Learning to Communicate Locally for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Pathfinding

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Vyaltsev, Valeriy, Sagirova, Alsu, Andreychuk, Anton, Bulichev, Oleg, Kuratov, Yuri, Yakovlev, Konstantin, Panov, Aleksandr, Skrynnik, Alexey
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Vyaltsev, Valeriy
Sagirova, Alsu
Andreychuk, Anton
Bulichev, Oleg
Kuratov, Yuri
Yakovlev, Konstantin
Panov, Aleksandr
Skrynnik, Alexey
author_facet Vyaltsev, Valeriy
Sagirova, Alsu
Andreychuk, Anton
Bulichev, Oleg
Kuratov, Yuri
Yakovlev, Konstantin
Panov, Aleksandr
Skrynnik, Alexey
contents Multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) is a widely used abstraction for multi-robot trajectory planning problems, where multiple homogeneous agents move simultaneously within a shared environment. Although solving MAPF optimally is NP-hard, scalable and efficient solvers are critical for real-world applications such as logistics and search-and-rescue. To this end, the research community has proposed various decentralized suboptimal MAPF solvers that leverage machine learning. Such methods frame MAPF (from a single agent perspective) as a Dec-POMDP where at each time step an agent has to decide an action based on the local observation and typically solve the problem via reinforcement learning or imitation learning. We follow the same approach but additionally introduce a learnable communication module tailored to enhance cooperation between agents via efficient feature sharing. We present the Local Communication for Multi-agent Pathfinding (LC-MAPF), a generalizable pre-trained model that applies multi-round communication between neighboring agents to exchange information and improve their coordination. Our experiments show that the introduced method outperforms the existing learning-based MAPF solvers, including IL and RL-based approaches, across diverse metrics in a diverse range of (unseen) test scenarios. Remarkably, the introduced communication mechanism does not compromise LC-MAPF's scalability, a common bottleneck for communication-based MAPF solvers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_07637
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Communicate Locally for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Pathfinding
Vyaltsev, Valeriy
Sagirova, Alsu
Andreychuk, Anton
Bulichev, Oleg
Kuratov, Yuri
Yakovlev, Konstantin
Panov, Aleksandr
Skrynnik, Alexey
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
Multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) is a widely used abstraction for multi-robot trajectory planning problems, where multiple homogeneous agents move simultaneously within a shared environment. Although solving MAPF optimally is NP-hard, scalable and efficient solvers are critical for real-world applications such as logistics and search-and-rescue. To this end, the research community has proposed various decentralized suboptimal MAPF solvers that leverage machine learning. Such methods frame MAPF (from a single agent perspective) as a Dec-POMDP where at each time step an agent has to decide an action based on the local observation and typically solve the problem via reinforcement learning or imitation learning. We follow the same approach but additionally introduce a learnable communication module tailored to enhance cooperation between agents via efficient feature sharing. We present the Local Communication for Multi-agent Pathfinding (LC-MAPF), a generalizable pre-trained model that applies multi-round communication between neighboring agents to exchange information and improve their coordination. Our experiments show that the introduced method outperforms the existing learning-based MAPF solvers, including IL and RL-based approaches, across diverse metrics in a diverse range of (unseen) test scenarios. Remarkably, the introduced communication mechanism does not compromise LC-MAPF's scalability, a common bottleneck for communication-based MAPF solvers.
title Learning to Communicate Locally for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Pathfinding
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07637