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arxiv: 2508.08574 · v3 · submitted 2025-08-12 · 💻 cs.RO · cs.MA

DeepFleet: Multi-Agent Foundation Models for Mobile Robots

Pith reviewed 2026-05-19 00:09 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.RO cs.MA
keywords foundation modelsmulti-agent systemsmobile robotswarehouse automationgraph neural networksdecision transformersinductive biasesfleet coordination
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The pith

Models that focus on local robot interactions and asynchronous updates perform best for coordinating large mobile robot fleets.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

This paper presents DeepFleet, a set of foundation models trained on movement data from hundreds of thousands of robots in Amazon warehouses. The authors compare four architectures, each with a different way of representing robot interactions and the warehouse environment. They find that designs using neighborhoods of individual robots with autoregressive prediction and graph-based spatial modeling with temporal attention yield the strongest results on forecasting tasks. These models also scale effectively when given more data from larger operations. Readers might care because such models could support more reliable automation in settings where many robots must navigate shared spaces without constant human oversight.

Core claim

The central discovery is that the robot-centric model, an autoregressive decision transformer on individual robot neighborhoods, and the graph-floor model, which uses temporal attention combined with graph neural networks for spatial relationships, both outperform the other two designs on prediction tasks involving robot positions, goals, and interactions, and that these two benefit from scaling up with larger datasets.

What carries the argument

The inductive biases embodied in the four architectures, particularly the use of asynchronous robot state updates and the incorporation of localized structures of robot interactions in the robot-centric and graph-floor models.

Load-bearing premise

Improvements in accuracy on historical prediction tasks will lead to better outcomes in live, real-time robot coordination and planning without needing additional fine-tuning or safety constraints.

What would settle it

A direct test would be to integrate one of the promising models into a warehouse simulator or live system and measure changes in overall fleet efficiency, such as average task completion time or number of near-misses, compared to traditional planning methods.

read the original abstract

We introduce DeepFleet, a suite of foundation models designed to support coordination and planning for large-scale mobile robot fleets. These models are trained on fleet movement data, including robot positions, goals, and interactions, from hundreds of thousands of robots in Amazon warehouses worldwide. DeepFleet consists of four architectures that each embody a distinct inductive bias and collectively explore key points in the design space for multi-agent foundation models: the robot-centric (RC) model is an autoregressive decision transformer operating on neighborhoods of individual robots; the robot-floor (RF) model uses a transformer with cross-attention between robots and the warehouse floor; the image-floor (IF) model applies convolutional encoding to a multi-channel image representation of the full fleet; and the graph-floor (GF) model combines temporal attention with graph neural networks for spatial relationships. In this paper, we describe these models and present our evaluation of the impact of these design choices on prediction task performance. We find that the robot-centric and graph-floor models, which both use asynchronous robot state updates and incorporate the localized structure of robot interactions, show the most promise. We also present experiments that show that these two models can make effective use of larger warehouses operation datasets as the models are scaled up.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

1 major / 1 minor

Summary. The manuscript introduces DeepFleet, a suite of four multi-agent foundation models (robot-centric RC, robot-floor RF, image-floor IF, and graph-floor GF) for coordination and planning in large-scale mobile robot fleets. The models are trained on fleet movement data including positions, goals, and interactions from hundreds of thousands of robots across Amazon warehouses. Each architecture embodies a distinct inductive bias: RC uses an autoregressive decision transformer on robot neighborhoods with asynchronous updates; RF employs transformer cross-attention between robots and the floor; IF applies convolutional encoding to multi-channel fleet images; and GF combines temporal attention with graph neural networks for spatial relationships. The paper evaluates the impact of these design choices on prediction task performance and concludes that the RC and GF models, which incorporate asynchronous state updates and localized interaction structures, show the most promise and scale effectively with larger warehouse datasets.

Significance. If the superior prediction performance of the RC and GF models translates to improved real-time planning and coordination, the work could meaningfully advance scalable multi-agent foundation models for robotics and warehouse logistics by leveraging large-scale real-world data. The systematic exploration of inductive biases provides useful design insights. However, the current focus on isolated prediction metrics without downstream operational validation limits the strength of claims regarding practical coordination benefits.

major comments (1)
  1. [Evaluation section (as described in abstract and main text)] The central claim that the RC and GF models 'show the most promise' for coordination and planning rests on their outperformance in prediction tasks (state forecasting and interaction modeling) and scaling behavior with larger datasets. The evaluation section reports only these prediction metrics under the four inductive biases and does not include any closed-loop planning experiments, MPC-style rollouts, or operational metrics such as throughput, collision rate, or makespan. This gap means the results do not directly test whether better next-state prediction yields improved real-time fleet decisions, which is load-bearing for the paper's motivation and conclusions.
minor comments (1)
  1. [Abstract] The abstract states that comparative evaluation and scaling results are presented but supplies no quantitative metrics, error bars, dataset sizes, or ablation details, making it harder for readers to immediately gauge the magnitude of the reported improvements.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

1 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for their constructive and detailed review of our manuscript. We address the major comment below, providing an honest assessment of the evaluation scope while defending the paper's contributions on their own terms.

read point-by-point responses
  1. Referee: [Evaluation section (as described in abstract and main text)] The central claim that the RC and GF models 'show the most promise' for coordination and planning rests on their outperformance in prediction tasks (state forecasting and interaction modeling) and scaling behavior with larger datasets. The evaluation section reports only these prediction metrics under the four inductive biases and does not include any closed-loop planning experiments, MPC-style rollouts, or operational metrics such as throughput, collision rate, or makespan. This gap means the results do not directly test whether better next-state prediction yields improved real-time fleet decisions, which is load-bearing for the paper's motivation and conclusions.

    Authors: We thank the referee for this observation. The manuscript explicitly frames its contribution as an exploration of inductive biases in multi-agent foundation models, with evaluation focused on prediction tasks (state forecasting and interaction modeling) because these directly assess how well each architecture captures fleet dynamics from hundreds of thousands of real-world robot trajectories. The RC and GF models' superior performance and scaling behavior on these tasks provide evidence that architectures incorporating asynchronous updates and localized interaction structures are the most promising starting points for models intended to support coordination and planning. We do not claim or demonstrate direct improvements in closed-loop planning, MPC rollouts, throughput, collision rates, or makespan, as such operational validation would require coupling the models to specific planners and simulators—an integration that lies beyond the current scope of comparing design choices via prediction metrics. We agree that this represents a limitation for stronger claims about real-time fleet decisions. In revision we will add a dedicated paragraph in the discussion and conclusion sections that explicitly acknowledges this scope limitation, clarifies that prediction performance is presented as a necessary (but not sufficient) indicator of promise for downstream coordination, and outlines future work on closed-loop evaluation. revision: partial

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No significant circularity in empirical model evaluation

full rationale

The paper introduces four model architectures embodying distinct inductive biases and evaluates them empirically on prediction tasks using external warehouse fleet movement data from hundreds of thousands of robots. No mathematical derivation chain, first-principles results, or equations are presented that reduce to fitted parameters or self-referential inputs by construction. Claims rest on comparative performance metrics from independent datasets rather than any self-definitional, fitted-input-as-prediction, or self-citation load-bearing steps. The work is self-contained against external benchmarks with no circularity signals.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

The central claims rest on the representativeness of Amazon warehouse movement data and the assumption that the chosen architectural inductive biases meaningfully capture multi-agent coordination structure.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption Warehouse robot movement data from hundreds of thousands of units captures the relevant interaction patterns needed to train and evaluate coordination models.
    All training and scaling experiments depend on this external dataset being representative of the target deployment setting.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5835 in / 1356 out tokens · 52524 ms · 2026-05-19T00:09:01.771616+00:00 · methodology

discussion (0)

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Forward citations

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    List of Contributors Please address correspondence to deepfleet@amazon.com. Scaling experiments and writing lead Ameya Agaskar Sriram Siva DeepFleet model design and development William Pickering (Robot-Centric model) Kyle O’Brien (Robot-Floor Cross Attention model) Charles Kekeh (Image-Based Floor-Centric model) Sriram Siva (Graph-Based Floor-Centric mod...