Decision-Oriented Learning Using Differentiable Submodular Maximization for Multi-Robot Coordination

We present a differentiable, decision-oriented learning framework for cost prediction in a class of multi-robot decision-making problems, in which the robots need to trade off the task performance with the costs of taking actions when they select actions to take. Specifically, we consider the cases where the task performance is measured by a known monotone submodular function (e.g., coverage, mutual information), and the cost of actions depends on the context (e.g., wind and terrain conditions). We need to learn a function that maps the context to the costs. Classically, we treat such a learning problem and the downstream decision-making problem as two decoupled problems, i.e., we first learn to predict the cost function without considering the downstream decision-making problem, and then use the learned function for predicting the cost and using it in the decision-making problem. However, the loss function used in learning a prediction function may not be aligned with the downstream decision-making. We propose a decision-oriented learning framework that incorporates the downstream task performance in the prediction phase via a differentiable optimization layer. The main computational challenge in such a framework is to make the combinatorial optimization, i.e., non-monotone submodular maximization, differentiable. This function is not naturally differentiable. We propose the Differentiable Cost Scaled Greedy algorithm (D-CSG), which is a continuous and differentiable relaxation of CSG. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework through numerical simulations. The results show that the proposed framework can result in better performance than the traditional two-stage approach.