Formulating and Representing Multiagent Systems With Hypergraphs

Graph-learning methods, especially graph neural networks (GNNs), have shown remarkable effectiveness in handling non-Euclidean data and have achieved great success in various scenarios. Existing GNNs are primarily based on message-passing schemes, that is, aggregating information from neighboring nodes. However, the diversity and complexity of complex systems from real-world circumstances are not sufficiently taken into account. In these cases, the individual should be treated as an agent, with the ability to perceive their surroundings and interact with other individuals, rather than just be viewed as nodes in existing graph approaches. Additionally, the pairwise interactions used in existing methods also lack the expressiveness for the higher-order complex relations among multiple agents, thus limiting the performance in various tasks. In this work, we propose a Multiagent Hypergraph Force-learning method dubbed MHGForce. First, we formalize the multiagent system (MAS) and illustrate its connection to graph learning. Then, we propose a generalized multiagent hypergraph-learning framework. In this framework, we integrate message-passing and force-based interactions to devise a pluggable method. The method empowers graph approaches to excel in downstream tasks while effectively maintaining structural information in the representations. Experimental results on the Cora, Citeseer, Cora-CA, Zoo, and NTU2012 datasets in node classification demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our proposed method. We also discuss the characteristics of the MHGForce and explore its role through parametric analysis and visualization. Finally, we give a discussion, conclude our work, and propose future directions.