학술논문

Heterogeneous Crowd Simulation Using Parametric Reinforcement Learning
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics IEEE Trans. Visual. Comput. Graphics Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on. 29(4):2036-2052 Apr, 2023
Subject
Computing and Processing
Bioengineering
Signal Processing and Analysis
Computational modeling
Reinforcement learning
Neural networks
Collision avoidance
Training
Predictive models
Navigation
Multi-agent navigation
crowd simulation
reinforcement learning
parametric policy learning
Language
ISSN
1077-2626
1941-0506
2160-9306
Abstract
Agent-based synthetic crowd simulation affords the cost-effective large-scale simulation and animation of interacting digital humans. Model-based approaches have successfully generated a plethora of simulators with a variety of foundations. However, prior approaches have been based on statically defined models predicated on simplifying assumptions, limited video-based datasets, or homogeneous policies. Recent works have applied reinforcement learning to learn policies for navigation. However, these approaches may learn static homogeneous rules, are typically limited in their generalization to trained scenarios, and limited in their usability in synthetic crowd domains. In this article, we present a multi-agent reinforcement learning-based approach that learns a parametric predictive collision avoidance and steering policy. We show that training over a parameter space produces a flexible model across crowd configurations. That is, our goal-conditioned approach learns a parametric policy that affords heterogeneous synthetic crowds. We propose a model-free approach without centralization of internal agent information, control signals, or agent communication. The model is extensively evaluated. The results show policy generalization across unseen scenarios, agent parameters, and out-of-distribution parameterizations. The learned model has comparable computational performance to traditional methods. Qualitatively the model produces both expected (laminar flow, shuffling, bottleneck) and unexpected (side-stepping) emergent qualitative behaviours, and quantitatively the approach is performant across measures of movement quality.