Permutation Robustness Is Not Enough: Action Collapse in Multi-Agent Transformer Policies

Abstract

Transformer policies are attractive for multi-agent robot learning because self-attention can model interactions among agents. However, multi-agent teams are unordered, while transformers typically process agents as ordered token sequences. We study how this mismatch affects cooperative navigation policies under agent-order permutations. Our results show that low permutation error alone can be misleading: policies may appear robust simply because all agents choose the same action. We therefore evaluate policies using both permutation-consistency metrics and action-collapse diagnostics, including action diversity, same-action fraction, and maximum action frequency. A PPO-ID baseline yields non-collapsed behavior but remains order-sensitive, while strong equivariance regularization can still induce homogeneous behavior. A weak equivariance penalty improves the robustness while preserving more diverse actions for teams with \(N=3\) agents, whereas teams with \(N=4\) agents require substantially smaller regularization weights. These findings suggest that multi-agent transformer policies should be evaluated not only by return and permutation robustness, but also by whether they maintain non-collapsed, differentiated multi-agent behavior.