FAME: A Framework for Accelerating Independent Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning on Heterogeneous Platforms

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) enables multiple autonomous agents to learn and act in a shared environment. Independent learning (IL) is a widely used MARL paradigm that underpins many real-world applications requiring efficient training at scale. However, accelerating IL at scale is non-trivial. Existing MARL frameworks rely on single-process execution and homogeneous hardware assumptions, limiting scalability and underutilizing modern heterogeneous platforms composed of CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs. Addressing this gap requires new execution models that increase parallelism while preserving IL training semantics. In this work, we present FAME, a framework that distributes computation across heterogeneous hardware resources while providing flexible interfaces that allow MARL practitioners to prototype and test new IL approaches. FAME is composed of: (1) high-level APIs that simplify IL algorithm development, (2) a heterogeneous IL training protocol that supports concurrent agent training on multiple diverse devices, while maintaining algorithm-agnostic training semantics, (3) automatic hardware configuration generation that optimizes system throughput without needing users to manually fine-tune their system setup, and (4) dynamic load balancing among devices with different compute and memory characteristics. We demonstrate FAME’s capabilities using three representative IL algorithms on a heterogeneous node platform consisting of CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs. Implementations generated using FAME achieve a geometric mean end-to-end training time speedup of 7.1 × over state-of-the-art implementations and up to 2.7 × speedup over additional highly parallel baselines developed in this work.