Credit Assignment and Fine-Tuning Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Collaborative Spatial Crowdsourcing

Credit Assignment and Fine-Tuning Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Collaborative Spatial Crowdsourcing

Wei Chen, Yafei Li, Baolong Mei, Guanglei Zhu, Jiaqi Wu, Mingliang Xu

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4119-4127. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/459

Collaborative spatial crowdsourcing leverages distributed workers' collective intelligence to accomplish spatial tasks. A central challenge is to efficiently assign suitable workers to collaborate on these tasks. Although mainstream reinforcement learning (RL) methods have proven effective in task allocation, they face two key obstacles: delayed reward feedback and non-stationary data distributions, both hindering optimal allocation and collaborative efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose CAFE (credit assignment and fine-tuning enhanced), a novel multi-agent RL framework for spatial crowdsourcing. CAFE introduces a credit assignment mechanism that distributes rewards based on workers' contributions and spatiotemporal constraints, coupled with bi-level meta-optimization to jointly optimize credit assignment and RL policy. To handle non-stationary spatial task distributions, CAFE employs an adaptive fine-tuning procedure that efficiently adjusts credit assignment parameters while preserving collaborative knowledge. Experiments on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our framework, demonstrating superior performance in terms of task completion and equitable reward redistribution.
Keywords:
Humans and AI: HAI: Human computation and crowdsourcing
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Applications
Humans and AI: HAI: Applications