Shalin Jain

Huihua Zhao, Rafael Cathomen, Lionel Gulich et al.

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have enabled impressive humanoid behaviors in simulation, yet transferring these results to new robots remains challenging. In many real deployments, the primary bottleneck is no longer simulation throughput or algorithm design, but the absence of systematic infrastructure that links environment verification, training, evaluation, and deployment in a coherent loop. To address this gap, we present AGILE, an end-to-end workflow for humanoid RL that standardizes the policy-development lifecycle to mitigate common sim-to-real failure modes. AGILE comprises four stages: (1) interactive environment verification, (2) reproducible training, (3) unified evaluation, and (4) descriptor-driven deployment via robot/task configuration descriptors. For evaluation stage, AGILE supports both scenario-based tests and randomized rollouts under a shared suite of motion-quality diagnostics, enabling automated regression testing and principled robustness assessment. AGILE also incorporates a set of training stabilizations and algorithmic enhancements in training stage to improve optimization stability and sim-to-real transfer. With this pipeline in place, we validate AGILE across five representative humanoid skills spanning locomotion, recovery, motion imitation, and loco-manipulation on two hardware platforms (Unitree G1 and Booster T1), achieving consistent sim-to-real transfer. Overall, AGILE shows that a standardized, end-to-end workflow can substantially improve the reliability and reproducibility of humanoid RL development.

Yash Srivastava, Shalin Jain, Sneha Awathare et al.

The rising demand for collaborative machine learning and data analytics calls for secure and decentralized data sharing frameworks that balance privacy, trust, and incentives. Existing approaches, including federated learning (FL) and blockchain-based data markets, fall short: FL often depends on trusted aggregators and lacks Byzantine robustness, while blockchain frameworks struggle with computation-intensive training and incentive integration. We present \prot, a decentralized data marketplace that unifies federated learning, blockchain arbitration, and economic incentives into a single framework for privacy-preserving data sharing. \prot\ enables data buyers to submit bid-based requests via blockchain smart contracts, which manage auctions, escrow, and dispute resolution. Computationally intensive training is delegated to \cone\ (\uline{Co}mpute \uline{N}etwork for \uline{E}xecution), an off-chain distributed execution layer. To safeguard against adversarial behavior, \prot\ integrates a modified YODA protocol with exponentially growing execution sets for resilient consensus, and introduces Corrected OSMD to mitigate malicious or low-quality contributions from sellers. All protocols are incentive-compatible, and our game-theoretic analysis establishes honesty as the dominant strategy. We implement \prot\ on Ethereum and evaluate it over benchmark datasets -- MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 -- under varying adversarial settings. \prot\ achieves up to 99\% accuracy on MNIST and 90\% on Fashion-MNIST, with less than 3\% degradation up to 30\% Byzantine nodes, and 56\% accuracy on CIFAR-10 despite its complexity. Our results show that \prot\ ensures privacy, maintains robustness under adversarial conditions, and scales efficiently with the number of participants, making it a practical foundation for real-world decentralized data sharing.

Siva Kailas, Shalin Jain, Harish Ravichandar

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), developed by the graph learning community, have been adopted and shown to be highly effective in multi-robot and multi-agent learning. Inspired by this successful cross-pollination, we investigate and characterize the suitability of existing GNN explanation methods for explaining multi-agent coordination. We find that these methods have the potential to identify the most-influential communication channels that impact the team's behavior. Informed by our initial analyses, we propose an attention entropy regularization term that renders GAT-based policies more amenable to existing graph-based explainers. Intuitively, minimizing attention entropy incentivizes agents to limit their attention to the most influential or impactful agents, thereby easing the challenge faced by the explainer. We theoretically ground this intuition by showing that minimizing attention entropy increases the disparity between the explainer-generated subgraph and its complement. Evaluations across three tasks and three team sizes i) provides insights into the effectiveness of existing explainers, and ii) demonstrates that our proposed regularization consistently improves explanation quality without sacrificing task performance.