ARTFEED — Contemporary Art Intelligence

Bandwidth-Constrained Communication in Multi-Agent RL

other · 2026-05-22

A new paper on arXiv introduces SLIM, a minimal architecture for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) that decouples communication from policy representation under bandwidth constraints. The authors propose a normalized per-agent bandwidth budget β to unify sparsity, rounds, and message dimension. This addresses performance degradation in applications like drone swarms for search-and-rescue, where reducing message size limits policy capacity. The work is from arXiv:2605.21085.

Key facts

  • arXiv:2605.21085
  • SLIM architecture decouples communication from policy latent space
  • β is a normalized per-agent bandwidth budget
  • Addresses bandwidth constraints in MARL
  • Application: search-and-rescue with drone swarms
  • Coupled bottleneck in shared latent representation causes performance loss
  • Reducing message size limits policy capacity
  • In-step co-optimization is mentioned

Entities

Institutions

  • arXiv

Sources