H.3. Artificial Intelligence
Seyedeh Hamideh Erfani; Mohammad Javad Fadaeieslam; Reza Mortazavi; Mohammad Rahmanimanesh
Abstract
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) frequently exhibit limited generalization performance when applied to out-of-distribution (OOD) data, primarily due to spurious correlations acquired during the training process. This paper introduces a hybrid methodology that explicitly reduces statistical correlations within ...
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Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) frequently exhibit limited generalization performance when applied to out-of-distribution (OOD) data, primarily due to spurious correlations acquired during the training process. This paper introduces a hybrid methodology that explicitly reduces statistical correlations within the node representation space to improve OOD generalization capabilities. The proposed approach combines three complementary components: the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) for reducing inter-dimensional dependencies, variance regularization for stabilizing network weights, and a parallel Variational Graph Auto-Encoder (VGAE) for learning label-independent representations. The method is evaluated on node classification tasks using the GOOD benchmark datasets under covariate and concept shift scenarios. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that eliminating statistical correlations in node representations enables the proposed GNN model to achieve higher OOD test accuracy and also achieve performance GAP reductions of up to 35% on average between Identical and Independent Distribution (IID) and OOD settings.
B.3. Communication/Networking and Information Technology
Sajad Bastami; Mohammad Bagher Dowlatshahi; Rojiar Pir Mohammadiani; Seyedeh Zahra Mousavi
Abstract
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a key paradigm for coordination in robotics, autonomous systems, and distributed control. However, existing MARL methods face fundamental limitations in scalability, adaptability to dynamic environments, and stability under evolving interactions. To address ...
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Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a key paradigm for coordination in robotics, autonomous systems, and distributed control. However, existing MARL methods face fundamental limitations in scalability, adaptability to dynamic environments, and stability under evolving interactions. To address these challenges, we propose Adaptive Graph-Transformer Reinforcement Learning (AGTRL), a framework integrating graph-based relational modelling with transformer attention for adaptive coordination in large-scale multi-agent systems. AGTRL unifies graph-based perception and attention-based coordination in an end-to-end pipeline, encoding role information and adaptively weighting interactions by context. This combination, missing in prior MARL methods, bridges scalability and robustness in dynamic environments. AGTRL constructs a dynamic graph of agent relationships and uses multi-head self-attention to prioritize relevant interactions in real-time, ensuring robust performance under perturbations. We evaluate robustness under communication dropout (up to 40% link removal) and dynamic edge removal, measuring performance via episode reward and win rate. The framework incorporates an adaptive stability-performance trade-off mechanism that maintains learning efficacy in the presence of communication constraints and environmental uncertainty. We introduce a graph-enhanced policy architecture that jointly optimizes individual agent policies and inter-agent coordination through attention-weighted message passing. Comprehensive evaluations on benchmark environments—including StarCraft II micromanagement scenarios, cooperative navigation (Spread), and adversarial tasks (Predator-Prey)—demonstrate that AGTRL achieves superior sample efficiency, scalability, and robustness compared to state-of-the-art MARL baselines. Experimental results show AGTRL improves convergence speed by 32% on average and maintains stable performance with up to 40% communication dropout, establishing its viability for real-world deployment in dynamic multi-agent domains.
