"Learning to Communicate in MultiAgent Systems" Amanda Prorok (Cambridge University)

Abstract: Effective communication is key to successful multiagent coordination. Yet it is far from obvious what, how and when information needs to be shared among agents that aim to solve cooperative tasks. In this talk, I discuss our recent work on using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to solve multiagent coordination problems. In my first casestudy, I show how we use GNNs to find a decentralized solution to the multiagent path finding problem, which is known to be NPhard. I demonstrate how our policy is able to achieve nearoptimal performance, at a fraction of the realtime computational cost. Secondly, I show how GNNbased reinforcement learning can be leveraged to learn interagent communication policies. In this casestudy, I demonstrate how nonshared optimization objectives can lead to adversarial communication strategies. Finally, I address the challenge of learning robust communication policies, enabling a multiagent system to maintain high performance in the presence of anonymous noncooperative agents that communicate faulty, misleading or manipulative information.

Biography: Amanda Prorok is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, at Cambridge University, UK, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. Her mission is to find new ways of coordinating artificially intelligent agents (e.g., robots, vehicles, machines) to achieve common goals in shared physical and virtual spaces. Amanda Prorok has been honored by an ERC Starting Grant, an Amazon Research Award, an EPSRC New Investigator Award, an Isaac Newton Trust Early Career Award, and the Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) Award for the best thesis at EPFL in Computer Science. Further awards include Best Paper at DARS 2018, Finalist for Best MultiRobot Systems Paper at ICRA 2017, Best Paper at BICT 2015, and MIT Rising Stars 2015. She serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL), and Associate Editor for Autonomous Robots (AURO). Prior to joining Cambridge, Amanda Prorok was a postdoctoral researcher at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She completed her PhD at EPFL, Switzerland.

“Robotics Today A series of technical talks” is a new virtual robotics seminar series. The goal of the series is to bring the robotics community together during these challenging times.The seminars are scheduled on Fridays at 3PM EDT (12AM PDT) are open to the public. The format of the seminar consists of a technical talk live captioned and streamed via Web (https://roboticstoday.github.io/watch...) and Twitter (@RoboticsSeminar), followed by an interactive discussion between the speaker and a panel of faculty, postdocs, and students that will moderate audience questions.

Website: https://roboticstoday.github.io/
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Outline
0:00 Introduction
1:35 Amanda's Talk
34:58 Panel Introduction
36:18 Panel Discussion
1:21:29 Concluding Remarks