DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office is seeking innovative proposals in the technical areas of AU, control theory, formal methods and game theory to develop decentralized multi-agentic AI collectives.
DICE aims to crate a local adaptor that can interface with any agent and is responsible for peer-to-peer coordination and local control. The agents in DICE can be heterogeneous and use different foundation models.
DICE seeks to build a highly scalable decentralized coordination architecture that decomposes complex goals and fuses distributed situational context across specialized agents over long-time-horizons. The architecture will support multistep interaction among agents, iterative information gathering under partial observability, adaptive strategy refinement as the environment evolves, and resilience to broken links, conflicting information, agents going rogue by developing instrumental goals misaligned with mission, and the loss, failure, or adversarial compromise of individual agents. Through peer-to-peer coordination and resilient distributed consensus, agents will be able to self-organize into teams, allocate roles, and fuse conflicting, incomplete, or adversarial information without waiting for a central human or machine planner. In DICE, AI capabilities will emerge from the interactions among heterogeneous agents, extending beyond the intelligence of individual agents.
DICE is a 36month, 3-phase effort with 3 technical areas;
- Phase 1 – 9 months – decentralization and early demonstration of improvement against state-of-the-art multi-agent systems
- Phase 2 – 15 months – adversarial robustness
- Phase 3 – 12 months – scalability.
Proposals must address TA1 and TA2 together, OR TA 3 only. Organisations selected for TA3 will not be eligible for TA1 or TA2.
Technical Area 1 – self-organization via peer-to-peer coordination and distributed consensus
Technical Area 2 – role coherence and local inference control
Technical Area 3 – testing and evaluation
Abstracts (strongly encouraged but not mandatory) are due 30 June 2026.
Full proposals are due 25 August 2026.
Document
BAA – DICE – HR001126S0010-Amendment-01
