Ghost Swarms: Learning Swarm Rules from Environmental Changes Alone

Khulud Alharthi, Zahraa S. Abdallah, Sabine Hauert

Abstract: Swarm behaviours emerge from agents interacting with their local environment following simple rules. While directly observing each agent can be challenging, their collective behaviour leaves detectable environmental imprints that could offer insights into the underlying swarm dynamics. However, this task is complex due to the hidden and interconnected relationships between the rules governing agent interactions, the emergent swarm behaviour, and the environmental changes generated by this behaviour. In this work, we propose a method for extracting human-readable controllers from demonstrations showing only observable environmental imprints caused by the swarm. This approach explores whether these environmental imprints can reveal the swarm’s actions, even when the individual agents are challenging to track. Our approach eliminates the need for prior knowledge about the controller or its structure, enabling the successful learning of controllers from a single demonstration. We provide a novel method for understanding and managing both natural and engineered swarms by utilising the environmental imprints left by swarm behaviours, even when direct observation of the swarm’s actions is not feasible.