Dynamic Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Inverse Reinforcement Learning Based on Graph Attention Mean Field
Li Song, Irfan Ali Channa, Zeyu Wang, Guangyu Sun · Symmetry · 2025
Multi-agent inverse reinforcement learning (MA-IRL) infers the underlying reward functions or objectives of multiple agents by observing their behavioral data, thereby providing insights into collaboration, competition, or mixed interaction strategies among agents, and addressing the symmetrical ambiguity problem where multiple rewards may correspond to the same strategy. However, most existing algorithms mainly focus on solving cooperative and non-cooperative tasks among homogeneous multi-agent systems, making it difficult to adapt to the dynamic topologies and heterogeneous behavioral strategies of multi-agent systems in real-world applications. This makes it difficult for the algorithm to adapt to scenarios with locally sparse interactions and dynamic heterogeneity, such as autonomous driving, drone swarms, and robot clusters. To address this problem, this study proposes a dynamic heterogeneous multi-agent inverse reinforcement learning framework (GAMF-DHIRL) based on a graph attention mean field (GAMF) to infer the potential reward functions of agents. In GAMF-DHIRL, we introduce a graph attention mean field theory based on adversarial maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning to dynamically model dependencies between agents and adaptively adjust the influence weights of neighboring nodes through attention mechanisms. Specifically, the GAMF module uses a dynamic adjacency matrix to capture the time-varying characteristics of the interactions among agents. Meanwhile, the typed mean-field approximation reduces computational complexity. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can efficiently recover reward functions of heterogeneous agents in collaborative tasks and adversarial environments, and it outperforms traditional MA-IRL methods.