Ruoyu Lin

Ruoyu Lin, Gennaro Notomista, Magnus Egerstedt

This paper develops a general framework for multi-agent control synthesis, which applies to a wide range of problems with convergence guarantees, including those with time-varying objective functions. The proposed framework achieves decentralization without inducing dynamical coupling among agents, and it naturally supports multi-objective robotics and real-time implementation. To demonstrate its generality and effectiveness, the framework is applied to solve three representative problems, namely time-varying leader-follower formation control, decentralized coverage control for time-varying density functions without approximations, which is a long-standing open problem, and safe formation navigation in a dense environment.

Riwa Karam, Ruoyu Lin, Brooks A. Butler et al.

This paper studies heterogeneous multi-team collaboration through dynamic robot allocation, where robots are treated as transferable resources. Leveraging Hamilton's rule from ecology as an altruistic decision-making mechanism, we propose a multi-team collaborative resource allocation framework with heterogeneous capabilities, transfer costs, and capability-dependent contributions. The resulting allocation problem is combinatorial and is shown to be NP-hard. To address scalability, we develop a graph neural network policy under centralized training and decentralized execution that approximates the altruistic allocations based on Hamilton's rule. The model operates over the team interaction graph and predicts robot-level transfer decisions and next robot-to-team assignments. The proposed approach is validated in a firefighting scenario through simulations and experiments, demonstrating that the learned policy achieves near-optimal performance while scaling to larger systems.

Riwa Karam, Alexander A. Nguyen, Ruoyu Lin et al.

Collaboration is a central theme in multi-robot systems as tasks and demands increasingly require capabilities that go beyond what any one individual robot possesses. Yet, despite extensive work on cooperative control and coordinated behaviors, the terminology surrounding collective multi-robot interaction remains inconsistent across research communities. In particular, cooperation, coordination, and collaboration are often treated interchangeably, without clearly articulating the differences among them. To address this gap, we propose definitions that distinguish and relate cooperation, coordination, and collaboration in multi-robot systems, highlighting the support of new capabilities in collaborative behaviors, and illustrate these concepts through representative examples. Building on this taxonomy, different frameworks for collaboration are reviewed, and technical challenges and promising future research directions are identified for collaborative multi-robot systems.

Riwa Karam, Ruoyu Lin, Brooks A. Butler et al.

This paper presents a multi-team collaboration strategy based on Hamilton's rule from ecology that facilitates resource allocation among multiple teams, where agents are considered as shared resource among all teams that must be allocated appropriately. We construct an algorithmic framework that allows teams to make bids for agents that consider the costs and benefits of transferring agents while also considering relative mission importance for each team. This framework is applied to a multi-team coverage control mission to demonstrate its effectiveness. It is shown that the necessary criteria of a mission evaluation function are met by framing it as a function of the locational coverage cost of each team with respect to agent gain and loss, and these results are illustrated through simulations.

Jiayu Chen, Ruoyu Lin, Zihao Zheng et al.

Visual Autoregressive(VAR) models enhance generation quality but face a critical efficiency bottleneck in later stages. In this paper, we present a novel optimization framework for VAR models that fundamentally differs from prior approaches such as FastVAR and SkipVAR. Instead of relying on heuristic skipping strategies, our method leverages attention entropy to characterize the semantic projections across different dimensions of the model architecture. This enables precise identification of parameter dynamics under varying token granularity levels, semantic scopes, and generation scales. Building on this analysis, we further uncover sparsity patterns along three critical dimensions-token, layer, and scale-and propose a set of fine-grained optimization strategies tailored to these patterns. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that our approach achieves aggressive acceleration of the generation process while significantly preserving semantic fidelity and fine details, outperforming traditional methods in both efficiency and quality. Experiments on Infinity-2B and Infinity-8B models demonstrate that ToProVAR achieves up to 3.4x acceleration with minimal quality loss, effectively mitigating the issues found in prior work. Our code will be made publicly available.