Asynchronous Distributed Bandit Submodular Maximization under Heterogeneous Communication Delays

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sharma, Pranjal, Xu, Zirui, Tzoumas, Vasileios
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Sharma, Pranjal
Xu, Zirui
Tzoumas, Vasileios
author_facet Sharma, Pranjal
Xu, Zirui
Tzoumas, Vasileios
contents We study asynchronous distributed decision-making for scalable multi-agent bandit submodular maximization. We are motivated by distributed information-gathering tasks in unknown environments and under heterogeneous inter-agent communication delays. To enable scalability despite limited communication delays, existing approaches restrict each agent to coordinate only with its one-hop neighbors. But these approaches assume homogeneous communication delays among the agents and a synchronous global clock. In practice, however, delays are heterogeneous, and agents operate with mismatched local clocks. That is, each agent does not receive information from all neighbors at the same time, compromising decision-making. In this paper, we provide an asynchronous coordination algorithm to overcome the challenges. We establish a provable approximation guarantee against the optimal synchronized centralized solution, where the suboptimality gap explicitly depends on communication delays and clock mismatches. The bounds also depend on the topology of each neighborhood, capturing the effect of distributed decision-making via one-hop-neighborhood messages only. We validate the approach through numerical simulations on multi-camera area monitoring.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_06430
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Asynchronous Distributed Bandit Submodular Maximization under Heterogeneous Communication Delays
Sharma, Pranjal
Xu, Zirui
Tzoumas, Vasileios
Systems and Control
Multiagent Systems
We study asynchronous distributed decision-making for scalable multi-agent bandit submodular maximization. We are motivated by distributed information-gathering tasks in unknown environments and under heterogeneous inter-agent communication delays. To enable scalability despite limited communication delays, existing approaches restrict each agent to coordinate only with its one-hop neighbors. But these approaches assume homogeneous communication delays among the agents and a synchronous global clock. In practice, however, delays are heterogeneous, and agents operate with mismatched local clocks. That is, each agent does not receive information from all neighbors at the same time, compromising decision-making. In this paper, we provide an asynchronous coordination algorithm to overcome the challenges. We establish a provable approximation guarantee against the optimal synchronized centralized solution, where the suboptimality gap explicitly depends on communication delays and clock mismatches. The bounds also depend on the topology of each neighborhood, capturing the effect of distributed decision-making via one-hop-neighborhood messages only. We validate the approach through numerical simulations on multi-camera area monitoring.
title Asynchronous Distributed Bandit Submodular Maximization under Heterogeneous Communication Delays
topic Systems and Control
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06430