# SIGMAS: Second-Order Interaction-based Grouping for Overlapping Multi-Agent Swarms

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00120 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00120/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [Evaluation: from precision, recall and F-measure to ROC, informedness, markedness and correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16061/) (2020)
- [AgentFormer: Agent-Aware Transformers for Socio-Temporal Multi-Agent Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14023/) (2021)
- [DESIRE: Distant Future Prediction in Dynamic Scenes with Interacting Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04394/) (2017)
- [Leapfrog Diffusion Model for Stochastic Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10895/) (2023)
- [GroupNet: Multiscale Hypergraph Neural Networks for Trajectory Prediction with Relational Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08770/) (2022)
- [Learning Pedestrian Group Representations for Multi-modal Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09953/) (2022)
- [SocialCircle: Learning the Angle-based Social Interaction Representation for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05370/) (2023)
- [MART: MultiscAle Relational Transformer Networks for Multi-agent Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21635/) (2024)
- [Auxiliary Tasks Benefit 3D Skeleton-based Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08942/) (2023)
- [Building an Aerial-Ground Robotics System for Precision Farming: An Adaptable Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03098/) (2019)
- [Programming and Deployment of Autonomous Swarms using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10605/) (2021)
- [Exploiting a Fleet of UAVs for Monitoring and Data Acquisition of a Distributed Sensor Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03693/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Swarming systems, such as drone fleets and robotic teams, exhibit complex dynamics driven by both individual behaviors and emergent group-level interactions. Unlike traditional multi-agent domains such as pedestrian crowds or traffic systems, swarms typically consist of a few large groups with inherent and persistent memberships, making group identification essential for understanding fine-grained behavior. We introduce the novel task of group prediction in overlapping multi-agent swarms, where latent group structures must be inferred directly from agent trajectories without ground-truth supervision. To address this challenge, we propose SIGMAS (Second-order Interaction-based Grouping for Multi-Agent Swarms), a self-supervised framework that goes beyond direct pairwise interactions and model second-order interaction across agents. By capturing how similarly agents interact with others, SIGMAS enables robust group inference and adaptively balances individual and collective dynamics through a learnable gating mechanism for joint reasoning. Experiments across diverse synthetic swarm scenarios demonstrate that SIGMAS accurately recovers latent group structures and remains robust under simultaneously overlapping swarm dynamics, establishing both a new benchmark task and a principled modeling framework for swarm understanding.