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Semantic Perception Swarm Policy with Deep Reinforcement Learning

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Neural Information Processing (ICONIP 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 13110))

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Abstract

Swarm systems with simple, homogeneous and autonomous individuals can efficiently accomplish specified complex tasks. Recent works have shown the power of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods to learn cooperative policies for swarm systems. However, most of them show poor adaptability when applied to new environments or tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic perception swarm policy with DRL for distributed swarm systems. This policy implements innovative semantic perception, which enables agents to understand their observation information, yielding semantic information, to promote agents’ adaptability. In particular, semantic disentangled representation with posterior distribution and semantic mixture representation with network mapping are realized to represent semantic information of agents’ observations. Moreover, in the semantic representation, heterogeneous graph attention network is adopted to effectively model individual-level and group-level relational information. The distributed and transferable swarm policy can perceive the information of uncertain number of agents in swarm environments. Various simulations and real-world experiments on several challenging tasks, i.e., sheep food collection and wolves predation, demonstrate the superior effectiveness and adaptability performance of our method compared with existing methods.

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2018AAA0102402, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 62073323, the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences under Grant No. XDA27030403, and the External Cooperation Key Project of Chinese Academy Sciences No. 173211KYSB20200002.

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Correspondence to Zhen Liu .

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Zhang, T., Liu, Z., Pu, Z., Yi, J. (2021). Semantic Perception Swarm Policy with Deep Reinforcement Learning. In: Mantoro, T., Lee, M., Ayu, M.A., Wong, K.W., Hidayanto, A.N. (eds) Neural Information Processing. ICONIP 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13110. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92238-2_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92238-2_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-92237-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-92238-2

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