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Neurosymbolic Transformers for Multi-Agent Communication

Multiagent Systems 2021-11-03 v1 Machine Learning Programming Languages

Abstract

We study the problem of inferring communication structures that can solve cooperative multi-agent planning problems while minimizing the amount of communication. We quantify the amount of communication as the maximum degree of the communication graph; this metric captures settings where agents have limited bandwidth. Minimizing communication is challenging due to the combinatorial nature of both the decision space and the objective; for instance, we cannot solve this problem by training neural networks using gradient descent. We propose a novel algorithm that synthesizes a control policy that combines a programmatic communication policy used to generate the communication graph with a transformer policy network used to choose actions. Our algorithm first trains the transformer policy, which implicitly generates a "soft" communication graph; then, it synthesizes a programmatic communication policy that "hardens" this graph, forming a neurosymbolic transformer. Our experiments demonstrate how our approach can synthesize policies that generate low-degree communication graphs while maintaining near-optimal performance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2101.03238,
  title  = {Neurosymbolic Transformers for Multi-Agent Communication},
  author = {Jeevana Priya Inala and Yichen Yang and James Paulos and Yewen Pu and Osbert Bastani and Vijay Kumar and Martin Rinard and Armando Solar-Lezama},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.03238},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T21:56:08.664Z