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Collaborative State Fusion in Partially Known Multi-agent Environments

Zhou, Tianlong, Shang, Jun, Rao, Weixiong

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, we study the collaborative state fusion problem in a multi-agent environment, where mobile agents collaborate to track movable targets. Due to the limited sensing range and potential errors of on-board sensors, it is necessary to aggregate individual observations to provide target state fusion for better target state estimation. Existing schemes do not perform well due to (1) impractical assumption of the fully known prior target state-space model and (2) observation outliers from individual sensors. To address the issues, we propose a two-stage collaborative fusion framework, namely \underline{L}earnable Weighted R\underline{o}bust \underline{F}usion (\textsf{LoF}). \textsf{LoF} combines a local state estimator (e.g., Kalman Filter) with a learnable weight generator to address the mismatch between the prior state-space model and underlying patterns of moving targets. Moreover, given observation outliers, we develop a time-series soft medoid(TSM) scheme to perform robust fusion. We evaluate \textsf{LoF} in a collaborative detection simulation environment with promising results. In an example setting with 4 agents and 2 targets, \textsf{LoF} leads to a 9.1\% higher fusion gain compared to the state-of-the-art.


Reliable Graph Neural Networks via Robust Aggregation

Geisler, Simon, Zügner, Daniel, Günnemann, Stephan

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Perturbations targeting the graph structure have proven to be extremely effective in reducing the performance of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and traditional defenses such as adversarial training do not seem to be able to improve robustness. This work is motivated by the observation that adversarially injected edges effectively can be viewed as additional samples to a node's neighborhood aggregation function, which results in distorted aggregations accumulating over the layers. Conventional GNN aggregation functions, such as a sum or mean, can be distorted arbitrarily by a single outlier. We propose a robust aggregation function motivated by the field of robust statistics. Our approach exhibits the largest possible breakdown point of 0.5, which means that the bias of the aggregation is bounded as long as the fraction of adversarial edges of a node is less than 50\%. Our novel aggregation function, Soft Medoid, is a fully differentiable generalization of the Medoid and therefore lends itself well for end-to-end deep learning. Equipping a GNN with our aggregation improves the robustness with respect to structure perturbations on Cora ML by a factor of 3 (and 5.5 on Citeseer) and by a factor of 8 for low-degree nodes.