Game-theoretic Occlusion-Aware Motion Planning: an Efficient Hybrid-Information Approach

Kushagra Gupta; David Fridovich-Keil

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2309.10901

Game-theoretic Occlusion-Aware Motion Planning: an Efficient Hybrid-Information Approach

Kushagra Gupta·David Fridovich-Keil

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

We present a novel algorithm for game-theoretic trajectory planning, tailored for settings in which agents can only observe one another in specific regions of the state space. Such problems arise naturally in the context of multi-robot navigation, where occlusions due to environment geometry naturally mask agents' view of one another. In this paper, we formalize these settings as dynamic games with a hybrid information structure, which interleaves so-called "open-loop" periods (in which agents cannot observe one another) with "feedback" periods (with full state observability). We present two main contributions. First, we study a canonical variant of these hybrid information games in which agents' dynamics are linear, and objectives are convex and quadratic. Here, we build upon classical solution methods for the open-loop and feedback variants of these games to derive an algorithm for the hybrid information case that matches the cubic runtime of the classical settings. Second, we consider a far broader class of problems in which agents' dynamics are nonlinear, and objectives are nonquadratic; we reduce these problems to sequences of hybrid information linear-quadratic games and empirically demonstrate that iteratively solving these simpler problems with the proposed algorithm yields reliable convergence to approximate Nash equilibria through simulation studies of overtaking and intersection traffic scenarios.

Explore related subjects

cs.MA

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Kushagra Gupta, David Fridovich-Keil. 2024-06-17. Game-theoretic Occlusion-Aware Motion Planning: an Efficient Hybrid-Information Approach. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10901

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Optimization without Future Compromises? Decentralized Coordination via Collective and Reinforcement Learning

Efficient resource allocation in multi-agent systems requires autonomous agents to coordinate their decisions while balancing system-wide objectives with individual costs. This becomes increasingly challenging over long time horizons, where decisions that improve the current allocation may compromise future resource allocation, while decentralized agents have limited observations of the overall system. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) can learn such long-term dependencies via local observations, but directly applying it to large-scale coordination leads to rapidly growing decision spaces and inefficient training. To this end, we propose Hierarchical Reinforcement and Collective Learning (HRCL), a hierarchical framework that uses MARL to guide, rather than replace, decentralized multi-agent coordination. At the high level, MARL learns strategies that restrict the alternatives considered during coordination and guide agents in balancing system-wide and individual objectives. At the low level, agents perform efficient decentralized coordination under this strategic guidance. This separation reduces the learning space and allows short-term coordination trade-offs to be evaluated according to their long-term effects. Experiments on a synthetic benchmark show that HRCL converges substantially faster than standalone MARL and reduces system-wide and individual costs by 35.53% and 27.05%, respectively. Evaluations on energy self-management and drone swarm sensing further show improved resource allocation, power-peak regulation, and sensing efficiency. These results show that learning strategic guidance for an existing coordination process can retain scalable decentralized coordination without letting short-term decisions compromise future resource allocation.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

RideSkill: A Hierarchical Algorithm for Generalized Ride Sharing with LLM-Driven Automatic Evolution

Ride-sharing, which allows multiple passengers with different origin-destination (OD) pairs to share a single vehicle, is a challenging operational problem, as it requires orders with different OD pairs to be efficiently bundled and assigned to vehicles under uncertain and varying scenarios. Although multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) solutions have achieved promising performance, they suffer from limited generalization (adapting to different environmental scenarios), low transferability (adapting to different platform objectives), and training difficulties in large-scale systems, such as the curse of dimensionality. Recently, motivated by the scaling of large language models (LLMs), several works have incorporated LLMs into ride-hailing systems, either by employing LLMs directly as decision-making agents or using them for automatic algorithm design. However, none of these approaches support vehicle sharing, which complicates the problem by expanding both the state and action spaces exponentially. Moreover, most of them require frequent LLM calls at inference time, making them infeasible for real-time deployment. To address these issues, we propose RideSkill, a hierarchical method for ride-sharing that leverages LLM-assisted automatic algorithmic design. RideSkill consists of a combiner that assigns appropriate skills to each vehicle from a learned skill repository, enabling adaptive dispatch under varying scenarios and objectives, and a repositioner that sequentially relocates idle vehicles to emerging regions, avoiding conflicts among vehicles. Crucially, the skill repository, combiner, and repositioner are all trained by an LLM-based automatic evolutionary method, eliminating the need for LLM calls during deployment and thus ensuring high real-time performance.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

Anchor and Perturb: Lazy Agent Remediation by Exploration Injection

Anchor and Perturb (AnP) is a lightweight framework that resolves multi-agent coordination failures by decoupling exploratory variance injection from recurrent manifold stability. Existing remediation strategies predominantly alter mixing network architectures or enforce simultaneous exploration across the collective, which inevitably precipitates severe temporal-difference penalties in non-monotonic reward spaces. Specifically, AnP isolates underperforming lazy agents and injects an asymmetric exploratory pulse into targeted coordinates whilst anchoring converged teammates to nominal greedy exploitation. Empirical telemetry benchmarks demonstrate that AnP successfully rescues collapsed joint policies (recovering from a 5% evaluation win rate nadir back to 85%) and facilitates escape from suboptimal coordination plateaus, sustaining peak win rates of 90% without requiring structural network modifications.

cs.MA↗