SMAC-R1: The Emergence of Intelligence in Decision-Making Tasks

TL;DR

This paper introduces SMAC-R1, a novel approach that uses large language models to generate interpretable decision trees for multi-agent reinforcement learning in StarCraft environments, achieving high transferability and minimal exploration.

Contribution

The paper presents a new method combining LLMs and decision trees for MARL, with a pipeline that includes self-reflection and fine-tuning, improving interpretability and transferability of policies.

Findings

High-quality, interpretable decision trees generated

Strong transferability to new environments demonstrated

Minimal environmental exploration required

Abstract

StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) has been one of the most commonly used experimental environments in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where the specific task is to control a set number of allied units to defeat enemy forces. Traditional MARL algorithms often require interacting with the environment for millions of steps to train a parametric model, of which the resulting policies are typically non-interpretable with weak transferability. In this paper, we introduce SMAC-R1 which is based on the Qwen2.5-7B-Base LLM distilled from DeepSeek-Coder-v2.5-236B. Similar to online reinforcement learning after behavior cloning in offline learning process, in our pipeline, agents leverage the DeepSeek LLM to generate decision tree code by providing task descriptions, and the agents are further self-reflected using feedback from the rewards provided by the environment. Based on that, we augment the generated scripts to fine-tune a small LLM, Qwen2.5-7B-Base, to distill the decision-making ability via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and enhance the script generation ability by the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm. We conduct experiments in the original 23 SMAC tasks and 10 newly-designed tasks to demonstrate that our method can produce high-quality, interpretable decision trees with minimal environmental exploration. Moreover, these scripts exhibit strong transferability, successfully applying to homogeneous SMAC environments without modification. We believe this approach offers a new direction for solving decision-making tasks and domain-specific LLM training pipelines in the future.