Abstract
Temporally extended actions improve the ability to explore and plan in single-agent settings. In multi-agent settings, the exponential growth of the joint state space with the number of agents makes coordinated behaviours even more valuable. Yet, this same exponential growth renders the design of multi-agent options particularly challenging. Existing multi-agent option discovery methods often sacrifice coordination by producing loosely coupled or fully independent behaviours. Toward addressing these limitations, we describe a novel approach for multi-agent option discovery. Specifically, we propose a joint-state abstraction that compresses the state space while preserving the information necessary to discover strongly coordinated behaviours. Our approach builds on the inductive bias that synchronisation over agent states provides a natural foundation for coordination in the absence of explicit objectives. We first approximate a fictitious state of maximal alignment with the team, the \