Oryx: a Performant and Scalable Algorithm for Many-Agent Coordination in Offline MARL
Juan Formanek, Omayma Mahjoub, Louay Nessir, Sasha Abramowitz, Ruan John de Kock, Wiem Khlifi, Daniel Rajaonarivonivelomanantsoa, Simon Du Toit, Arnol Fokam, Siddarth Singh, Ulrich Armel Mbou Sob, Felix Chalumeau, Arnu Pretorius
A key challenge in offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is achieving effective many-agent multi-step coordination in complex environments. In this work, we propose Oryx, a novel algorithm for offline cooperative MARL to directly address this challenge. Oryx adapts the recently proposed retention-based architecture Sable and combines it with a sequential form of implicit constraint Q-learning (ICQ), to develop a novel offline auto-regressive policy update scheme. This allows Oryx to solve complex coordination challenges while maintaining temporal coherence over lengthy trajectories. We evaluate Oryx across a diverse set of benchmarks from prior works—SMAC, RWARE, and Multi-Agent MuJoCo—covering tasks of both discrete and continuous control, varying in scale and difficulty. Oryx achieves state-of-the-art performance on more than 80% of the 65 tested datasets, outperforming prior offline MARL methods and demonstrating robust generalisation across domains with many agents and long horizons. Finally, we introduce new datasets to push the limits of many-agent coordination in offline MARL, and demonstrate Oryx's surperior ability to scale effectively in such settings. We make all of our datasets, experimental data, and code available.