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Kyle H. Wray

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2

AAMAS Conference 2026 Conference Paper

A Semi-Decentralized Approach to Multiagent Control

  • Mahdi Al-Husseini
  • Mykel J. Kochenderfer
  • Kyle H. Wray

We introduce an expressive framework and algorithms for the semidecentralized control of cooperative agents in environments with communication uncertainty. Whereas semi-Markov control admits a distribution over time for agent actions, semi-Markov communication, or what we refer to as semi-decentralization, gives a distribution over time for what actions and observations agents can store in their histories. We extend semi-decentralization to the partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). The resulting SDec-POMDP unifies decentralized and multiagent POMDPs and several existing explicit communication mechanisms. We present recursive small-step semi-decentralized A* (RS-SDA*), an exact algorithm for generating optimal SDec-POMDP policies. RS-SDA* is evaluated on semi-decentralized versions of several standard benchmarks and a maritime medical evacuation scenario. This paper provides a well-defined theoretical foundation for exploring many classes of multiagent communication problems through the lens of semi-decentralization.

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AIJ Journal 2023 Journal Article

Competence-aware systems

  • Connor Basich
  • Justin Svegliato
  • Kyle H. Wray
  • Stefan Witwicki
  • Joydeep Biswas
  • Shlomo Zilberstein

Building autonomous systems for deployment in the open world has been a longstanding objective in both artificial intelligence and robotics. The open world, however, presents challenges that question some of the assumptions often made in contemporary AI models. Autonomous systems that operate in the open world face complex, non-stationary environments wherein enumerating all situations the system may face over the course of its deployment is intractable. Nevertheless, these systems are expected to operate safely and reliably for extended durations. Consequently, AI systems often rely on some degree of human assistance to mitigate risks while completing their tasks, and are hence better treated as semi-autonomous systems. In order to reduce unnecessary reliance on humans and optimize autonomy, we propose a novel introspective planning model—competence-aware systems (CAS)—that enables a semi-autonomous system to reason about its own competence and allowed level of autonomy by leveraging human feedback or assistance. A CAS learns to adjust its level of autonomy based on experience and interactions with a human authority so as to reduce improper reliance on the human and optimize the degree of autonomy it employs in any given circumstance. To handle situations in which the initial CAS model has insufficient state information to properly discriminate feedback received from humans, we introduce a methodology called iterative state space refinement that gradually increases the granularity of the state space online. The approach exploits information that exists in the standard CAS model and requires no additional input from the human. The result is an agent that can more confidently predict the correct feedback from the human authority in each level of autonomy, enabling it learn its competence in a larger portion of the state space.

Details DOI
v2026.09.13