Discrete Diffusion for Complex and Congested Multi-Agent Path Finding with Sparse Social Attention
Authors: Yuanzhe Wang, Tian Zhi, Zihang Wei, Hongguang Wang, Jiaming Guo, Yang Zhao, Zisheng Liu, Shiyu Quan, +3 more
Organizations: State Key Lab of Processors, Institute of Computing Technology, CAS · School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences, CAS · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Institute of Microelectronics, CAS
Abstract
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a coordination problem that requires computing globally consistent, collision-free trajectories from individual start positions to assigned goal positions under combinatorial planning complexity. In dense environments, suboptimal initial plans induce compound conflicts that hinder feasible repair. For repair-based solvers like LNS2, initial plan quality critically affects downstream repair, yet this factor remains underexplored. We propose DiffLNS, a hybrid framework that integrates a discrete denoising diffusion probabilistic model (D3PM) with LNS2. The D3PM serves as an initializer with sparse social attention that learns a spatiotemporal prior over coordinated multi-agent action trajectories from expert demonstrations and samples multiple joint plans. Operating directly on the categorical action space, our discrete diffusion preserves the MAPF action structure and samples from a multimodal joint-plan distribution to produce diverse drafts well suited for neighborhood repair. These drafts act as warm starts for downstream repair, which completes unfinished trajectories and resolves remaining conflicts under hard MAPF constraints. Experimental results show that despite being trained only on instances with at most 96 agents, the initializer generalizes to scenarios with up to 312 agents at inference time. Across 20 complex and congested settings, DiffLNS achieves an average success rate of 95.8%, outperforming the strongest tested baseline by 9.6 percentage points and matching or exceeding all baselines in all 20 settings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to leverage discrete diffusion for warm-starting an LNS-based MAPF solver.
Multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) is a widely used abstraction for multi-robot trajectory planning problems, where multiple homogeneous agents move simultaneously within a shared environment. Although solving MAPF optimally is NP-hard, scalable and efficient solvers are critical for real-world applications such as logistics and search-and-rescue. To this end, the research community has proposed various decentralized suboptimal MAPF solvers that leverage machine learning. Such methods frame MAPF (from a single agent perspective) as a Dec-POMDP where at each time step an agent has to decide an action based on the local observation and typically solve the problem via reinforcement learning or imitation learning. We follow the same approach but additionally introduce a learnable communication module tailored to enhance cooperation between agents via efficient feature sharing. We present the Local Communication for Multi-agent Pathfinding (LC-MAPF), a generalizable pre-trained model that applies multi-round communication between neighboring agents to exchange information and improve their coordination. Our experiments show that the introduced method outperforms the existing learning-based MAPF solvers, including IL and RL-based approaches, across diverse metrics in a diverse range of (unseen) test scenarios. Remarkably, the introduced communication mechanism does not compromise LC-MAPF's scalability, a common bottleneck for communication-based MAPF solvers.
Valeriy Vyaltsev, Alsu Sagirova, Anton Andreychuk +5
We propose STEAM (Spatial, Temporal, and Emergent congestion Awareness for MAPF), a training-free test-time enhancement framework for learning-based decentralized Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) in discrete environments. Given a pretrained decentralized policy, STEAM requires no retraining, architectural modification, or replacement by a centralized planner. Instead, it injects lightweight congestion-aware guidance into the original policy execution. STEAM first rolls out the shortest paths induced by the current cost-to-go maps to identify potential future congestion hotspots. Spatially avoidable congestion is mitigated by updating agent-specific cost-to-go information, while spatially unavoidable bottlenecks are handled through temporal logit correction. In addition, emergent local congestion is reduced by a density-aware logit correction based on neighboring agents' corrected cost-to-go maps. Extensive experiments on representative learning-based decentralized MAPF algorithms show that STEAM consistently improves success rate, makespan, and solution cost, with success-rate gains of up to 60% and only minor computational overhead. The implementation is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/STEAM-MAPF-7A62.
Modern Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) algorithms must plan for hundreds to thousands of agents in congested environments within a second, requiring highly efficient algorithms. Priority Inheritance with Backtracking (PIBT) is a popular algorithm capable of effectively planning in such situations. However, PIBT, and its variants like Enhanced PIBT (EPIBT), is constrained by its rule-based planning procedure and lacks generality because it restricts its search to paths that collide with at most one other agent. In this paper, we describe a new perspective on solving MAPF by planning over agent dependencies. Taking inspiration from PIBT's priority inheritance logic, we define the concept of agent dependencies and propose Multi-Dependency PIBT (MD-PIBT) that searches over agent dependencies. MD-PIBT is a general framework where specific parameterizations can reproduce PIBT and EPIBT. At the same time, alternative configurations generalize PIBT and EPIBT to multi-step planning capable of reasoning paths that collide with more than one other agent. Our experiments demonstrate that MD-PIBT effectively plans for as many as 10,000 homogeneous agents under various kinodynamic constraints, including pebble motion, rotation motion, and differential drive robots with speed and acceleration limits. We perform thorough evaluations on different variants of MAPF and find that MD-PIBT is particularly effective in MAPF with large agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/lunjohnzhang/MD-PIBT.