Enhancing swarms' durability to threats via graph signal processing and graph-neural-network-based generative modeling

Swarms, such as schools of fish or drone formations, are prevalent in both natural and engineered systems. While previous works have focused on the social interactions within swarms, the role of external perturbations–such as environmental changes, predators, or communication breakdowns–in affecting swarm stability is not fully understood. Our study addresses this gap by modeling swarms as graphs and applying graph signal processing techniques to analyze perturbations as signals on these graphs. By examining predation, we uncover a detectability-durability trade-off, demonstrating a tension between a swarm's ability to evade detection and its resilience to predation, once detected. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence for this trade-off, explicitly tying it to properties of the swarm's spatial configuration. Toward task-specific optimized swarms, we introduce SwaGen, a graph neural network-based generative model. We apply SwaGen to resilient swarm generation by defining a task-specific loss function, optimizing the contradicting trade-off terms simultaneously. With this, SwaGen reveals unique spatial configurations, optimizing the trade-off at both ends. Applying the model can guide the design of robust artificial swarms and deepen our understanding of natural swarm dynamics.