Education
Attention-Augmented Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Graph Convolutions for Multi-Agent Task Allocation
Yin, Huilin, Yang, Zhikun, Zhang, Linchuan, Watzenig, Daniel
This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible. Multi-agent task allocation (MATA) plays a vital role in cooperative multi-agent systems, with significant implications for applications such as logistics, search and rescue, and robotic coordination. Although traditional deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods have been shown to be promising, their effectiveness is hindered by a reliance on manually designed reward functions and inefficiencies in dynamic environments. In this paper, an inverse reinforcement learning (IRL)-based framework is proposed, in which multi-head self-attention (MHSA) and graph attention mechanisms are incorporated to enhance reward function learning and task execution efficiency. Expert demonstrations are utilized to infer optimal reward densities, allowing dependence on handcrafted designs to be reduced and adaptability to be improved. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of the proposed method over widely used multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms in terms of both cumulative rewards and task execution efficiency.
Command A: An Enterprise-Ready Large Language Model
Cohere, Team, :, null, Aakanksha, null, Ahmadian, Arash, Ahmed, Marwan, Alammar, Jay, Alizadeh, Milad, Alnumay, Yazeed, Althammer, Sophia, Arkhangorodsky, Arkady, Aryabumi, Viraat, Aumiller, Dennis, Avalos, Raphaรซl, Aviv, Zahara, Bae, Sammie, Baji, Saurabh, Barbet, Alexandre, Bartolo, Max, Bebensee, Bjรถrn, Beladia, Neeral, Beller-Morales, Walter, Bรฉrard, Alexandre, Berneshawi, Andrew, Bialas, Anna, Blunsom, Phil, Bobkin, Matt, Bongale, Adi, Braun, Sam, Brunet, Maxime, Cahyawijaya, Samuel, Cairuz, David, Campos, Jon Ander, Cao, Cassie, Cao, Kris, Castagnรฉ, Roman, Cendrero, Juliรกn, Currie, Leila Chan, Chandak, Yash, Chang, Diane, Chatziveroglou, Giannis, Chen, Hongyu, Cheng, Claire, Chevalier, Alexis, Chiu, Justin T., Cho, Eugene, Choi, Eugene, Choi, Eujeong, Chung, Tim, Cirik, Volkan, Cismaru, Ana, Clavier, Pierre, Conklin, Henry, Crawhall-Stein, Lucas, Crouse, Devon, Cruz-Salinas, Andres Felipe, Cyrus, Ben, D'souza, Daniel, Dalla-Torre, Hugo, Dang, John, Darling, William, Domingues, Omar Darwiche, Dash, Saurabh, Debugne, Antoine, Dehaze, Thรฉo, Desai, Shaan, Devassy, Joan, Dholakia, Rishit, Duffy, Kyle, Edalati, Ali, Eldeib, Ace, Elkady, Abdullah, Elsharkawy, Sarah, Ergรผn, Irem, Ermis, Beyza, Fadaee, Marzieh, Fan, Boyu, Fayoux, Lucas, Flet-Berliac, Yannis, Frosst, Nick, Gallรฉ, Matthias, Galuba, Wojciech, Garg, Utsav, Geist, Matthieu, Azar, Mohammad Gheshlaghi, Gilsenan-McMahon, Ellen, Goldfarb-Tarrant, Seraphina, Goldsack, Tomas, Gomez, Aidan, Gonzaga, Victor Machado, Govindarajan, Nithya, Govindassamy, Manoj, Grinsztajn, Nathan, Gritsch, Nikolas, Gu, Patrick, Guo, Shangmin, Haefeli, Kilian, Hajjar, Rod, Hawes, Tim, He, Jingyi, Hofstรคtter, Sebastian, Hong, Sungjin, Hooker, Sara, Hosking, Tom, Howe, Stephanie, Hu, Eric, Huang, Renjie, Jain, Hemant, Jain, Ritika, Jakobi, Nick, Jenkins, Madeline, Jordan, JJ, Joshi, Dhruti, Jung, Jason, Kalyanpur, Trushant, Kamalakara, Siddhartha Rao, Kedrzycki, Julia, Keskin, Gokce, Kim, Edward, Kim, Joon, Ko, Wei-Yin, Kocmi, Tom, Kozakov, Michael, Kryลciลski, Wojciech, Jain, Arnav Kumar, Teru, Komal Kumar, Land, Sander, Lasby, Michael, Lasche, Olivia, Lee, Justin, Lewis, Patrick, Li, Jeffrey, Li, Jonathan, Lin, Hangyu, Locatelli, Acyr, Luong, Kevin, Ma, Raymond, Mach, Lukรกลก, Machado, Marina, Magbitang, Joanne, Lopez, Brenda Malacara, Mann, Aryan, Marchisio, Kelly, Markham, Olivia, Matton, Alexandre, McKinney, Alex, McLoughlin, Dominic, Mokry, Jozef, Morisot, Adrien, Moulder, Autumn, Moynehan, Harry, Mozes, Maximilian, Muppalla, Vivek, Murakhovska, Lidiya, Nagarajan, Hemangani, Nandula, Alekhya, Nasir, Hisham, Nehra, Shauna, Netto-Rosen, Josh, Ohashi, Daniel, Owers-Bardsley, James, Ozuzu, Jason, Padilla, Dennis, Park, Gloria, Passaglia, Sam, Pekmez, Jeremy, Penstone, Laura, Piktus, Aleksandra, Ploeg, Case, Poulton, Andrew, Qi, Youran, Raghvendra, Shubha, Ramos, Miguel, Ranjan, Ekagra, Richemond, Pierre, Robert-Michon, Cรฉcile, Rodriguez, Aurรฉlien, Roy, Sudip, Ruder, Sebastian, Ruis, Laura, Rust, Louise, Sachan, Anubhav, Salamanca, Alejandro, Saravanakumar, Kailash Karthik, Satyakam, Isha, Sebag, Alice Schoenauer, Sen, Priyanka, Sepehri, Sholeh, Seshadri, Preethi, Shen, Ye, Sherborne, Tom, Shi, Sylvie Shang, Shivaprasad, Sanal, Shmyhlo, Vladyslav, Shrinivason, Anirudh, Shteinbuk, Inna, Shukayev, Amir, Simard, Mathieu, Snyder, Ella, Spataru, Ava, Spooner, Victoria, Starostina, Trisha, Strub, Florian, Su, Yixuan, Sun, Jimin, Talupuru, Dwarak, Tarassov, Eugene, Tommasone, Elena, Tracey, Jennifer, Trend, Billy, Tumer, Evren, รstรผn, Ahmet, Venkitesh, Bharat, Venuto, David, Verga, Pat, Voisin, Maxime, Wang, Alex, Wang, Donglu, Wang, Shijian, Wen, Edmond, White, Naomi, Willman, Jesse, Winkels, Marysia, Xia, Chen, Xie, Jessica, Xu, Minjie, Yang, Bowen, Yi-Chern, Tan, Zhang, Ivan, Zhao, Zhenyu, Zhao, Zhoujie
In this report we describe the development of Command A, a powerful large language model purpose-built to excel at real-world enterprise use cases. Command A is an agent-optimised and multilingual-capable model, with support for 23 languages of global business, and a novel hybrid architecture balancing efficiency with top of the range performance. It offers best-in-class Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities with grounding and tool use to automate sophisticated business processes. These abilities are achieved through a decentralised training approach, including self-refinement algorithms and model merging techniques. We also include results for Command R7B which shares capability and architectural similarities to Command A. Weights for both models have been released for research purposes. This technical report details our original training pipeline and presents an extensive evaluation of our models across a suite of enterprise-relevant tasks and public benchmarks, demonstrating excellent performance and efficiency.
GIScience in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: A Research Agenda Towards Autonomous GIS
Li, Zhenlong, Ning, Huan, Gao, Song, Janowicz, Krzysztof, Li, Wenwen, Arundel, Samantha T., Yang, Chaowei, Bhaduri, Budhendra, Wang, Shaowen, Zhu, A-Xing, Gahegan, Mark, Shekhar, Shashi, Ye, Xinyue, McKenzie, Grant, Cervone, Guido, Hodgson, Michael E.
The advent of generative AI exemplified by large language models (LLMs) opens new ways to represent and compute geographic information and transcends the process of geographic knowledge production, driving geographic information systems (GIS) towards autonomous GIS. Leveraging LLMs as the decision core, autonomous GIS can independently generate and execute geoprocessing workflows to perform spatial analysis. In this vision paper, we further elaborate on the concept of autonomous GIS and present a conceptual framework that defines its five autonomous goals, five autonomous levels, five core functions, and three operational scales. We demonstrate how autonomous GIS could perform geospatial data retrieval, spatial analysis, and map making with four proof-of-concept GIS agents. We conclude by identifying critical challenges and future research directions, including fine-tuning and self-growing decision-cores, autonomous modeling, and examining the societal and practical implications of autonomous GIS. By establishing the groundwork for a paradigm shift in GIScience, this paper envisions a future where GIS moves beyond traditional workflows to autonomously reason, derive, innovate, and advance geospatial solutions to pressing global challenges. Meanwhile, as we design and deploy increasingly intelligent geospatial systems, we carry a responsibility to ensure they are developed in socially responsible ways, serve the public good, and support the continued value of human geographic insight in an AI-augmented future.
Generative Data Imputation for Sparse Learner Performance Data Using Generative Adversarial Imputation Networks
Zhang, Liang, Lin, Jionghao, Sabatini, John, Zapata-Rivera, Diego, Forsyth, Carol, Jiang, Yang, Hollander, John, Hu, Xiangen, Graesser, Arthur C.
DV ANCEMENTS in AI-driven technologies have significantly enhanced modern education through personalized tutoring and adaptive learning strategies on online platforms [1], [2]. Intelligent T utoring Systems (ITSs) exemplify this progress by leveraging advanced machine learning and natural language processing models to create interactive learning environments that improve outcomes across domains like literacy [3], mathematics [4], language learning [5], biology [6] and other STEM fields [7]. As human learners interact with ITSs, often through question-and-answer scenarios with immediate responses, their performance data becomes crucial for learner modeling, enabling systems to track progress, predict future performance, and adapt instruction accordingly [8]. Learner models like Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) and other knowledge tracing variants utilize the learner performance data to uncover learning characteristics, estimate knowledge states and acquisition [9]. However, in real-world scenarios, missing learner performance data is prevalent due to factors, such as learner dropout or disengagement [10], technical issues or incomplete data logging [11], biased sampling within experimental groups [12], and more. These challenges often lead to sparse data, where items (i.e., questions or problems) remain unattempted (e.g., learners may bypass the question, leave it unanswered due to a lack of response initiation, or make no attempt to engage with it), alongside limited learner interactions [13], [14]. As shown in Figure 1, missing performance records can occur along both the attempt and question dimensions during learner-ITS interactions. In the right portion of the figure's two matrices, entries marked with "?
I started 'vibe coding' my own apps with AI and I'm loving it
I've always had an interest in programming, because I've always had an interest in computers. I put together websites in HTML as a teenager (which, yes, were hosted on GeoCities) and have been occasionally dabbling in Python since. Yet none of my projects got very far and, apart from my early websites, I never made anything useful. My efforts all followed a familiar pattern: I'd fixate on a particular resource--like an O'Reilly book or an online course--and get started with great enthusiasm, but as I'd realize I was months or years away from creating anything remotely useful, I'd give up. That changed in late 2024 when my general frustration with WordPress, which I was using for my personal website, got the better of me. In a fit, I threw my website's content plus a screenshot of it into Claude 3.5 Sonnet and asked the AI to replicate my site with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Beyond Worst-Case Online Classification: VC-Based Regret Bounds for Relaxed Benchmarks
Montasser, Omar, Shetty, Abhishek, Zhivotovskiy, Nikita
We revisit online binary classification by shifting the focus from competing with the best-in-class binary loss to competing against relaxed benchmarks that capture smoothed notions of optimality. Instead of measuring regret relative to the exact minimal binary error -- a standard approach that leads to worst-case bounds tied to the Littlestone dimension -- we consider comparing with predictors that are robust to small input perturbations, perform well under Gaussian smoothing, or maintain a prescribed output margin. Previous examples of this were primarily limited to the hinge loss. Our algorithms achieve regret guarantees that depend only on the VC dimension and the complexity of the instance space (e.g., metric entropy), and notably, they incur only an $O(\log(1/\gamma))$ dependence on the generalized margin $\gamma$. This stands in contrast to most existing regret bounds, which typically exhibit a polynomial dependence on $1/\gamma$. We complement this with matching lower bounds. Our analysis connects recent ideas from adversarial robustness and smoothed online learning.
DUE: A Deep Learning Framework and Library for Modeling Unknown Equations
Chen, Junfeng, Wu, Kailiang, Xiu, Dongbin
Equations, particularly differential equations, are fundamental for understanding natural phenomena and predicting complex dynamics across various scientific and engineering disciplines. However, the governing equations for many complex systems remain unknown due to intricate underlying mechanisms. Recent advancements in machine learning and data science offer a new paradigm for modeling unknown equations from measurement or simulation data. This paradigm shift, known as data-driven discovery or modeling, stands at the forefront of AI for science, with significant progress made in recent years. In this paper, we introduce a systematic framework for data-driven modeling of unknown equations using deep learning. This versatile framework is capable of learning unknown ODEs, PDEs, DAEs, IDEs, SDEs, reduced or partially observed systems, and non-autonomous differential equations. Based on this framework, we have developed Deep Unknown Equations (DUE), an open-source software package designed to facilitate the data-driven modeling of unknown equations using modern deep learning techniques. DUE serves as an educational tool for classroom instruction, enabling students and newcomers to gain hands-on experience with differential equations, data-driven modeling, and contemporary deep learning approaches such as FNN, ResNet, generalized ResNet, operator semigroup networks (OSG-Net), and Transformers. Additionally, DUE is a versatile and accessible toolkit for researchers across various scientific and engineering fields. It is applicable not only for learning unknown equations from data but also for surrogate modeling of known, yet complex, equations that are costly to solve using traditional numerical methods. We provide detailed descriptions of DUE and demonstrate its capabilities through diverse examples, which serve as templates that can be easily adapted for other applications.
Fast-Slow-Thinking: Complex Task Solving with Large Language Models
Sun, Yiliu, Zhang, Yanfang, Zhao, Zicheng, Wan, Sheng, Tao, Dacheng, Gong, Chen
Nowadays, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been gradually employed to solve complex tasks. To face the challenge, task decomposition has become an effective way, which proposes to divide a complex task into multiple simpler subtasks and then solve them separately so that the difficulty of the original task can be reduced. However, the performance of existing task decomposition methods can be suboptimal when the task contains overly complex logic and constraints. In this situation, the solution generated by LLMs may deviate from the original purpose of the task, or contain redundant or even erroneous content. Therefore, inspired by the fact that humans possess two thinking systems including fast thinking and slow thinking, this paper introduces a new task decomposition method termed ``Fast-Slow-Thinking'' (FST), which stimulates LLMs to solve tasks through the cooperation of Fast Thinking (FT) and Slow Thinking (ST) steps. Here FT focuses more on the general and concise aspect of the task, and ST focuses more on the details of the task. In FT, LLMs are prompted to remove the constraints of the original task, therefore simplifying it to a general and concise one. In ST, we recall the constraints removed in FT, so that LLMs can improve the answer generated in FT to meet the requirements of the original task. Therefore, our FST method enables LLMs to consider a complex problem via a human-like cognition process from coarse to fine, the effectiveness of which has been well demonstrated by the experiments on three types of tasks.
Voice Interaction With Conversational AI Could Facilitate Thoughtful Reflection and Substantive Revision in Writing
Kim, Jiho, Laban, Philippe, Chen, Xiang 'Anthony', Arnold, Kenneth C.
Writing well requires not only expressing ideas but also refining them through revision, a process facilitated by reflection. Prior research suggests that feedback delivered through dialogues, such as those in writing center tutoring sessions, can help writers reflect more thoughtfully on their work compared to static feedback. Recent advancements in multi-modal large language models (LLMs) now offer new possibilities for supporting interactive and expressive voice-based reflection in writing. In particular, we propose that LLM-generated static feedback can be repurposed as conversation starters, allowing writers to seek clarification, request examples, and ask follow-up questions, thereby fostering deeper reflection on their writing. We argue that voice-based interaction can naturally facilitate this conversational exchange, encouraging writers' engagement with higher-order concerns, facilitating iterative refinement of their reflections, and reduce cognitive load compared to text-based interactions. To investigate these effects, we propose a formative study exploring how text vs. voice input influence writers' reflection and subsequent revisions. Findings from this study will inform the design of intelligent and interactive writing tools, offering insights into how voice-based interactions with LLM-powered conversational agents can support reflection and revision.
Genius: A Generalizable and Purely Unsupervised Self-Training Framework For Advanced Reasoning
Xu, Fangzhi, Yan, Hang, Ma, Chang, Zhao, Haiteng, Sun, Qiushi, Cheng, Kanzhi, He, Junxian, Liu, Jun, Wu, Zhiyong
Advancing LLM reasoning skills has captivated wide interest. However, current post-training techniques rely heavily on supervisory signals, such as outcome supervision or auxiliary reward models, which face the problem of scalability and high annotation costs. This motivates us to enhance LLM reasoning without the need for external supervision. We introduce a generalizable and purely unsupervised self-training framework, named Genius. Without external auxiliary, Genius requires to seek the optimal response sequence in a stepwise manner and optimize the LLM. To explore the potential steps and exploit the optimal ones, Genius introduces a stepwise foresight re-sampling strategy to sample and estimate the step value by simulating future outcomes. Further, we recognize that the unsupervised setting inevitably induces the intrinsic noise and uncertainty. To provide a robust optimization, we propose an advantage-calibrated optimization (ACO) loss function to mitigate estimation inconsistencies. Combining these techniques together, Genius provides an advanced initial step towards self-improve LLM reasoning with general queries and without supervision, revolutionizing reasoning scaling laws given the vast availability of general queries. The code will be released at https://github.com/xufangzhi/Genius.