Causality-Aware Efficient Exploration for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Exploration is critical for cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to improve sample efficiency. However, existing intrinsic motivation-based exploration strategies in MARL overlook the causal relationships among agents, global states, and rewards, suffering from interference by irrelevant factors and resulting in sample inefficiency. To address this issue, we propose Causality-aware Efficient Exploration (CEE), a novel framework that enhances sample efficiency by inferring causal relationships between agents, global states with respect to rewards, thereby enabling causality-guided exploration. Specifically, CEE operates through two components. First, CEE identifies causal relationships between global states and rewards, filtering out causally irrelevant state features that do not have a high impact on rewards to keep decision-critical state information. Second, CEE discovers causal relationships between agents' behaviors and rewards to quantify each agent's contribution to collective performance. To achieve this, we introduce a causal entropy objective that promotes exploration aligned with decision-critical aspects of the underlying causal structure. We provide comprehensive validation through experiments on $21$ challenging tasks spanning SMAC, SMAC-v2, and Google Research Football (GRF) environments. Our results demonstrate that CEE achieves superior performance in terms of sample efficiency and asymptotic performance compared to existing MARL methods.