CoDe: Communication Delay-Tolerant Multi-Agent Collaboration via Dual Alignment of Intent and Timeliness

TL;DR

This paper introduces CoDe, a framework for multi-agent collaboration that effectively handles communication delays by aligning intent and timeliness, improving robustness and performance in asynchronous settings.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel dual alignment mechanism in CoDe that enables agents to infer intent and manage delays, advancing multi-agent collaboration under realistic asynchronous communication conditions.

Findings

CoDe outperforms baseline algorithms in delay-free MARL benchmarks.

CoDe maintains robustness under fixed and time-varying delays.

Experimental results validate the effectiveness of intent and timeliness alignment.

Abstract

Communication has been widely employed to enhance multi-agent collaboration. Previous research has typically assumed delay-free communication, a strong assumption that is challenging to meet in practice. However, real-world agents suffer from channel delays, receiving messages sent at different time points, termed {\it{Asynchronous Communication}}, leading to cognitive biases and breakdowns in collaboration. This paper first defines two communication delay settings in MARL and emphasizes their harm to collaboration. To handle the above delays, this paper proposes a novel framework, Communication Delay-tolerant Multi-Agent Collaboration (CoDe). At first, CoDe learns an intent representation as messages through future action inference, reflecting the stable future behavioral trends of the agents. Then, CoDe devises a dual alignment mechanism of intent and timeliness to strengthen the fusion process of asynchronous messages. In this way, agents can extract the long-term intent of others, even from delayed messages, and selectively utilize the most recent messages that are relevant to their intent. Experimental results demonstrate that CoDe outperforms baseline algorithms in three MARL benchmarks without delay and exhibits robustness under fixed and time-varying delays.