Dynamical systems consisting of a set of autonomous agents face the challenge of having to accomplish a global task, relying only on local information. While centralized controllers are readily available, they face limitations in terms of scalability and implementation, as they do not respect the distributed information structure imposed by the network system of agents. Given the difficulties in finding optimal decentralized controllers, we propose a novel framework using graph neural networks (GNNs) to \emph{learn} these controllers. GNNs are well-suited for the task since they are naturally distributed architectures and exhibit good scalability and transferability properties. We show that GNNs learn appropriate decentralized controllers by means of imitation learning, leverage their permutation invariance properties to successfully scale to larger teams and transfer to unseen scenarios at deployment time. The problems of flocking and multi-agent path planning are explored to illustrate the potential of GNNs in learning decentralized controllers.
GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学GRASP实验室）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Drexel University（德雷塞尔大学电气与计算机工程系）
In this work, we study the problem of decentralized multi-agent perimeter defense that asks for computing actions for defenders with local perceptions and communications to maximize the capture of intruders. One major challenge for practical implementations is to make perimeter defense strategies scalable for large-scale problem instances. To this end, we leverage graph neural networks (GNNs) to develop an imitation learning framework that learns a mapping from defenders' local perceptions and their communication graph to their actions. The proposed GNN-based learning network is trained by imi…
Texas A&M University（德克萨斯农工大学）；Rice University（莱斯大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；US Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军研究实验室）
In this paper, we present a perception-action-communication loop design using Vision-based Graph Aggregation and Inference (VGAI). This multi-agent decentralized learning-to-control framework maps raw visual observations to agent actions, aided by local communication among neighboring agents. Our framework is implemented by a cascade of a convolutional and a graph neural network (CNN / GNN), addressing agent-level visual perception and feature learning, as well as swarm-level communication, local information aggregation and agent action inference, respectively. By jointly training the CNN and …
LPAC: Learnable Perception-Action-Communication Loops with Applications to Coverage Control
GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学GRASP实验室）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学电气与系统工程系）
Our goal is to train a policy for autonomous driving via imitation learning that is robust enough to drive a real vehicle. We find that standard behavior cloning is insufficient for handling complex driving scenarios, even when we leverage a perception system for preprocessing the input and a controller for executing the output on the car: 30 million examples are still not enough. We propose exposing the learner to synthesized data in the form of perturbations to the expert's driving, which creates interesting situations such as collisions and/or going off the road. Rather than purely imitatin…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室）；University of South Florida（南佛罗里达大学）
With the fast growing demand on new services and applications as well as the increasing awareness of data protection, traditional centralized traffic classification approaches are facing unprecedented challenges. This paper introduces a novel framework, Federated Generative Adversarial Networks and Automatic Classification (FGAN-AC), which integrates decentralized data synthesizing with traffic classification. FGAN-AC is able to synthesize and classify multiple types of service data traffic from decentralized local datasets without requiring a large volume of manually labeled dataset or causin…
We present Bayesian Team Imitation Learner (BTIL), an imitation learning algorithm to model the behavior of teams performing sequential tasks in Markovian domains. In contrast to existing multi-agent imitation learning techniques, BTIL explicitly models and infers the time-varying mental states of team members, thereby enabling learning of decentralized team policies from demonstrations of suboptimal teamwork. Further, to allow for sample- and label-efficient policy learning from small datasets, BTIL employs a Bayesian perspective and is capable of learning from semi-supervised demonstrations.…
In multi-agent systems, complex interacting behaviors arise due to the high correlations among agents. However, previous work on modeling multi-agent interactions from demonstrations is primarily constrained by assuming the independence among policies and their reward structures. In this paper, we cast the multi-agent interactions modeling problem into a multi-agent imitation learning framework with explicit modeling of correlated policies by approximating opponents' policies, which can recover agents' policies that can regenerate similar interactions. Consequently, we develop a Decentralized …
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Decentralized drone swarms deployed today either rely on sharing of positions among agents or detecting swarm members with the help of visual markers. This work proposes an entirely visual approach to coordinate markerless drone swarms based on imitation learning. Each agent is controlled by a small and efficient convolutional neural network that takes raw omnidirectional images as inputs and predicts 3D velocity commands that match those computed by a flocking algorithm. We start training in simulation and propose a simple yet effective unsupervised domain adaptation approach to transfer the …
Effective human-human and human-autonomy teamwork is critical but often challenging to perfect. The challenge is particularly relevant in time-critical domains, such as healthcare and disaster response, where the time pressures can make coordination increasingly difficult to achieve and the consequences of imperfect coordination can be severe. To improve teamwork in these and other domains, we present TIC: an automated intervention approach for improving coordination between team members. Using BTIL, a multi-agent imitation learning algorithm, our approach first learns a generative model of te…
The Pommerman simulation was recently developed to mimic the classic Japanese game Bomberman, and focuses on competitive gameplay in a multi-agent setting. We focus on the 2$\times$2 team version of Pommerman, developed for a competition at NeurIPS 2018. Our methodology involves training an agent initially through imitation learning on a noisy expert policy, followed by a proximal-policy optimization (PPO) reinforcement learning algorithm. The basic PPO approach is modified for stable transition from the imitation learning phase through reward shaping, action filters based on heuristics, and c…
Reactive and safe agent modelings are important for nowadays traffic simulator designs and safe planning applications. In this work, we proposed a reactive agent model which can ensure safety without comprising the original purposes, by learning only high-level decisions from expert data and a low-level decentralized controller guided by the jointly learned decentralized barrier certificates. Empirical results show that our learned road user simulation models can achieve a significant improvement in safety comparing to state-of-the-art imitation learning and pure control-based methods, while b…
Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（航空与航天系，麻省理工学院）；Institute for Research in Technology, ICAI School of Engineering, Comillas Pontifical University (Spain)（技术研究所，ICAI工程学院，Comillas天主教大学（西班牙））
