We aim to develop a general multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) policy that enables a group of robots to efficiently explore large-scale, unknown environments with random pose initialization. Existing MARL-based multi-robot exploration methods face challenges in reliably mapping observations to actions in large-scale scenarios and lack of zero-shot generalization to unknown environments. To this end, we propose a generic multi-task pre-training algorithm (termed TaskExp) to enhance the generalization of learning-based policies. In particular, we design a decision-related task to guide the policy to focus on valuable subspaces of the action space, improving the reliability of policy mapping. Moreover, two perception-related tasks-Location Estimation and Map Prediction-are designed to enhance the zero-shot capability of the policy by guiding it to extract general invariant features from unknown environments. With TaskExp pre-training, our policy significantly outperforms state-of-the-art planning-based methods in large-scale scenarios and demonstrates strong zero-shot performance in unseen environments. Furthermore, TaskExp can also be easily integrated to improve the existing learning-based multi-robot exploration methods.

Collaborative learning enhances the performance and adaptability of multi-robot systems in complex tasks but faces significant challenges due to high communication overhead and data heterogeneity inherent in multi-robot tasks. To this end, we propose CoCoL, a Communication efficient decentralized Collaborative Learning method tailored for multi-robot systems with heterogeneous local datasets. Leveraging a mirror descent framework, CoCoL achieves remarkable communication efficiency with approximate Newton-type updates by capturing the similarity between objective functions of robots, and reduces computational costs through inexact sub-problem solutions. Furthermore, the integration of a gradient tracking scheme ensures its robustness against data heterogeneity. Experimental results on three representative multi-robot collaborative learning tasks show that the proposed CoCoL can significantly reduce both the number of communication rounds and total bandwidth consumption while maintaining state-of-the-art accuracy. These benefits are particularly evident in challenging scenarios involving non-IID (non-independent and identically distributed) data distribution, streaming data, and time-varying network topologies.

The growing interest in embodied intelligence has brought ego-centric perspectives to contemporary research. One significant challenge within this realm is the accurate localization and tracking of objects in ego-centric videos, primarily due to the substantial variability in viewing angles. Addressing this issue, this paper introduces a novel zero-shot approach for the 3D reconstruction and tracking of all objects from the ego-centric video. We present Ego3DT, a novel framework that initially identifies and extracts detection and segmentation information of objects within the ego environment. Utilizing information from adjacent video frames, Ego3DT dynamically constructs a 3D scene of the ego view using a pre-trained 3D scene reconstruction model. Additionally, we have innovated a dynamic hierarchical association mechanism for creating stable 3D tracking trajectories of objects in ego-centric videos. Moreover, the efficacy of our approach is corroborated by extensive experiments on two newly compiled datasets, with 1.04 × - 2.90× in HOTA, showcasing the robustness and accuracy of our method in diverse ego-centric scenarios.