Decomposing Communication Gain and Delay Cost Under Cross-Timestep Delays in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2604.03785v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Communication is essential for coordination in \emph{cooperative} multi-agent reinforcement learning under partial observability, yet \emph{cross-timestep} delays cause messages to arrive multiple timesteps after generation, inducing temporal misalignment and making information stale when consumed. We formalize this setting as a delayed-communication partially observable Markov game (DeComm-POMG) and decompose a message's effect into \emph{communic