Robohub.org
 

Amanda Prorok’s talk – Learning to Communicate in Multi-Agent Systems (with video)


by
17 April 2021



share this:

In this technical talk, Amanda Prorok, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of Pembroke College, discusses her team’s latest research on what, how and when information needs to be shared among agents that aim to solve cooperative tasks.

Abstract

Effective communication is key to successful multi-agent coordination. Yet it is far from obvious what, how and when information needs to be shared among agents that aim to solve cooperative tasks. In this talk, I discuss our recent work on using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to solve multi-agent coordination problems. In my first case-study, I show how we use GNNs to find a decentralized solution to the multi-agent path finding problem, which is known to be NP-hard. I demonstrate how our policy is able to achieve near-optimal performance, at a fraction of the real-time computational cost. Secondly, I show how GNN-based reinforcement learning can be leveraged to learn inter-agent communication policies. In this case-study, I demonstrate how non-shared optimization objectives can lead to adversarial communication strategies. Finally, I address the challenge of learning robust communication policies, enabling a multi-agent system to maintain high performance in the presence of anonymous non-cooperative agents that communicate faulty, misleading or manipulative information.

Biography

Amanda Prorok is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, at Cambridge University, UK, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. Her mission is to find new ways of coordinating artificially intelligent agents (e.g., robots, vehicles, machines) to achieve common goals in shared physical and virtual spaces. Amanda Prorok has been honored by an ERC Starting Grant, an Amazon Research Award, an EPSRC New Investigator Award, an Isaac Newton Trust Early Career Award, and the Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) Award for the best thesis at EPFL in Computer Science. Further awards include Best Paper at DARS 2018, Finalist for Best Multi-Robot Systems Paper at ICRA 2017, Best Paper at BICT 2015, and MIT Rising Stars 2015. She serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (R-AL), and Associate Editor for Autonomous Robots (AURO). Prior to joining Cambridge, Amanda Prorok was a postdoctoral researcher at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She completed her PhD at EPFL, Switzerland.

Featuring Guest Panelist(s): Stephanie Gil, Joey Durham


The next technical talk will be delivered by Koushil Sreenath from UC Berkeley, and it will take place on April 23 at 3pm EDT. Keep up to date on this website.



tags:


Robotics Today is a virtual robotics seminar series. The goal of the series is to bring the robotics community together during these challenging times (COVID-19).
Robotics Today is a virtual robotics seminar series. The goal of the series is to bring the robotics community together during these challenging times (COVID-19).





Related posts :



Robots to the rescue: miniature robots offer new hope for search and rescue operations

  09 Sep 2025
Small two-wheeled robots, equipped with high-tech sensors, will help to find survivors faster in the aftermath of disasters.

#IJCAI2025 distinguished paper: Combining MORL with restraining bolts to learn normative behaviour

and   04 Sep 2025
The authors introduce a framework for guiding reinforcement learning agents to comply with social, legal, and ethical norms.

Researchers are teaching robots to walk on Mars from the sand of New Mexico

  02 Sep 2025
Researchers are closer to equipping a dog-like robot to conduct science on the surface of Mars

Engineering fantasy into reality

  26 Aug 2025
PhD student Erik Ballesteros is building “Doc Ock” arms for future astronauts.

RoboCup@Work League: Interview with Christoph Steup

and   22 Aug 2025
Find out more about the RoboCup League focussed on industrial production systems.

Interview with Haimin Hu: Game-theoretic integration of safety, interaction and learning for human-centered autonomy

and   21 Aug 2025
Hear from Haimin in the latest in our series featuring the 2025 AAAI / ACM SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants.

AIhub coffee corner: Agentic AI

  15 Aug 2025
The AIhub coffee corner captures the musings of AI experts over a short conversation.

Interview with Kate Candon: Leveraging explicit and implicit feedback in human-robot interactions

and   25 Jul 2025
Hear from PhD student Kate about her work on human-robot interactions.



 

Robohub is supported by:




Would you like to learn how to tell impactful stories about your robot or AI system?


scicomm
training the next generation of science communicators in robotics & AI


 












©2025.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence