Sequential decision making addresses the problem of adapting an agent to an unknown environment, where the agent learns through a feedback loop by repeatedly receiving contexts, selecting actions, and observing feedback. This approach has been widely applied in real-world scenarios, including recommendation systems (Li et al., 2010; Agarwal et al., 2016), healthcare Tewari and Murphy (2017); Svensson (2023), and dialogue systems (Li et al., 2016). With the significant success of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing (Brown et al., 2020; Ouyang et al., 2022; Achiam et al., 2023), an important next step is to extend this success to sequential decision making and enhance applications therein. Existing efforts to leverage LLMs for sequential decision making focus on two directions: (i) viewing decision making as sequence modeling and re-training or finetuning large models to adapt them to unknown environments (Chen et al., 2021; Zheng et al., 2022; Reid et al., 2022; Sun et al., 2023; Raparthy et al., 2023; Lee et al., 2024), and (ii) utilizing prompt engineering and in-context learning to adapt pretrained large models to sequential decision making problems (Krishnamurthy et al., 2024). While the first approach usually achieves promising empirical results, it is hindered by the substantial computational burden associated with re-training or finetuning large models, which often contain hundreds of billions of parameters. The second approach (Krishnamurthy et al., 2024), on the other hand, has demonstrated that most in-context learning and prompt engineering methods fail to effectively adapt LLMs to sequential decision making environments, except when employing the most advanced models, i.e., GPT-4 (Achiam et al., 2023), with sophisticated prompt designs. In this paper, we propose a new approach to efficiently incorporate large pretrained models into sequential decision making environments, without the need for expensive model re-training or finetuning. We run experiments (see Figure 1 and its caption for settings) on the AmazonCat-13K dataset (Bhatia et al., 2016) and observe that: Vanilla LLMs as decision making agents exhibit strong initial performance thanks to their significant commonsense knowledge and remarkable reasoning ability.

To effectively implement quantum algorithms on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) processors is a central task in modern quantum technology. NISQ processors feature tens to a few hundreds of noisy qubits with limited coherence times and gate operations with errors, so NISQ algorithms naturally require employing circuits of short lengths via quantum compilation. Here, we develop a reinforcement learning (RL)-based quantum compiler for a superconducting processor and demonstrate its capability of discovering novel and hardware-amenable circuits with short lengths. We show that for the three-qubit quantum Fourier transformation, a compiled circuit using only seven CZ gates with unity circuit fidelity can be achieved. The compiler is also able to find optimal circuits under device topological constraints, with lengths considerably shorter than those by the conventional method. Our study exemplifies the codesign of the software with hardware for efficient quantum compilation, offering valuable insights for the advancement of RL-based compilers.

This perspective piece calls for the study of the new field of Intersymbolic AI, by which we mean the combination of symbolic AI, whose building blocks have inherent significance/meaning, with subsymbolic AI, whose entirety creates significance/effect despite the fact that individual building blocks escape meaning. Canonical kinds of symbolic AI are logic, games and planning. Canonical kinds of subsymbolic AI are (un)supervised machine and reinforcement learning. Intersymbolic AI interlinks the worlds of symbolic AI with its compositional symbolic significance and meaning and of subsymbolic AI with its summative significance or effect to enable culminations of insights from both worlds by going between and across symbolic AI insights with subsymbolic AI techniques that are being helped by symbolic AI principles. For example, Intersymbolic AI may start with symbolic AI to understand a dynamic system, continue with subsymbolic AI to learn its control, and end with symbolic AI to safely use the outcome of the learned subsymbolic AI controller in the dynamic system. Intersymbolic AI combines both symbolic and subsymbolic AI to increase the effectiveness of AI compared to either kind of AI alone, in much the same way that the combination of both conscious and subconscious thought increases the effectiveness of human thought compared to either kind of thought alone. Some successful contributions to the Intersymbolic AI paradigm are surveyed here but many more are considered possible by advancing Intersymbolic AI.

Modular, distributed and multi-core architectures are currently considered a promising approach for scalability of quantum computing systems. The integration of multiple Quantum Processing Units necessitates classical and quantum-coherent communication, introducing challenges related to noise and quantum decoherence in quantum state transfers between cores. Optimizing communication becomes imperative, and the compilation and mapping of quantum circuits onto physical qubits must minimize state transfers while adhering to architectural constraints. The compilation process, inherently an NP-hard problem, demands extensive search times even with a small number of qubits to be solved to optimality. To address this challenge efficiently, we advocate for the utilization of heuristic mappers that can rapidly generate solutions. In this work, we propose a novel approach employing Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods to learn these heuristics for a specific multi-core architecture. Our DRL agent incorporates a Transformer encoder and Graph Neural Networks. It encodes quantum circuits using self-attention mechanisms and produce outputs through an attention-based pointer mechanism that directly signifies the probability of matching logical qubits with physical cores. This enables the selection of optimal cores for logical qubits efficiently. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed method can outperform baseline approaches in terms of reducing inter-core communications and minimizing online time-to-solution. This research contributes to the advancement of scalable quantum computing systems by introducing a novel learning-based heuristic approach for efficient quantum circuit compilation and mapping.

Metacognition is the concept of reasoning about an agent's own internal processes and was originally introduced in the field of developmental psychology. In this position paper, we examine the concept of applying metacognition to artificial intelligence. We introduce a framework for understanding metacognitive artificial intelligence (AI) that we call TRAP: transparency, reasoning, adaptation, and perception. We discuss each of these aspects in-turn and explore how neurosymbolic AI (NSAI) can be leveraged to address challenges of metacognition.

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) is an emerging technology that enables vehicles to perform high-intensity tasks by executing tasks locally or offloading them to nearby edge devices. However, obstacles such as buildings may degrade the communications and incur communication interruptions, and thus the vehicle may not meet the requirement for task offloading. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) is introduced to support vehicle communication and provide an alternative communication path. The system performance can be improved by flexibly adjusting the phase-shift of the RIS. For RIS-assisted VEC system where tasks arrive randomly, we design a control scheme that considers offloading power, local power allocation and phase-shift optimization. To solve this non-convex problem, we propose a new deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework that employs modified multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) approach to optimize the power allocation for vehicle users (VUs) and block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm to optimize the phase-shift of the RIS. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme outperforms the centralized deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) scheme and random scheme.

Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithms, trained only to optimize task reward, can lead to a concentration of power where the failure or adversarial intent of a single agent could decimate the reward of every agent in the system. In the context of teams of people, it is often useful to explicitly consider how power is distributed to ensure no person becomes a single point of failure. Here, we argue that explicitly regularizing the concentration of power in cooperative RL systems can result in systems which are more robust to single agent failure, adversarial attacks, and incentive changes of co-players. To this end, we define a practical pairwise measure of power that captures the ability of any co-player to influence the ego agent's reward, and then propose a power-regularized objective which balances task reward and power concentration. Given this new objective, we show that there always exists an equilibrium where every agent is playing a power-regularized best-response balancing power and task reward. Moreover, we present two algorithms for training agents towards this power-regularized objective: Sample Based Power Regularization (SBPR), which injects adversarial data during training; and Power Regularization via Intrinsic Motivation (PRIM), which adds an intrinsic motivation to regulate power to the training objective. Our experiments demonstrate that both algorithms successfully balance task reward and power, leading to lower power behavior than the baseline of task-only reward and avoid catastrophic events in case an agent in the system goes off-policy.

This work aims to investigate semantic communication in high-speed mobile Internet of vehicles (IoV) environments, with a focus on the spectrum sharing between vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. We specifically address spectrum scarcity and network traffic and then propose a semantic-aware spectrum sharing algorithm (SSS) based on the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) soft actor-critic (SAC) approach. Firstly, we delve into the extraction of semantic information. Secondly, we redefine metrics for semantic information in V2V and V2I spectrum sharing in IoV environments, introducing high-speed semantic spectrum efficiency (HSSE) and semantic transmission rate (HSR). Finally, we employ the SAC algorithm for decision optimization in V2V and V2I spectrum sharing based on semantic information. This optimization encompasses the optimal link of V2V and V2I sharing strategies, the transmission power for vehicles sending semantic information and the length of transmitted semantic symbols, aiming at maximizing HSSE of V2I and enhancing success rate of effective semantic information transmission (SRS) of V2V. Experimental results demonstrate that the SSS algorithm outperforms other baseline algorithms, including other traditional-communication-based spectrum sharing algorithms and spectrum sharing algorithm using other reinforcement learning approaches. The SSS algorithm exhibits a 15% increase in HSSE and approximately a 7% increase in SRS.

Reward Machines provide an automata-inspired structure for specifying instructions, safety constraints, and other temporally extended reward-worthy behaviour. By exposing complex reward function structure, they enable counterfactual learning updates that have resulted in impressive sample efficiency gains. While Reward Machines have been employed in both tabular and deep RL settings, they have typically relied on a ground-truth interpretation of the domain-specific vocabulary that form the building blocks of the reward function. Such ground-truth interpretations can be elusive in many real-world settings, due in part to partial observability or noisy sensing. In this paper, we explore the use of Reward Machines for Deep RL in noisy and uncertain environments. We characterize this problem as a POMDP and propose a suite of RL algorithms that leverage task structure under uncertain interpretation of domain-specific vocabulary. Theoretical analysis exposes pitfalls in naive approaches to this problem, while experimental results show that our algorithms successfully leverage task structure to improve performance under noisy interpretations of the vocabulary. Our results provide a general framework for exploiting Reward Machines in partially observable environments.

Recent advancements in general-purpose AI have highlighted the importance of guiding AI systems towards the intended goals, ethical principles, and values of individuals and groups, a concept broadly recognized as alignment. However, the lack of clarified definitions and scopes of human-AI alignment poses a significant obstacle, hampering collaborative efforts across research domains to achieve this alignment. In particular, ML- and philosophy-oriented alignment research often views AI alignment as a static, unidirectional process (i.e., aiming to ensure that AI systems' objectives match humans) rather than an ongoing, mutual alignment problem [429]. This perspective largely neglects the long-term interaction and dynamic changes of alignment. To understand these gaps, we introduce a systematic review of over 400 papers published between 2019 and January 2024, spanning multiple domains such as Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and others. We characterize, define and scope human-AI alignment. From this, we present a conceptual framework of "Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment" to organize the literature from a human-centered perspective. This framework encompasses both 1) conventional studies of aligning AI to humans that ensures AI produces the intended outcomes determined by humans, and 2) a proposed concept of aligning humans to AI, which aims to help individuals and society adjust to AI advancements both cognitively and behaviorally. Additionally, we articulate the key findings derived from literature analysis, including discussions about human values, interaction techniques, and evaluations. To pave the way for future studies, we envision three key challenges for future directions and propose examples of potential future solutions.