Spatiotemporal Attention-Augmented Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Agent Task Allocation

Abstract

Adversarial inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) for multi-agent task allocation (MATA) is challenged by non-stationary interactions and high-dimensional coordination. Unconstrained reward inference in these settings often leads to high variance and poor generalization. We propose an attention-structured adversarial IRL framework that constrains reward inference via spatiotemporal representation learning. Our method employs multi-head self-attention (MHSA) for long-range temporal dependencies and graph attention networks (GAT) for agent-task relational structures. We formulate reward inference as a low-capacity, adaptive linear transformation of the environment reward, ensuring stable and interpretable guidance. This framework decouples reward inference from policy learning and optimizes the reward model adversarially. Experiments on benchmark MATA scenarios show that our approach outperforms representative MARL baselines in convergence speed, cumulative rewards, and spatial efficiency. Results demonstrate that attention-guided, capacity-constrained reward inference is a scalable and effective mechanism for stabilizing adversarial IRL in complex multi-agent systems.