Verbal communication plays a crucial role in human cooperation, particularly when the partners only have incomplete information about the task, environment, and each other's mental state. In this paper, we propose a novel cooperative communication framework, Goal-Oriented Mental Alignment (GOMA). GOMA formulates verbal communication as a planning problem that minimizes the misalignment between the parts of agents' mental states that are relevant to the goals. This approach enables an embodied assistant to reason about when and how to proactively initialize communication with humans verbally using natural language to help achieve better cooperation. We evaluate our approach against strong baselines in two challenging environments, Overcooked (a multiplayer game) and VirtualHome (a household simulator). Our experimental results demonstrate that large language models struggle with generating meaningful communication that is grounded in the social and physical context. In contrast, our approach can successfully generate concise verbal communication for the embodied assistant to effectively boost the performance of the cooperation as well as human users' perception of the assistant.

Zero-shot generalization (ZSG) to unseen dynamics is a major challenge for creating generally capable embodied agents. To address the broader challenge, we start with the simpler setting of contextual reinforcement learning (cRL), assuming observability of the context values that parameterize the variation in the system's dynamics, such as the mass or dimensions of a robot, without making further simplifying assumptions about the observability of the Markovian state. Toward the goal of ZSG to unseen variation in context, we propose the contextual recurrent state-space model (cRSSM), which introduces changes to the world model of the Dreamer (v3) (Hafner et al., 2023). This allows the world model to incorporate context for inferring latent Markovian states from the observations and modeling the latent dynamics. Our experiments show that such systematic incorporation of the context improves the ZSG of the policies trained on the ``dreams'' of the world model. We further find qualitatively that our approach allows Dreamer to disentangle the latent state from context, allowing it to extrapolate its dreams to the many worlds of unseen contexts. The code for all our experiments is available at \url{https://github.com/sai-prasanna/dreaming_of_many_worlds}.

This work presents a sustainable multi-agent deep reinforcement learning framework capable of selectively scaling parallelized training workloads on-demand, and transferring the trained policies from simulation to reality using minimal hardware resources. We introduce AutoDRIVE Ecosystem as an enabling digital twin framework to train, deploy, and transfer cooperative as well as competitive multi-agent reinforcement learning policies from simulation to reality. Particularly, we first investigate an intersection traversal problem of 4 cooperative vehicles (Nigel) that share limited state information in single as well as multi-agent learning settings using a common policy approach. We then investigate an adversarial autonomous racing problem of 2 vehicles (F1TENTH) using an individual policy approach. In either set of experiments, a decentralized learning architecture was adopted, which allowed robust training and testing of the policies in stochastic environments. The agents were provided with realistically sparse observation spaces, and were restricted to sample control actions that implicitly satisfied the imposed kinodynamic and safety constraints. The experimental results for both problem statements are reported in terms of quantitative metrics and qualitative remarks for training as well as deployment phases. We also discuss agent and environment parallelization techniques adopted to efficiently accelerate MARL training, while analyzing their computational performance. Finally, we demonstrate a resource-aware transition of the trained policies from simulation to reality using the proposed digital twin framework.

Model-based controllers using a linearized model around the system's equilibrium point is a common approach in the control of a wheeled humanoid due to their less computational load and ease of stability analysis. However, controlling a wheeled humanoid robot while it lifts an unknown object presents significant challenges, primarily due to the lack of knowledge in object dynamics. This paper presents a framework designed for predicting the new equilibrium point explicitly to control a wheeled-legged robot with unknown dynamics. We estimated the total mass and center of mass of the system from its response to initially unknown dynamics, then calculated the new equilibrium point accordingly. To avoid using additional sensors (e.g., force torque sensor) and reduce the effort of obtaining expensive real data, a data-driven approach is utilized with a novel real-to-sim adaptation. A more accurate nonlinear dynamics model, offering a closer representation of real-world physics, is injected into a rigid-body simulation for real-to-sim adaptation. The nonlinear dynamics model parameters were optimized using Particle Swarm Optimization. The efficacy of this framework was validated on a physical wheeled inverted pendulum, a simplified model of a wheeled-legged robot. The experimental results indicate that employing a more precise analytical model with optimized parameters significantly reduces the gap between simulation and reality, thus improving the efficiency of a model-based controller in controlling a wheeled robot with unknown dynamics.

We present a new algorithm for exactly solving decision-making problems represented as an influence diagram. We do not require the usual assumptions of no forgetting and regularity, which allows us to solve problems with limited information.

Factored Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (Dec-POMDPs) form a powerful framework for multiagent planning under uncertainty, but optimal solutions require a rigid history-based policy representation. In this paper we allow inter-agent communication which turns the problem in a centralized Multiagent POMDP (MPOMDP). We map belief distributions over state factors to an agent's local actions by exploiting structure in the joint MPOMDP policy. The key point is that when sparse dependencies between the agents' decisions exist, often the belief over its local state factors is sufficient for an agent to unequivocally identify the optimal action, and communication can be avoided. We formalize these notions by casting the problem into convex optimization form, and present experimental results illustrating the savings in communication that we can obtain.

Skill discovery algorithms in reinforcement learning typically identify single states or regions in state space that correspond to task-specific subgoals. However, such methods do not directly address the question of how many distinct skills are appropriate for solving the tasks that the agent faces. This can be highly inefficient when many identified subgoals correspond to the same underlying skill, but are all used individually as skill goals. Furthermore, skills created in this manner are often only transferable to tasks that share identical state spaces, since corresponding subgoals across tasks are not merged into a single skill goal. We show that these problems can be overcome by clustering subgoal data defined in an agent-space and using the resulting clusters as templates for skill termination conditions. Clustering via a Dirichlet process mixture model is used to discover a minimal, sufficient collection of portable skills.

Multi-agent perception (MAP) allows autonomous systems to understand complex environments by interpreting data from multiple sources. This paper investigates intermediate collaboration for MAP with a specific focus on exploring "good" properties of collaborative view (i.e., post-collaboration feature) and its underlying relationship to individual views (i.e., pre-collaboration features), which were treated as an opaque procedure by most existing works. We propose a novel framework named CMiMC (Contrastive Mutual Information Maximization for Collaborative Perception) for intermediate collaboration. The core philosophy of CMiMC is to preserve discriminative information of individual views in the collaborative view by maximizing mutual information between pre- and post-collaboration features while enhancing the efficacy of collaborative views by minimizing the loss function of downstream tasks. In particular, we define multi-view mutual information (MVMI) for intermediate collaboration that evaluates correlations between collaborative views and individual views on both global and local scales. We establish CMiMNet based on multi-view contrastive learning to realize estimation and maximization of MVMI, which assists the training of a collaboration encoder for voxel-level feature fusion. We evaluate CMiMC on V2X-Sim 1.0, and it improves the SOTA average precision by 3.08% and 4.44% at 0.5 and 0.7 IoU (Intersection-over-Union) thresholds, respectively. In addition, CMiMC can reduce communication volume to 1/32 while achieving performance comparable to SOTA. Code and Appendix are released at https://github.com/77SWF/CMiMC.

Distributed nonconvex optimization underpins key functionalities of numerous distributed systems, ranging from power systems, smart buildings, cooperative robots, vehicle networks to sensor networks. Recently, it has also merged as a promising solution to handle the enormous growth in data and model sizes in deep learning. A fundamental problem in distributed nonconvex optimization is avoiding convergence to saddle points, which significantly degrade optimization accuracy. We discover that the process of quantization, which is necessary for all digital communications, can be exploited to enable saddle-point avoidance. More specifically, we propose a stochastic quantization scheme and prove that it can effectively escape saddle points and ensure convergence to a second-order stationary point in distributed nonconvex optimization. With an easily adjustable quantization granularity, the approach allows a user to control the number of bits sent per iteration and, hence, to aggressively reduce the communication overhead. Numerical experimental results using distributed optimization and learning problems on benchmark datasets confirm the effectiveness of the approach.

Navigation in cluttered underwater environments is challenging, especially when there are constraints on communication and self-localisation. Part of the fully distributed underwater navigation problem has been resolved by introducing multi-agent robot teams, however when the environment becomes cluttered, the problem remains unresolved. In this paper, we first studied the connection between everyday activity of dog walking and the cooperative underwater obstacle avoidance problem. Inspired by this analogy, we propose a novel dog walking paradigm and implement it in a multi-agent underwater system. Simulations were conducted across various scenarios, with performance benchmarked against traditional methods utilising Image-Based Visual Servoing in a multi-agent setup. Results indicate that our dog walking-inspired paradigm significantly enhances cooperative behavior among agents and outperforms the existing approach in navigating through obstacles.