English

Alleviating Community Fear in Disasters via Multi-Agent Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2026-04-13 v1 Systems and Control Systems and Control

Abstract

During disasters, cascading failures across power grids, communication networks, and social behavior amplify community fear and undermine cooperation. Existing cyber-physical-social (CPS) models simulate these coupled dynamics but lack mechanisms for active intervention. We extend the CPS resilience model of Valinejad and Mili (2023) with control channels for three agencies, communication, power, and emergency management, and formulate the resulting system as a three-player non-zero-sum differential game solved via online actor-critic reinforcement learning. Simulations based on Hurricane Harvey data show 70% mean fear reduction with improved infrastructure recovery; cross-validation in the case of Hurricane Irma (without refitting) achieves 50% fear reduction, confirming generalizability.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.08802,
  title  = {Alleviating Community Fear in Disasters via Multi-Agent Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Yashodhan D. Hakke and Almuatazbellah M. Boker and Lamine Mili and Michael von Spakovsky and Hoda Eldardiry},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.08802},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

10 pages, 6 figures