DSGN: A Dual-Stream Gated Network for Scalable Simultaneous Surveillance and Containment

Overview & Synopsis

The simultaneous surveillance and containment (SSC) problem arises in multi-robot applications such as perimeter security and environmental monitoring, where robots must survey a region of interest and coordinate to enclose targets once they are detected. Surveillance favors spatial dispersion for coverage, whereas containment requires target-centric cohesion for enclosure. This conflict makes heuristic switching unstable, and the instability becomes more pronounced as larger robotic networks introduce more inter-agent and agent-target relations. End-to-end DRL reduces reliance on hand-crafted switching, but conventional single-stream policies often mix surveillance and containment cues in one shared feature space that could entangle dispersion-oriented and target-centric signals and weaken task transitions. In this paper, we propose the Dual-Stream Gated Network (DSGN), an architecture designed to address scale-amplified task-transition difficulties by separating surveillance and containment into specialized representation streams and coordinating them through a context-aware gating mechanism. A probabilistic prior further regularizes the gating process, reducing ambiguous intermediate decisions and supporting clearer behavioral transitions under large-scale interaction complexity. Evaluations show that DSGN maintains strong task efficacy and scalability under constant-density cross-scale settings. Additional ablation and phase-specific evaluations show that the proposed dynamic gating mechanism and probabilistic prior support effective task arbitration and reliable mode switching in both pure surveillance and task-switching scenarios. The source code is available at https://github.com/zuozysama/DSGN.