# Staggered Participation in Cooperative MARL

The authors formalize staggered participation (SP), a cooperative MARL setting where agents contribute to one objective over temporally offset participation windows and earlier participants leave task-relevant information for later ones, and propose SPL, a training-time augmentation combining prospective acquisition supervision for earlier agents with outcome-supervised receiver learning for later agents; across 60 MPE/RWARE backbone comparisons SPL shows higher observed mean task completion in every case, averaging a 14.1% difference, with gains extending to eight-agent teams and a physics-based UAV–UGV setting in Isaac Lab.

The authors formalize staggered participation (SP), a cooperative MARL setting where agents contribute to one objective over temporally offset participation windows and earlier participants leave task-relevant information for later ones, and propose SPL, a training-time augmentation combining prospective acquisition supervision for earlier agents with outcome-supervised receiver learning for later agents; across 60 MPE/RWARE backbone comparisons SPL shows higher observed mean task completion in every case, averaging a 14.1% difference, with gains extending to eight-agent teams and a physics-based UAV–UGV setting in Isaac Lab.