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Active Asymmetric Multi-Agent Multimodal Learning under Uncertainty

Machine Learning 2026-02-05 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Multi-agent systems are increasingly equipped with heterogeneous multimodal sensors, enabling richer perception but introducing modality-specific and agent-dependent uncertainty. Existing multi-agent collaboration frameworks typically reason at the agent level, assume homogeneous sensing, and handle uncertainty implicitly, limiting robustness under sensor corruption. We propose Active Asymmetric Multi-Agent Multimodal Learning under Uncertainty (A2MAML), a principled approach for uncertainty-aware, modality-level collaboration. A2MAML models each modality-specific feature as a stochastic estimate with uncertainty prediction, actively selects reliable agent-modality pairs, and aggregates information via Bayesian inverse-variance weighting. This formulation enables fine-grained, modality-level fusion, supports asymmetric modality availability, and provides a principled mechanism to suppress corrupted or noisy modalities. Extensive experiments on connected autonomous driving scenarios for collaborative accident detection demonstrate that A2MAML consistently outperforms both single-agent and collaborative baselines, achieving up to 18.7% higher accident detection rate.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.04763,
  title  = {Active Asymmetric Multi-Agent Multimodal Learning under Uncertainty},
  author = {Rui Liu and Pratap Tokekar and Ming Lin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.04763},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:36:17.557Z