This project studies risk-aware multi-agent reinforcement learning for planning
under uncertainty. Standard reinforcement learning optimizes expected return,
which can hide rare but severe failures. This is especially problematic in
multi-agent systems where agents share resources, induce coupled failure modes,
or must coordinate without direct communication. The project will develop and
evaluate algorithms for decentralized and centralized learning under recursive
entropic risk, CVaR/EVaR-style tail-risk diagnostics, and shared-resource
constraints.
The first part of the project uses exact finite MDPs (Markov decision processes) and
multi-agent MDP baselines. These baselines make it possible
to compare learned policies against the true risk-sensitive optimum and to
identify when decentralized training is exact, conservative, or misleading. The
second part scales the experiments to vectorized multi-agent reinforcement
learning environments, including custom shared-risk tasks and PufferLib-based
benchmarks. The computational work will consist of controlled sweeps over risk
parameters, random seeds, environment variants, and learning algorithms.
The requested NAISS resources will be used for GPU-accelerated deep
reinforcement learning experiments, CPU-based exact baselines, and reproducible
hyperparameter and seed sweeps. The expected outcome is a set of empirically
validated methods and benchmark environments for studying how risk-sensitive
objectives interact with decentralization, communication assumptions, and shared
stochastic failures in multi-agent systems.
The project is part of my doctoral studies at Chalmers University of Technology.
My main supervisor is Anna Gautier, Chalmers University of Technology.