evidence Navigation for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Dogan Urgun

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) enables teams of agents, such as robots and autonomous vehicles, to learn coordinated behavior, but what such teams learn is largely determined by their reward function. Because task success alone provides too little guidance for learning, intermediate rewards are usually designed by hand, and this effort must often be repeated whenever the environment or the team changes. Large language models (LLMs) can automate the effort by writing reward functions as code, yet the resulting rewards are typically designed and tested in a single setting. To enable their reuse across settings, GARDEN (Generalist Autonomous Reward Design through Evidence Navigation) is proposed, in which one reward program is developed for a family of related scenarios and transferred, unchanged, to scenarios that were not available during its design. During development, environment code, training records, and agent behavior are investigated by an LLM reward engineer, and draft rewards are tested in trial training runs, while the learning algorithm and the rule for selecting the final reward are held fixed. On unseen scenarios of the Overcooked and SMAX…