[2603.00120] SIGMAS: Second-Order Interaction-based Grouping for Overlapping Multi-Agent Swarms

Computer Science > Multiagent Systems arXiv:2603.00120 (cs) [Submitted on 23 Feb 2026] Title:SIGMAS: Second-Order Interaction-based Grouping for Overlapping Multi-Agent Swarms Authors:Minah Lee, Saibal Mukhopadhyay View a PDF of the paper titled SIGMAS: Second-Order Interaction-based Grouping for Overlapping Multi-Agent Swarms, by Minah Lee and 1 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Swarming systems, such as drone fleets and robotic teams, exhibit complex dynamics driven by both individual behaviors and emergent group-level interactions. Unlike traditional multi-agent domains such as pedestrian crowds or traffic systems, swarms typically consist of a few large groups with inherent and persistent memberships, making group identification essential for understanding fine-grained behavior. We introduce the novel task of group prediction in overlapping multi-agent swarms, where latent group structures must be inferred directly from agent trajectories without ground-truth supervision. To address this challenge, we propose SIGMAS (Second-order Interaction-based Grouping for Multi-Agent Swarms), a self-supervised framework that goes beyond direct pairwise interactions and model second-order interaction across agents. By capturing how similarly agents interact with others, SIGMAS enables robust group inference and adaptively balances individual and collective dynamics through a learnable gating mechanism for joint reasoning. Experiments across diverse synthetic swarm...