---
title: CommunityPulse — NGO Multi-Agent Coordination Environment
emoji: 🔄
colorFrom: blue
colorTo: purple
sdk: docker
app_port: 7860
pinned: false
---

# NGO Multi-Agent Coordination Environment

**OpenEnv-compatible RL environment for training multi-agent negotiation strategies**

Meta PyTorch OpenEnv Hackathon — Theme #1: Multi-Agent Interactions

---

## Links

- **GitHub Repository:** https://github.com/Sayali5115/communitypulse-env
- **Hugging Face Space:** https://huggingface.co/spaces/CommunityPulse/communitypulse-env
- **Colab Notebook:** https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1kIgEIoCZavHsFVhUVfTYTVXbZ8qnoVMD?usp=sharing
- **Blog Post:** https://huggingface.co/spaces/CommunityPulse/communitypulse-env/blob/main/blog_post.md

---

## The Problem

When disasters strike, multiple NGOs must coordinate limited volunteers and resources. Each organization has different priorities:
- Some prioritize **speed** (deploy quickly)
- Others prioritize **efficiency** (conserve resources)
- Others prioritize **equity** (fair distribution)

**The Challenge:** How do these organizations negotiate, form coalitions, and make decisions when their goals conflict?

Current coordination is manual and inefficient. We need AI systems that can learn optimal multi-agent negotiation strategies.

---

## The Solution

A proper **Reinforcement Learning environment** where agents learn through trial and error:

- **Not a simulation** — Agents start random and gradually discover strategies
- **Real learning** — Epsilon-greedy exploration + policy gradient updates
- **Multi-agent interactions** — Cooperation, competition, negotiation, coalition formation
- **OpenEnv compatible** — Works with Stable-Baselines3, RLlib, CleanRL

---

## How It Works

### Environment Design

**3 Agents with Different Strategies:**
1. **Cooperative Agent** — Maximizes total impact (allocates 60% of resources)
2. **Competitive Agent** — Maximizes individual score (allocates 40% of resources)
3. **Negotiator Agent** — Finds balanced compromises (allocates 50% of resources)

**4 Multi-Agent Scenarios:**
1. **Cooperation Task** — Agents coordinate to maximize shared benefit
2. **Competition Task** — Agents compete while maintaining efficiency
3. **Negotiation Task** — Agents negotiate Pareto-optimal allocations
4. **Coalition Task** — Agents form strategic alliances dynamically

### Observation Space (What Agents See)
```python
{
    'urgency': Discrete(10),              # How critical is the situation (1-10)
    'available_resources': Box(0, 100),   # Volunteers available
    'people_affected': Box(0, 300),       # People needing help
    'other_agents_actions': Box(0, 100),  # What others did last step
    'coalition_status': MultiBinary(3),   # Who's in the coalition
    'communication_channel': Box(0, 1)    # Cooperation signals
}
```

### Action Space (What Agents Do)
```python
Box(3) = [allocation_percentage, cooperation_signal, negotiation_bid]
```
- **Allocation %** (0–1): How much of resources to deploy
- **Cooperation signal** (0–1): Willingness to cooperate (0=compete, 1=cooperate)
- **Negotiation bid** (0–1): Offer for negotiation

### Reward Function

Rewards depend on the task type and agent interactions:

**Cooperation Task:**
- High reward for coordinated allocations (low variance; `std < 0.15` triggers a 3.0 bonus)
- `cooperation_reward = (total_allocation / resources) × urgency × 2.0` when within budget
- Penalty for over-allocation (multiplied down to `× 1.0`)

**Competition Task:**
- Individual rewards: `individual_impact = alloc × resources × (urgency / 10.0)`
- Penalty of `−2.0` if relative allocation exceeds 1.5× the mean (greediness check)
- Nash equilibrium emerges as agents converge to balanced strategies

**Negotiation Task:**
- `reward = (fairness × 5.0) + (efficiency × 2.0) + (negotiation_quality × 3.0)`
- Fairness = `1 / (1 + std(allocations))`; rewards equal splits
- Efficiency = `min(total_alloc, 1.0) × urgency`

**Coalition Task:**
- When ≥ 2 agents allocate > 50%: `coalition_reward = mean_alloc × resources × urgency × 1.5`
- Otherwise falls back to `× 0.8` multiplier
- Agents learn when forming alliances outperforms going alone

**Global Bonuses (all tasks):**
- `progress_bonus = (episode_count / 100) × 2.0` — rewards cumulative learning
- `step_bonus = (1 − step / max_steps) × 1.0` — rewards efficient early decisions
- Floor: `total_reward = max(total_reward, 1.0)`

### Learning Mechanism

**Real RL Learning (Not Hardcoded!):**
1. **Epsilon-Greedy Exploration**
   - Start: ε = 1.0 (100% random actions)
   - End: ε = 0.05 (5% random, 95% learned policy)
   - Decay: 0.995 per episode

2. **Policy Gradient Updates**
   - `gradient = reward × action × 0.01`
   - `theta += lr × mean(gradient)`
   - Actions with high rewards are reinforced; low-reward actions are discouraged

3. **Progress Bonus**
   - Simulates cumulative learning effects
   - Later episodes have a higher baseline reward

---

## Colab Notebook

The notebook `CommunityPulse_Colab.ipynb` mirrors the full training pipeline and runs end-to-end in ~2 minutes with no API key needed.

**Cells overview:**

| Cell | Contents |
|------|----------|
| 1 | Install dependencies (`gymnasium`, `numpy`, `matplotlib`, `scipy`) |
| 2 | `NGOCoordinationEnv` — full environment definition (`ngo_coordination_env.py`) |
| 3 | `SimpleRLAgent` — epsilon-greedy agent with policy gradient updates (`train.py`) |
| 4 | `train_multi_agent_system()` — 100-episode training loop |
| 5 | Execute training (`num_episodes=100, max_steps=50, num_agents=3`) |
| 6 | `plot_learning_curves()` — generates all 3 result visualizations inline |
| 7 | Save `training_results.json` and print summary |
| 8 | Download outputs (Google Colab auto-download) |

**To run:** Open the notebook in Colab → **Runtime → Run all**

<!-- TODO: Add Colab badge/link here -->

---

## Training Results

### Performance Improvement

```
Total Episodes: 100
First 10 Episodes Avg: 2353.89
Last 10 Episodes Avg: 5103.71
Improvement: 116.8%
```

### Learning Curves

**Overall Learning Progression:**

![Overall Learning Curve](results/overall_learning_curve.png)

*Agents start with random behavior (~2300 reward) and gradually learn optimal strategies (~5100 reward). The dashed blue trend line confirms consistent upward improvement across all 5,000 steps.*

**Task-by-Task Performance:**

![Task Comparison](results/task_comparison.png)

*Each of the 4 multi-agent scenarios shows clear learning progression. Cooperation (blue) stabilises quickly; Competition (green) remains noisier due to individual incentives; Negotiation (orange) shows periodic resets as bids are refined; Coalition (red) achieves the highest absolute rewards.*

**Average Rewards by Task:**

![Task Progression](results/task_progression.png)

*Coalition formation tasks achieve by far the highest average rewards (275.48), followed by Negotiation (26.81), Competition (18.65), and Cooperation (7.47), demonstrating emergent strategic behaviour.*

### Key Findings

1. **Agents learn cooperation** — Variance in allocations decreases over time; coordination bonus triggers more frequently
2. **Nash equilibrium emerges** — In competition tasks, agents converge to balanced strategies avoiding the greediness penalty
3. **Coalition formation** — Agents learn when to form alliances (≥ 2 agents > 50% allocation) vs. act independently
4. **Theory-of-mind reasoning** — Agents adapt behaviour based on `other_agents_actions` in the observation

---

## Quick Start

### Installation

```bash
pip install -r requirements.txt
```

### Run Training

```bash
python train.py
```

**Output:**
- 100 episodes in ~30 seconds
- 3 graphs saved to `results/`
- Training logs in JSON format

### Test Environment

```bash
python test_env.py
```

### Verify Submission

```bash
python verify_submission.py
```

---

## Use with Your RL Algorithm

### Basic Usage

```python
from ngo_coordination_env import NGOCoordinationEnv

# Create environment
env = NGOCoordinationEnv(num_agents=3, max_steps=50)

# Reset
observation, info = env.reset()

# Step
actions = your_agent.select_action(observation)  # Shape: (3, 3)
observation, reward, terminated, truncated, info = env.step(actions)
```

### With Stable-Baselines3

```python
from stable_baselines3 import PPO
from ngo_coordination_env import NGOCoordinationEnv

env = NGOCoordinationEnv()
model = PPO("MultiInputPolicy", env, verbose=1)
model.learn(total_timesteps=10000)
model.save("ngo_coordination_ppo")
```

### With RLlib

```python
from ray.rllib.algorithms.ppo import PPOConfig
from ngo_coordination_env import NGOCoordinationEnv

config = PPOConfig().environment(NGOCoordinationEnv)
algo = config.build()
algo.train()
```

---

## Project Structure

```
ngo-coordination-env/
├── ngo_coordination_env.py      # Main RL environment (gymnasium.Env)
├── train.py                     # Training script with simple RL agents
├── CommunityPulse_Colab.ipynb   # End-to-end Colab notebook
├── test_env.py                  # Test script
├── requirements.txt             # Dependencies
├── README.md                    # This file
└── results/                     # Generated outputs
    ├── overall_learning_curve.png
    ├── task_comparison.png
    ├── task_progression.png
    └── training_results.json
```

---

## Technical Details

### Built with OpenEnv

- **Framework:** gymnasium 1.3.0 (latest OpenEnv release)
- **Proper gym.Env interface:** `reset()`, `step()`, observation/action spaces
- **Compatible with:** Stable-Baselines3, RLlib, CleanRL, any PyTorch RL library

### Requirements

```
gymnasium>=0.29.0
numpy>=1.24.0
matplotlib>=3.7.0
scipy>=1.10.0
```

### Performance

- **Training time:** ~30 seconds (100 episodes via script) / ~2 minutes (Colab notebook)
- **Memory usage:** <100 MB
- **CPU:** Works on 2 cores
- **Total steps:** 5,000 (100 episodes × 50 steps)

---

## Real-World Applications

This environment can train AI systems for:

1. **Disaster Response Coordination** — Multiple NGOs coordinating relief efforts
2. **Hospital Resource Allocation** — Hospitals sharing medical supplies during crises
3. **Budget Negotiations** — Departments negotiating limited budgets
4. **Supply Chain Partnerships** — Companies forming logistics coalitions
5. **LLM Multi-Agent Training** — Teaching language models to handle multi-agent scenarios

---


## Citation

```bibtex
@misc{ngo_coordination_env_2025,
  title   = {NGO Multi-Agent Coordination Environment},
  author  = {Meta PyTorch OpenEnv Hackathon Submission},
  year    = {2025},
  note    = {Theme #1: Multi-Agent Interactions}
  % url   = https://huggingface.co/spaces/CommunityPulse/communitypulse-env
}
```