On Swarm Leader Identification using Probing Policies
Fuente:
arXiv
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| Auteurs principaux: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866915688182972416 |
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| author | Bachoumas, Stergios E. Artemiadis, Panagiotis |
| author_facet | Bachoumas, Stergios E. Artemiadis, Panagiotis |
| contents | Identifying the leader within a robotic swarm is crucial, especially in adversarial contexts where leader concealment is necessary for mission success. This work introduces the interactive Swarm Leader Identification (iSLI) problem, a novel approach where an adversarial probing agent identifies a swarm's leader by physically interacting with its members. We formulate the iSLI problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) and employ Deep Reinforcement Learning, specifically Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), to train the prober's policy. The proposed approach utilizes a novel neural network architecture featuring a Timed Graph Relationformer (TGR) layer combined with a Simplified Structured State Space Sequence (S5) model. The TGR layer effectively processes graph-based observations of the swarm, capturing temporal dependencies and fusing relational information using a learned gating mechanism to generate informative representations for policy learning. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our TGR-based model outperforms baseline graph neural network architectures and exhibits significant zero-shot generalization capabilities across varying swarm sizes and speeds different from those used during training. The trained prober achieves high accuracy in identifying the leader, maintaining performance even in out-of-training distribution scenarios, and showing appropriate confidence levels in its predictions. Real-world experiments with physical robots further validate the approach, confirming successful sim-to-real transfer and robustness to dynamic changes, such as unexpected agent disconnections. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_18146 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | On Swarm Leader Identification using Probing Policies Bachoumas, Stergios E. Artemiadis, Panagiotis Robotics Artificial Intelligence Multiagent Systems Identifying the leader within a robotic swarm is crucial, especially in adversarial contexts where leader concealment is necessary for mission success. This work introduces the interactive Swarm Leader Identification (iSLI) problem, a novel approach where an adversarial probing agent identifies a swarm's leader by physically interacting with its members. We formulate the iSLI problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) and employ Deep Reinforcement Learning, specifically Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), to train the prober's policy. The proposed approach utilizes a novel neural network architecture featuring a Timed Graph Relationformer (TGR) layer combined with a Simplified Structured State Space Sequence (S5) model. The TGR layer effectively processes graph-based observations of the swarm, capturing temporal dependencies and fusing relational information using a learned gating mechanism to generate informative representations for policy learning. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our TGR-based model outperforms baseline graph neural network architectures and exhibits significant zero-shot generalization capabilities across varying swarm sizes and speeds different from those used during training. The trained prober achieves high accuracy in identifying the leader, maintaining performance even in out-of-training distribution scenarios, and showing appropriate confidence levels in its predictions. Real-world experiments with physical robots further validate the approach, confirming successful sim-to-real transfer and robustness to dynamic changes, such as unexpected agent disconnections. |
| title | On Swarm Leader Identification using Probing Policies |
| topic | Robotics Artificial Intelligence Multiagent Systems |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18146 |