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Main Authors: Lee, Minah, Mukhopadhyay, Saibal
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00120
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author Lee, Minah
Mukhopadhyay, Saibal
author_facet Lee, Minah
Mukhopadhyay, Saibal
contents Swarming systems, such as drone fleets and robotic teams, exhibit complex dynamics driven by both individual behaviors and emergent group-level interactions. Unlike traditional multi-agent domains such as pedestrian crowds or traffic systems, swarms typically consist of a few large groups with inherent and persistent memberships, making group identification essential for understanding fine-grained behavior. We introduce the novel task of group prediction in overlapping multi-agent swarms, where latent group structures must be inferred directly from agent trajectories without ground-truth supervision. To address this challenge, we propose SIGMAS (Second-order Interaction-based Grouping for Multi-Agent Swarms), a self-supervised framework that goes beyond direct pairwise interactions and model second-order interaction across agents. By capturing how similarly agents interact with others, SIGMAS enables robust group inference and adaptively balances individual and collective dynamics through a learnable gating mechanism for joint reasoning. Experiments across diverse synthetic swarm scenarios demonstrate that SIGMAS accurately recovers latent group structures and remains robust under simultaneously overlapping swarm dynamics, establishing both a new benchmark task and a principled modeling framework for swarm understanding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_00120
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SIGMAS: Second-Order Interaction-based Grouping for Overlapping Multi-Agent Swarms
Lee, Minah
Mukhopadhyay, Saibal
Multiagent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
Swarming systems, such as drone fleets and robotic teams, exhibit complex dynamics driven by both individual behaviors and emergent group-level interactions. Unlike traditional multi-agent domains such as pedestrian crowds or traffic systems, swarms typically consist of a few large groups with inherent and persistent memberships, making group identification essential for understanding fine-grained behavior. We introduce the novel task of group prediction in overlapping multi-agent swarms, where latent group structures must be inferred directly from agent trajectories without ground-truth supervision. To address this challenge, we propose SIGMAS (Second-order Interaction-based Grouping for Multi-Agent Swarms), a self-supervised framework that goes beyond direct pairwise interactions and model second-order interaction across agents. By capturing how similarly agents interact with others, SIGMAS enables robust group inference and adaptively balances individual and collective dynamics through a learnable gating mechanism for joint reasoning. Experiments across diverse synthetic swarm scenarios demonstrate that SIGMAS accurately recovers latent group structures and remains robust under simultaneously overlapping swarm dynamics, establishing both a new benchmark task and a principled modeling framework for swarm understanding.
title SIGMAS: Second-Order Interaction-based Grouping for Overlapping Multi-Agent Swarms
topic Multiagent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00120