Learning Decentralized Swarms Using Rotation Equivariant Graph Neural Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Transue, Taos, Wang, Bao
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Transue, Taos
Wang, Bao
author_facet Transue, Taos
Wang, Bao
contents The orchestration of agents to optimize a collective objective without centralized control is challenging yet crucial for applications such as controlling autonomous fleets, and surveillance and reconnaissance using sensor networks. Decentralized controller design has been inspired by self-organization found in nature, with a prominent source of inspiration being flocking; however, decentralized controllers struggle to maintain flock cohesion. The graph neural network (GNN) architecture has emerged as an indispensable machine learning tool for developing decentralized controllers capable of maintaining flock cohesion, but they fail to exploit the symmetries present in flocking dynamics, hindering their generalizability. We enforce rotation equivariance and translation invariance symmetries in decentralized flocking GNN controllers and achieve comparable flocking control with 70% less training data and 75% fewer trainable weights than existing GNN controllers without these symmetries enforced. We also show that our symmetry-aware controller generalizes better than existing GNN controllers. Code and animations are available at http://github.com/Utah-Math-Data-Science/Equivariant-Decentralized-Controllers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_17612
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Decentralized Swarms Using Rotation Equivariant Graph Neural Networks
Transue, Taos
Wang, Bao
Robotics
Machine Learning
68T05 (Primary), 68Q32 (Secondary), 68T42
The orchestration of agents to optimize a collective objective without centralized control is challenging yet crucial for applications such as controlling autonomous fleets, and surveillance and reconnaissance using sensor networks. Decentralized controller design has been inspired by self-organization found in nature, with a prominent source of inspiration being flocking; however, decentralized controllers struggle to maintain flock cohesion. The graph neural network (GNN) architecture has emerged as an indispensable machine learning tool for developing decentralized controllers capable of maintaining flock cohesion, but they fail to exploit the symmetries present in flocking dynamics, hindering their generalizability. We enforce rotation equivariance and translation invariance symmetries in decentralized flocking GNN controllers and achieve comparable flocking control with 70% less training data and 75% fewer trainable weights than existing GNN controllers without these symmetries enforced. We also show that our symmetry-aware controller generalizes better than existing GNN controllers. Code and animations are available at http://github.com/Utah-Math-Data-Science/Equivariant-Decentralized-Controllers.
title Learning Decentralized Swarms Using Rotation Equivariant Graph Neural Networks
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
68T05 (Primary), 68Q32 (Secondary), 68T42
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17612