Graph neural networks for decentralized multi-agent perimeter defense

Abstract

In this work, we study the problem of decentralized multi-agent perimeter defense that asks for computing actions for defenders with local perceptions and communications to maximize the capture of intruders. One major challenge for practical implementations is to make perimeter defense strategies scalable for large-scale problem instances. To this end, we leverage graph neural networks (GNNs) to develop an imitation learning framework that learns a mapping from defenders’ local perceptions and their communication graph to their actions. The proposed GNN-based learning network is trained by imitating a centralized expert algorithm such that the learned actions are close to that generated by the expert algorithm. We demonstrate that our proposed network performs closer to the expert algorithm and is superior to other baseline algorithms by capturing more intruders. Our GNN-based network is trained at a small scale and can be generalized to large-scale cases. We run perimeter defense games in scenarios with different team sizes and configurations to demonstrate the performance of the learned network.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jan 13, 2023
Source ID
10.3389/fcteg.2023.1104745

Entities

People

  • Alejandro Ribeiro
  • Elijah S. Lee
  • Lifeng Zhou
  • Vijay Kumar

Organizations

  • United States Army Research Laboratory

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking
  • Military History / Militaries and War Studies
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Machine Learning Algorithms
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks