{"title":"设计对通信损失具有鲁棒性的独立于转换的多智能体系统策略","authors":"Mustafa O. Karabag, Cyrus Neary, Ufuk Topcu","doi":"10.1007/s10458-025-09721-9","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In a cooperative multiagent system, a collection of agents executes a joint policy in order to achieve some common objective. The successful deployment of such systems hinges on the availability of reliable inter-agent communication. However, many sources of potential disruption to communication exist in practice, such as radio interference, hardware failure, and adversarial attacks. In this work, we develop joint policies for cooperative multiagent systems that are robust to potential losses in communication. More specifically, we develop joint policies for cooperative Markov games with independent transitions and joint reach-avoid objectives. First, we propose an algorithm for the decentralized execution of joint policies during periods of communication loss. This algorithm is designed to work under arbitrary communication partitions between the agents. Next, we use the total correlation of the state-action process induced by a joint policy as a measure of the intrinsic dependencies between the agents. We then use this measure to lower-bound the performance of a joint policy under randomly intermittent or adversarial communication loss scenarios. We show the existence of a multiagent decision-making environment in which this bound is tight—the highest performance under intermittent communication loss, for any policy execution mechanism, is of the same order as the bound. We then present an algorithm that maximizes a proxy to this lower bound in order to synthesize minimum-dependency joint policies that remain performant under communication loss. Through two-agent and three-agent numerical experiments, we show that the proposed minimum-dependency policies require minimal coordination between the agents while incurring little to no loss in performance; the total correlation value of the synthesized policy is significantly lower than the total correlation value of the baseline policy which does not take potential communication losses into account. As a result, the performance of the minimum-dependency policies remains consistently high regardless of whether or not communication is available. By contrast, the performance of the baseline policy decreases drastically when communication is lost.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":55586,"journal":{"name":"Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems","volume":"39 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6000,"publicationDate":"2025-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Designing policies for transition-independent multiagent systems that are robust to communication loss\",\"authors\":\"Mustafa O. Karabag, Cyrus Neary, Ufuk Topcu\",\"doi\":\"10.1007/s10458-025-09721-9\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<div><p>In a cooperative multiagent system, a collection of agents executes a joint policy in order to achieve some common objective. The successful deployment of such systems hinges on the availability of reliable inter-agent communication. However, many sources of potential disruption to communication exist in practice, such as radio interference, hardware failure, and adversarial attacks. In this work, we develop joint policies for cooperative multiagent systems that are robust to potential losses in communication. More specifically, we develop joint policies for cooperative Markov games with independent transitions and joint reach-avoid objectives. First, we propose an algorithm for the decentralized execution of joint policies during periods of communication loss. This algorithm is designed to work under arbitrary communication partitions between the agents. Next, we use the total correlation of the state-action process induced by a joint policy as a measure of the intrinsic dependencies between the agents. We then use this measure to lower-bound the performance of a joint policy under randomly intermittent or adversarial communication loss scenarios. We show the existence of a multiagent decision-making environment in which this bound is tight—the highest performance under intermittent communication loss, for any policy execution mechanism, is of the same order as the bound. We then present an algorithm that maximizes a proxy to this lower bound in order to synthesize minimum-dependency joint policies that remain performant under communication loss. Through two-agent and three-agent numerical experiments, we show that the proposed minimum-dependency policies require minimal coordination between the agents while incurring little to no loss in performance; the total correlation value of the synthesized policy is significantly lower than the total correlation value of the baseline policy which does not take potential communication losses into account. As a result, the performance of the minimum-dependency policies remains consistently high regardless of whether or not communication is available. By contrast, the performance of the baseline policy decreases drastically when communication is lost.</p></div>\",\"PeriodicalId\":55586,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems\",\"volume\":\"39 2\",\"pages\":\"\"},\"PeriodicalIF\":2.6000,\"publicationDate\":\"2025-08-21\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"\",\"citationCount\":\"0\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"94\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10458-025-09721-9\",\"RegionNum\":3,\"RegionCategory\":\"计算机科学\",\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"Q3\",\"JCRName\":\"AUTOMATION & CONTROL SYSTEMS\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems","FirstCategoryId":"94","ListUrlMain":"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10458-025-09721-9","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"AUTOMATION & CONTROL SYSTEMS","Score":null,"Total":0}
Designing policies for transition-independent multiagent systems that are robust to communication loss
In a cooperative multiagent system, a collection of agents executes a joint policy in order to achieve some common objective. The successful deployment of such systems hinges on the availability of reliable inter-agent communication. However, many sources of potential disruption to communication exist in practice, such as radio interference, hardware failure, and adversarial attacks. In this work, we develop joint policies for cooperative multiagent systems that are robust to potential losses in communication. More specifically, we develop joint policies for cooperative Markov games with independent transitions and joint reach-avoid objectives. First, we propose an algorithm for the decentralized execution of joint policies during periods of communication loss. This algorithm is designed to work under arbitrary communication partitions between the agents. Next, we use the total correlation of the state-action process induced by a joint policy as a measure of the intrinsic dependencies between the agents. We then use this measure to lower-bound the performance of a joint policy under randomly intermittent or adversarial communication loss scenarios. We show the existence of a multiagent decision-making environment in which this bound is tight—the highest performance under intermittent communication loss, for any policy execution mechanism, is of the same order as the bound. We then present an algorithm that maximizes a proxy to this lower bound in order to synthesize minimum-dependency joint policies that remain performant under communication loss. Through two-agent and three-agent numerical experiments, we show that the proposed minimum-dependency policies require minimal coordination between the agents while incurring little to no loss in performance; the total correlation value of the synthesized policy is significantly lower than the total correlation value of the baseline policy which does not take potential communication losses into account. As a result, the performance of the minimum-dependency policies remains consistently high regardless of whether or not communication is available. By contrast, the performance of the baseline policy decreases drastically when communication is lost.
期刊介绍:
This is the official journal of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. It provides a leading forum for disseminating significant original research results in the foundations, theory, development, analysis, and applications of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. Coverage in Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems includes, but is not limited to:
Agent decision-making architectures and their evaluation, including: cognitive models; knowledge representation; logics for agency; ontological reasoning; planning (single and multi-agent); reasoning (single and multi-agent)
Cooperation and teamwork, including: distributed problem solving; human-robot/agent interaction; multi-user/multi-virtual-agent interaction; coalition formation; coordination
Agent communication languages, including: their semantics, pragmatics, and implementation; agent communication protocols and conversations; agent commitments; speech act theory
Ontologies for agent systems, agents and the semantic web, agents and semantic web services, Grid-based systems, and service-oriented computing
Agent societies and societal issues, including: artificial social systems; environments, organizations and institutions; ethical and legal issues; privacy, safety and security; trust, reliability and reputation
Agent-based system development, including: agent development techniques, tools and environments; agent programming languages; agent specification or validation languages
Agent-based simulation, including: emergent behavior; participatory simulation; simulation techniques, tools and environments; social simulation
Agreement technologies, including: argumentation; collective decision making; judgment aggregation and belief merging; negotiation; norms
Economic paradigms, including: auction and mechanism design; bargaining and negotiation; economically-motivated agents; game theory (cooperative and non-cooperative); social choice and voting
Learning agents, including: computational architectures for learning agents; evolution, adaptation; multi-agent learning.
Robotic agents, including: integrated perception, cognition, and action; cognitive robotics; robot planning (including action and motion planning); multi-robot systems.
Virtual agents, including: agents in games and virtual environments; companion and coaching agents; modeling personality, emotions; multimodal interaction; verbal and non-verbal expressiveness
Significant, novel applications of agent technology
Comprehensive reviews and authoritative tutorials of research and practice in agent systems
Comprehensive and authoritative reviews of books dealing with agents and multi-agent systems.