Influential Paper Award

The 2023 IFAAMAS Influential paper award committee (Maria Gini (chair), Jeff Rosenschein & William Yeoh) has recommended the following paper for the 2023 award.

Claus, Caroline, and Craig Boutilier. “The dynamics of reinforcement learning in cooperative multiagent systems.” AAAI 1998.746-752 (1998).

The paper, which has received more than 1,500 citations, laid the foundations for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Specifically, it introduced methods for agents which learn individual Q-functions and for agents which learn Q-functions over all agent actions.  These concepts are widely used in modern MARL systems.