Discrete Diffusion for Complex and Congested Multi-Agent Path Finding with Sparse Social Attention

TL;DR

This paper introduces DiffLNS, a novel hybrid framework combining discrete diffusion models with local search to improve multi-agent path finding in complex, congested environments, achieving high success rates.

Contribution

First to leverage discrete diffusion probabilistic models as warm-starts for LNS-based MAPF solvers, enhancing performance in dense scenarios.

Findings

DiffLNS achieves 95.8% success rate on complex MAPF instances.

The model generalizes to scenarios with up to 312 agents.

Outperforms baseline methods by 9.6 percentage points on average.

Abstract

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a coordination problem that requires computing globally consistent, collision-free trajectories from individual start positions to assigned goal positions under combinatorial planning complexity. In dense environments, suboptimal initial plans induce compound conflicts that hinder feasible repair. For repair-based solvers like LNS2, initial plan quality critically affects downstream repair, yet this factor remains underexplored. We propose DiffLNS, a hybrid framework that integrates a discrete denoising diffusion probabilistic model (D3PM) with LNS2. The D3PM serves as an initializer with sparse social attention that learns a spatiotemporal prior over coordinated multi-agent action trajectories from expert demonstrations and samples multiple joint plans. Operating directly on the categorical action space, our discrete diffusion preserves the MAPF action structure and samples from a multimodal joint-plan distribution to produce diverse drafts well suited for neighborhood repair. These drafts act as warm starts for downstream repair, which completes unfinished trajectories and resolves remaining conflicts under hard MAPF constraints. Experimental results show that despite being trained only on instances with at most 96 agents, the initializer generalizes to scenarios with up to 312 agents at inference time. Across 20 complex and congested settings, DiffLNS achieves an average success rate of 95.8%, outperforming the strongest tested baseline by 9.6 percentage points and matching or exceeding all baselines in all 20 settings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to leverage discrete diffusion for warm-starting an LNS-based MAPF solver.