Rahman Farnoosh

Mazyar Taghavi, Rahman Farnoosh

This paper investigates the utilization of Quantum Computing and Neuromorphic Computing for Safe, Reliable, and Explainable Multi_Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) in the context of optimal control in autonomous robotics. The objective was to address the challenges of optimizing the behavior of autonomous agents while ensuring safety, reliability, and explainability. Quantum Computing techniques, including Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), were employed to efficiently explore large solution spaces and find approximate solutions to complex MARL problems. Neuromorphic Computing, inspired by the architecture of the human brain, provided parallel and distributed processing capabilities, which were leveraged to develop intelligent and adaptive systems. The combination of these technologies held the potential to enhance the safety, reliability, and explainability of MARL in autonomous robotics. This research contributed to the advancement of autonomous robotics by exploring cutting-edge technologies and their applications in multi-agent systems. Codes and data are available.

Mazyar Taghavi, Rahman Farnoosh

Protecting endangered wildlife from illegal poaching presents a critical challenge, particularly in vast and partially observable environments where real-time response is essential. This paper introduces a novel Expectation-Maximization (EM) based latent variable modeling approach in the context of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) coordination in wildlife protection. By modeling hidden environmental factors and inter-agent dynamics through latent variables, our method enhances exploration and coordination under uncertainty.We implement and evaluate our EM-MARL framework using a custom simulation involving 10 UAVs tasked with patrolling protected habitats of the endangered Iranian leopard. Extensive experimental results demonstrate superior performance in detection accuracy, adaptability, and policy convergence when compared to standard algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG). Our findings underscore the potential of combining EM inference with MARL to improve decentralized decisionmaking in complex, high-stakes conservation scenarios. The full implementation, simulation environment, and training scripts are publicly available on GitHub.