← all papers · overview

Hierarchical Control in Multi-Agent Games: LLM-based Planning and RL Execution

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved strong performance in sequential decision-making, yet scaling to complex multi-agent environments remains challenging due to sparse rewards, large state-action spaces, and the difficulty of learning coordinated strategies. We propose a hierarchical architecture where a pretrained large language model (LLM) acts as a centralized strategic controller that selects among specialized RL skill policies for a team of agents, while RL policies handle reactive low-level execution. We evaluate this hybrid system in a competitive 2v2 King of the Hill environment against behavior tree (BT) and \emph{``Flat''} RL (end-to-end training without skill decomposition) baselines. The LLM+RL system achieves task performance statistically equivalent to hand-crafted BT (46.4\% vs 51.5\% win rate, p=0.103p=0.103) while both significantly outperform Flat RL trained without skill decomposition. A user study (n=15n=15) reveals that 60\% of participants perceive LLM+RL agents as the most human-like (p=0.027p=0.027), citing behavioral adaptability and tactical variability. These results demonstrate that pretrained LLM reasoning can effectively orchestrate pretrained RL skills, achieving competitive multi-agent coordination and superior perceived believability without manual rule engineering.

Related papers

Ranked by semantic similarity — how closely each paper's abstract matches this one (100% = near-identical topic).