communication architecture
Learning Attentional Communication for Multi-Agent Cooperation
Communication could potentially be an effective way for multi-agent cooperation. However, information sharing among all agents or in predefined communication architectures that existing methods adopt can be problematic. When there is a large number of agents, agents cannot differentiate valuable information that helps cooperative decision making from globally shared information. Therefore, communication barely helps, and could even impair the learning of multi-agent cooperation. Predefined communication architectures, on the other hand, restrict communication among agents and thus restrain potential cooperation. To tackle these difficulties, in this paper, we propose an attentional communication model that learns when communication is needed and how to integrate shared information for cooperative decision making. Our model leads to efficient and effective communication for large-scale multi-agent cooperation. Empirically, we show the strength of our model in a variety of cooperative scenarios, where agents are able to develop more coordinated and sophisticated strategies than existing methods.
Learning Attentional Communication for Multi-Agent Cooperation
Communication could potentially be an effective way for multi-agent cooperation. However, information sharing among all agents or in predefined communication architectures that existing methods adopt can be problematic. When there is a large number of agents, agents cannot differentiate valuable information that helps cooperative decision making from globally shared information. Therefore, communication barely helps, and could even impair the learning of multi-agent cooperation. Predefined communication architectures, on the other hand, restrict communication among agents and thus restrain potential cooperation. To tackle these difficulties, in this paper, we propose an attentional communication model that learns when communication is needed and how to integrate shared information for cooperative decision making. Our model leads to efficient and effective communication for large-scale multi-agent cooperation. Empirically, we show the strength of our model in a variety of cooperative scenarios, where agents are able to develop more coordinated and sophisticated strategies than existing methods.
Attack the Messages, Not the Agents: A Multi-round Adaptive Stealthy Tampering Framework for LLM-MAS
Yan, Bingyu, Zhou, Ziyi, Zhang, Xiaoming, Li, Chaozhuo, Zeng, Ruilin, Qi, Yirui, Wang, Tianbo, Zhang, Litian
Large language model-based multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS) effectively accomplish complex and dynamic tasks through inter-agent communication, but this reliance introduces substantial safety vulnerabilities. Existing attack methods targeting LLM-MAS either compromise agent internals or rely on direct and overt persuasion, which limit their effectiveness, adaptability, and stealthiness. In this paper, we propose MAST, a Multi-round Adaptive Stealthy Tampering framework designed to exploit communication vulnerabilities within the system. MAST integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search with Direct Preference Optimization to train an attack policy model that adaptively generates effective multi-round tampering strategies. Furthermore, to preserve stealthiness, we impose dual semantic and embedding similarity constraints during the tampering process. Comprehensive experiments across diverse tasks, communication architectures, and LLMs demonstrate that MAST consistently achieves high attack success rates while significantly enhancing stealthiness compared to baselines.
Beyond Self-Talk: A Communication-Centric Survey of LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems
Yan, Bingyu, Zhang, Xiaoming, Zhang, Litian, Zhang, Lian, Zhou, Ziyi, Miao, Dezhuang, Li, Chaozhuo
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning, planning, and decision-making. Building upon these strengths, researchers have begun incorporating LLMs into multi-agent systems (MAS), where agents collaborate or compete through natural language interactions to tackle tasks beyond the scope of single-agent setups. In this survey, we present a communication-centric perspective on LLM-based multi-agent systems, examining key system-level features such as architecture design and communication goals, as well as internal mechanisms like communication strategies, paradigms, objects and content. We illustrate how these communication elements interplay to enable collective intelligence and flexible collaboration. Furthermore, we discuss prominent challenges, including scalability, security, and multimodal integration, and propose directions for future work to advance research in this emerging domain. Ultimately, this survey serves as a catalyst for further innovation, fostering more robust, scalable, and intelligent multi-agent systems across diverse application domains.
UNet: A Generic and Reliable Multi-UAV Communication and Networking Architecture for Heterogeneous Applications
Roy, Sanku Kumar, Samshad, Mohamed, Rajawat, Ketan
The rapid growth of UAV applications necessitates a robust communication and networking architecture capable of addressing the diverse requirements of various applications concurrently, rather than relying on application-specific solutions. This paper proposes a generic and reliable multi-UAV communication and networking architecture designed to support the varying demands of heterogeneous applications, including short-range and long-range communication, star and mesh topologies, different data rates, and multiple wireless standards. Our architecture accommodates both adhoc and infrastructure networks, ensuring seamless connectivity throughout the network. Additionally, we present the design of a multi-protocol UAV gateway that enables interoperability among various communication protocols. Furthermore, we introduce a data processing and service layer framework with a graphical user interface of a ground control station that facilitates remote control and monitoring from any location at any time. We practically implemented the proposed architecture and evaluated its performance using different metrics, demonstrating its effectiveness.
Communication Learning in Multi-Agent Systems from Graph Modeling Perspective
Hu, Shengchao, Shen, Li, Zhang, Ya, Tao, Dacheng
In numerous artificial intelligence applications, the collaborative efforts of multiple intelligent agents are imperative for the successful attainment of target objectives. To enhance coordination among these agents, a distributed communication framework is often employed. However, indiscriminate information sharing among all agents can be resource-intensive, and the adoption of manually pre-defined communication architectures imposes constraints on inter-agent communication, thus limiting the potential for effective collaboration. Moreover, the communication framework often remains static during inference, which may result in sustained high resource consumption, as in most cases, only key decisions necessitate information sharing among agents. In this study, we introduce a novel approach wherein we conceptualize the communication architecture among agents as a learnable graph. We formulate this problem as the task of determining the communication graph while enabling the architecture parameters to update normally, thus necessitating a bi-level optimization process. Utilizing continuous relaxation of the graph representation and incorporating attention units, our proposed approach, CommFormer, efficiently optimizes the communication graph and concurrently refines architectural parameters through gradient descent in an end-to-end manner. Additionally, we introduce a temporal gating mechanism for each agent, enabling dynamic decisions on whether to receive shared information at a given time, based on current observations, thus improving decision-making efficiency. Extensive experiments on a variety of cooperative tasks substantiate the robustness of our model across diverse cooperative scenarios, where agents are able to develop more coordinated and sophisticated strategies regardless of changes in the number of agents.
Learning Multi-Agent Communication from Graph Modeling Perspective
Hu, Shengchao, Shen, Li, Zhang, Ya, Tao, Dacheng
In numerous artificial intelligence applications, the collaborative efforts of multiple intelligent agents are imperative for the successful attainment of target objectives. To enhance coordination among these agents, a distributed communication framework is often employed. However, information sharing among all agents proves to be resource-intensive, while the adoption of a manually pre-defined communication architecture imposes limitations on inter-agent communication, thereby constraining the potential for collaborative efforts. In this study, we introduce a novel approach wherein we conceptualize the communication architecture among agents as a learnable graph. We formulate this problem as the task of determining the communication graph while enabling the architecture parameters to update normally, thus necessitating a bi-level optimization process. Utilizing continuous relaxation of the graph representation and incorporating attention units, our proposed approach, CommFormer, efficiently optimizes the communication graph and concurrently refines architectural parameters through gradient descent in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on a variety of cooperative tasks substantiate the robustness of our model across diverse cooperative scenarios, where agents are able to develop more coordinated and sophisticated strategies regardless of changes in the number of agents.
DRL-Based RAT Selection in a Hybrid Vehicular Communication Network
Yacheur, Badreddine Yacine, Ahmed, Toufik, Mosbah, Mohamed
Cooperative intelligent transport systems rely on a set of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) applications to enhance road safety. Emerging new V2X applications like Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADASs) and Connected Autonomous Driving (CAD) applications depend on a significant amount of shared data and require high reliability, low end-to-end (E2E) latency, and high throughput. However, present V2X communication technologies such as ITS-G5 and C-V2X (Cellular V2X) cannot satisfy these requirements alone. In this paper, we propose an intelligent, scalable hybrid vehicular communication architecture that leverages the performance of multiple Radio Access Technologies (RATs) to meet the needs of these applications. Then, we propose a communication mode selection algorithm based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to maximize the network's reliability while limiting resource consumption. Finally, we assess our work using the platooning scenario that requires high reliability. Numerical results reveal that the hybrid vehicular communication architecture has the potential to enhance the packet reception rate (PRR) by up to 30% compared to both the static RAT selection strategy and the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) selection algorithm. Additionally, it improves the efficiency of the redundant communication mode by 20% regarding resource consumption
Rethinking Internet Communication Through LLMs: How Close Are We?
Taki, Sifat Ut, Mastorakis, Spyridon
In this paper, we rethink the way that communication among users over the Internet, one of the fundamental outcomes of the Internet evolution, takes place. Instead of users communicating directly over the Internet, we explore an architecture that enables users to communicate with (query) Large Language Models (LLMs) that capture the cognition of users on the other end of the communication channel. We present an architecture to achieve such LLM-based communication and we perform a reality check to assess how close we are today to realizing such a communication architecture from a technical point of view. Finally, we discuss several research challenges and identify interesting directions for future research.
fpgaDDS: An Intra-FPGA Data Distribution Service for ROS 2 Robotics Applications
Lienen, Christian, Middeke, Sorel Horst, Platzner, Marco
Modern computing platforms for robotics applications comprise a set of heterogeneous elements, e.g., multi-core CPUs, embedded GPUs, and FPGAs. FPGAs are reprogrammable hardware devices that allow for fast and energy-efficient computation of many relevant tasks in robotics. ROS is the de-facto programming standard for robotics and decomposes an application into a set of communicating nodes. ReconROS is a previous approach that can map complete ROS nodes into hardware for acceleration. Since ReconROS relies on standard ROS communication layers, exchanging data between hardware-mapped nodes can lead to a performance bottleneck. This paper presents fpgaDDS, a lean data distribution service for hardware-mapped ROS 2 nodes. fpgaDDS relies on a customized and statically generated streaming-based communication architecture. We detail this communication architecture with its components and outline its benefits. We evaluate fpgaDDS on a test example and a larger autonomous vehicle case study. Compared to a ROS 2 application in software, we achieve speedups of up to 13.34 and reduce jitter by two orders of magnitude.