Publication

R. Jain, K. Okumura, M. Amir and A. Prorok. Graph Attention-Guided Search for Dense Multi-Agent Pathfinding. In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pages 29504-29512, 2026.

Abstract: Finding near-optimal solutions for dense multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) problems in real-time remains challenging even for state-of-the-art planners. To this end, we develop a hybrid framework that integrates a learned heuristic derived from MAGAT, a neural MAPF policy with a graph attention scheme, into a leading search-based algorithm, LaCAM. While prior work has explored learning-guided search in MAPF, such methods have historically underperformed. In contrast, our approach, termed LaGAT, outperforms both purely search-based and purely learning-based methods in dense scenarios. This is achieved through an enhanced MAGAT architecture, a pre-train-then-fine-tune strategy on maps of interest, and a deadlock detection scheme to account for imperfect neural guidance. Our results demonstrate that, when carefully designed, hybrid search offers a powerful solution for tightly coupled, challenging multi-agent coordination problems.

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