Position: Beyond Training Time, Test-Time Coordination is Essential for Cooperative MARL
We argue that cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) should treat test-time coordination as part of the problem definition rather than a deployment artifact. Our focus is on long-horizon, centrally monitored cooperative systems such as warehouse robotics, automated storage-and-retrieval systems, and cloud-resource scheduling, where teams share a reward, operate under shifting objectives, and already run with global telemetry at deployment. The dominant paradigm in this regime, centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE), uses global information only during training and provides no coordination channel at execution. This is sufficient when agents are weakly coup...
| Authors | Dongsu Lee, Sooraj Sathish, Joonkyung Kim et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 12 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 October 2026 |
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