Bayesian Robust Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Against Unknown Adversaries

Kiarash Kazari, György Dán

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

We consider the problem of robustness against adversarial attacks in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (c-MARL) at deployment time, where agents can face an adversary with an unknown objective. We address the uncertainty about the adversarial objective by proposing a Bayesian Dec-POMDP game model with a continuum of adversarial types, corresponding to distinct attack objectives. To compute a perfect Bayesian equilibrium (PBE) of the game, we introduce a novel partitioning scheme of adversarial policies based on their performance against a reference c-MARL policy. This allows us to cast the problem as finding a PBE in a finite-type Bayesian game. To compute the adversarial policies, we introduce the concept of an externally constrained reinforcement learning problem and present a provably convergent algorithm for solving it. Building on this, we propose to use a simultaneous gradient update scheme to obtain robust Bayesian c-MARL policies. Experiments on diverse benchmarks show that our approach, called BATPAL, outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under a wide variety of attack strategies, highlighting its robustness and adaptiveness.