Heterogeneous Crowd Simulation Using Parametric Reinforcement Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Agent-based synthetic crowd simulation affords the cost-effective large-scale simulation and animation of interacting digital humans. Model-based approaches have successfully generated a plethora of simulators with a variety of foundations. However, prior approaches have been based on statically defined models predicated on simplifying assumptions, limited video-based datasets, or homogeneous policies. Recent works have applied reinforcement learning to learn policies for navigation. However, these approaches may learn static homogeneous rules, are typically limited in their generalization to trained scenarios, and limited in their usability in synthetic crowd domains. In this article, we present a multi-agent reinforcement learning-based approach that learns a parametric predictive collision avoidance and steering policy. We show that training over a parameter space produces a flexible model across crowd configurations. That is, our goal-conditioned approach learns a parametric policy that affords heterogeneous synthetic crowds. We propose a model-free approach without centralization of internal agent information, control signals, or agent communication. The model is extensively evaluated. The results show policy generalization across unseen scenarios, agent parameters, and out-of-distribution parameterizations. The learned model has comparable computational performance to traditional methods. Qualitatively the model produces both expected (laminar flow, shuffling, bottleneck) and unexpected (side-stepping) emergent qualitative behaviours, and quantitatively the approach is performant across measures of movement quality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".