Artem Pshenitsyn

Stepan Dergachev, Artem Pshenitsyn, Aleksandr Panov et al.

Decentralized collision avoidance is a core challenge for scalable multi-robot systems. A promising approach to this problem is Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control - a framework that naturally handles arbitrary motion models and provides strong theoretical guarantees. Still, in practice an MPPI-based controller may produce suboptimal trajectories because its performance relies heavily on uninformed random sampling. We introduce CoRL-MPPI, a fusion of Cooperative Reinforcement Learning and MPPI that addresses this limitation. We train an action policy, approximated by a deep neural network, in simulation to learn local cooperative collision-avoidance behaviors. This learned policy is then embedded into the MPPI framework to guide its sampling distribution, biasing it toward more intelligent and cooperative actions in scenarios that may differ substantially from those used during training. Moreover, CoRL-MPPI preserves the theoretical guarantees of regular MPPI. We evaluate our approach in dense, dynamic setups against classical and learning-based state-of-the-art baselines. Our results demonstrate that CoRL-MPPI outperforms competing methods and significantly improves navigation efficiency, measured by success rate and delay, as well as safety, enabling agile and robust multi-robot navigation.

Egor Cherepanov, Nikita Kachaev, Daniil Zelezetsky et al.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models predict chunks of future actions from the current observation, an assumption that fails under partial observability, where decisions depend on information no longer visible. Existing memory-augmented VLAs simultaneously introduce recurrence, retrieval, compression modules, auxiliary objectives, hierarchical memory, or task-specific architectural changes, so the contribution of recurrence itself remains entangled with surrounding machinery. We present a controlled isolation study of recurrence in a strong pretrained VLA backbone. Our formulation augments the transformer with a small set of learnable memory tokens carried across timesteps and updated through self-attention, trained end to end with truncated backpropagation through time, with no auxiliary losses and no architectural changes. We instantiate this as $μ$VLA, a family of OpenVLA-OFT variants parameterized by memory width m, TBPTT length K, and the memory update rule (cross-step gradients or a detached EMA), so that recurrence is the only varying factor. On MIKASA-Robo, $μ$VLA improves average success rate on five training tasks from 0.42 to 0.84 at the strongest setting and reaches 0.23 on held-out tasks with the same memory structure versus 0.07 for the memoryless baseline. On tasks requiring different memory structure, performance remains near baseline. On LIBERO, the strongest recurrent variant achieves 96.2% average success, indicating no regression under full observability. We interpret these results as a calibration of the capability envelope of minimal in-backbone recurrence, identifying the regime in which it is sufficient and the regime where additional memory structure is required. Demos and videos can be found in https://avanturist322.github.io/mu-vla/.

Artem Pshenitsyn, Aleksandr Panov, Alexey Skrynnik

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a powerful paradigm for solving cooperative and competitive decision-making problems. While many MARL benchmarks have been proposed, few combine continuous state and action spaces with challenging coordination and planning tasks. We introduce CAMAR, a new MARL benchmark designed explicitly for multi-agent pathfinding in environments with continuous actions. CAMAR supports cooperative and competitive interactions between agents and runs efficiently at up to 100,000 environment steps per second. We also propose a three-tier evaluation protocol to better track algorithmic progress and enable deeper analysis of performance. In addition, CAMAR allows the integration of classical planning methods such as RRT and RRT* into MARL pipelines. We use them as standalone baselines and combine RRT* with popular MARL algorithms to create hybrid approaches. We provide a suite of test scenarios and benchmarking tools to ensure reproducibility and fair comparison. Experiments show that CAMAR presents a challenging and realistic testbed for the MARL community.