RAILGUN: A Unified Convolutional Policy for Multi-Agent Path Finding Across Different Environments and Tasks (Extended Abstract)

Authors

  • Yimin Tang University of Southern California
  • Xiao Xiong Independent Researcher
  • Jingyi Xi Independent Researcher
  • Jiaoyang Li Carnegie Mellon University
  • Erdem Bıyık University of Southern California
  • Sven Koenig University of California, Irvine

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v18i1.36015

Abstract

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF), which focuses on finding collision-free paths for multiple robots, is crucial for applications ranging from aerial swarms to warehouse automation. Solving MAPF is NP-hard so learning-based approaches for MAPF have gained attention, particularly those leveraging deep neural networks. Nonetheless, despite the community's continued efforts, all learning-based MAPF planners still rely on decentralized planning due to variability in the number of agents and map sizes. We have developed the first centralized learning-based policy for MAPF problem called RAILGUN. RAILGUN is not an agent-based policy but a map-based policy. By leveraging a CNN-based architecture, RAILGUN can generalize across different maps and handle any number of agents. We collect trajectories from rule-based methods to train our model in a supervised way. In experiments, RAILGUN outperforms most baseline methods and demonstrates great zero-shot generalization capabilities on various tasks, maps and agent numbers that were not seen in the training dataset.

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Published

2025-07-20

How to Cite

Tang, Y., Xiong, X., Xi, J., Li, J., Bıyık, E., & Koenig, S. (2025). RAILGUN: A Unified Convolutional Policy for Multi-Agent Path Finding Across Different Environments and Tasks (Extended Abstract). Proceedings of the International Symposium on Combinatorial Search, 18(1), 273–274. https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v18i1.36015