Sparse mobile crowdsensing is a cost-effective sensing paradigm that infers global data by sensing data from partial areas in a city. With the rapid development of diverse autonomous mobile agents such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and ground vehicles, they have been widely applied in sparse mobile crowdsensing. However, existing works often predefine the role structures and behavioral preferences of these agents in tasks, which significantly limits their flexibility and adaptability, and making it difficult to fully exploit the collaborative potential of crowdsensing agents to efficiently achieve high-quality data sensing. In this paper, we propose an adaptive role learning framework for sparse mobile crowdsensing (ARL-SMCS), which focuses on role recognition for heterogeneous agents and role refinement among homogeneous agents. This framework, based on a multi-agent reinforcement learning model, introduces a variational autoencoder to learn the latent role representations of agents and uses maximum mean discrepancy to distinguish the functionalities of different types of agents. Additionally, ARL-SMCS incorporates an evolutionary algorithm to further refine task preferences among homogeneous agents. This framework overcomes the limitations of static role assignment in adapting to dynamic environments and task conflicts during task execution, significantly improving sensing quality and resource utilization efficiency. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that ARL-SMCS consistently outperforms other baseline methods under various conditions, including different numbers, endurance, and decision interval lengths.

Sparse mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is a cost-effective data collection paradigm that aims to recruit users to collect data from a part of sensing subareas and infer the rest. In a more realistic scenario, users participate in real-time and collect data along the way. For missing data inference, the significance of data collected from different subareas often varies over time. However, since users’ trajectories are uncertain, recruiting users who can cover important spatio-temporal subareas presents a challenge. Additionally, how to segment the budget wisely during recruitment is another challenge. To tackle these challenges, we propose a dual reinforcement learning (RL)-based online user recruitment strategy with adaptive budget segmentation, called DualRL-U, which consists of two alternating decision steps, i.e., the user recruitment decision and the budget retention decision. Specifically, for the user recruitment decision, we use RL to connect the user with data inference accuracy to estimate their contributions. For the budget retention decision, we use RL to connect the budget with the number of times the user can sense to evaluate the cost effectiveness. In this way, a dual RL model is constructed to achieve effective recruitment by alternately executing user recruitment decisions and budget retention decisions. Extensive experiments on real-world sensing data sets show the effectiveness of DualRL-U.

Sparse crowdsensing collects data from a subset of the sensing area and infers data for unsensed areas, reducing data collection costs. Previous works have primarily focused on independently collecting and inferring single types of data. However, real-world scenarios often involve multiple types of data that can complement each other by providing missing spatiotemporal distribution information. In this paper, we fully consider both intra-data correlations among data of the same type and inter-data correlations among data of different types, enabling collaborative execution of various tasks. In addition, we enhance the adaptability in practical application scenarios by utilizing real-time collected sparse data to guide task execution. For this purpose, we propose a multi-task adaptive budgeting framework for online sparse crowdsensing, called MTAB-SC. This framework consists of three parts: training data updating, data inference, and data collection. Firstly, we propose a multi-task data updating method to keep models up-to-date. Secondly, we design a data inference network for multi-task data joint inference. Finally, to allocate suitable budgets for each task and facilitate collaborative data collection across multiple tasks, we propose an Adaptive Budgeting for Collaborative Data Collection model (AB-CoDC). The effectiveness of our proposals is demonstrated through extensive experiments on two real-world datasets.

Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) is a sensing paradigm that enables large-scale smart city applications, such as environmental sensing and traffic monitoring. However, traditional MCS often suffers from performance degradation due to the limited spatiotemporal coverage of collected data. In this context, Sparse MCS has been proposed, which utilizes data inference algorithms to recover full data from sparse data collected by users. However, existing Sparse MCS approaches often overlook spatiotemporal fractures, where no data is observed either for a sensing subarea across all sensing time slots (temporal fracture), or for a sensing time slot in all sensing subarea (spatial fracture). Such spatiotemporal fractures pose great challenges to the data inference algorithms, as it is difficult to capture the complex spatiotemporal correlations of the sensing data from very limited observations. To address this issue, we propose a Graph-and Attention-based Matrix Completion (GAMC) method for the spatiotemporal fracture data inference problem in Sparse MCS. Specifically, we first pre-fill the general missing values using the classical Matrix Factorization (MF) technique. Then, we propose a neural network architecture based on Graph Attention Networks (GAT) and Transformer to capture complex spatiotemporal dependencies in the sensing data. Finally, we recover the complete data with a projection layer. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world urban sensing datasets. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Efficiently obtaining the up-to-date information in the disaster-stricken area is the key to successful disaster response. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), workers and cars can collaborate to accomplish sensing tasks, such as life detection task in disaster-stricken areas. In this paper, we explicitly address the route planning for a group of agents, including UAVs, workers, and cars, with the goal of maximizing the sensing task completion rate. we propose a MARL-based heterogeneous multi-agent route planning algorithm called MANF-RL-RP. The algorithm has made targeted designs in terms of global-local dual information processing and model structure for heterogeneous multi-agent, making it effectively considers the collaboration among heterogeneous agents and the long-term impact of current decisions. Finally, we conducted detailed experiments based on the rich simulation data. In comparison to the baseline algorithms, namely Greedy-SC-RP and MANF-DNN-RP, MANF-RL-RP has exhibited a significant performance improvement. Compared to MANF-DNN-RP and Greedy-SC-RP, the task completion rate based on MANF-RL-RP increased by an average of 8.82% and 56.8%, respectively.