In many situations, communication between agents is a critical component of cooperative multi-agent systems, however, it can be difficult to learn or evolve. In this paper, we investigate a simple way in which the emergence of communication may be facilitated. Namely, we explore the effects of when agents can mimic preexisting, externally generated useful signals. The key idea here is that these signals incentivise listeners to develop positive responses, that can then also be invoked by speakers mimicking those signals. This investigation starts with formalising this problem, and demonstrating that this form of mimicry changes optimisation dynamics and may provide the opportunity to escape non-communicative local optima. We then explore the problem empirically with a simulation in which spatially situated agents must communicate to collect resources. Our results show that both evolutionary optimisation and reinforcement learning may benefit from this intervention.

We address the challenge of multi-agent cooperation, where agents achieve a common goal by interacting with a 3D scene and cooperating with decentralized agents under complex partial observations. This involves managing communication costs and optimizing interaction trajectories in dynamic environments. Our research focuses on three primary limitations of existing cooperative agent systems. Firstly, current systems demonstrate inefficiency in managing acquired information through observation, resulting in declining planning performance as the environment becomes more complex with additional objects or goals. Secondly, the neglect of false plans in partially observable settings leads to suboptimal cooperative performance, as agents struggle to adapt to environmental changes influenced by the unseen actions of other agents. Lastly, the failure to incorporate spatial data into decision-making processes restricts the agent's ability to construct optimized trajectories. To overcome these limitations, we propose the RElevance and Validation-Enhanced Cooperative Language Agent (REVECA), a novel cognitive architecture powered by GPT-3.5. REVECA leverages relevance assessment, plan validation, and spatial information to enhance the efficiency and robustness of agent cooperation in dynamic and partially observable environments while minimizing continuous communication costs and effectively managing irrelevant dummy objects. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of REVECA over previous approaches, including those driven by GPT-4.0. Additionally, a user study highlights REVECA's potential for achieving trustworthy human-AI cooperation. We expect that REVECA will have significant applications in gaming, XR applications, educational tools, and humanoid robots, contributing to substantial economic, commercial, and academic advancements.

Moreover, the program committee comprised researchers from 12 countries across five continents. The workshop featured six keynote speakers, oral sessions, poster sessions, a panel discussion, and a networking lunch. Of the 20 submitted papers, six were selected for oral and poster presentation, and an additional nine were selected for poster presentation only. The acceptance rate was, therefore, 75%. All accepted papers are published in the open-access workshop's proceedings at https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3649/.

The study of behavioral diversity in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a nascent yet promising field. In this context, the present work deals with the question of how to control the diversity of a multi-agent system. With no existing approaches to control diversity to a set value, current solutions focus on blindly promoting it via intrinsic rewards or additional loss functions, effectively changing the learning objective and lacking a principled measure for it. To address this, we introduce Diversity Control (DiCo), a method able to control diversity to an exact value of a given metric by representing policies as the sum of a parameter-shared component and dynamically scaled per-agent components. By applying constraints directly to the policy architecture, DiCo leaves the learning objective unchanged, enabling its applicability to any actor-critic MARL algorithm. We theoretically prove that DiCo achieves the desired diversity, and we provide several experiments, both in cooperative and competitive tasks, that show how DiCo can be employed as a novel paradigm to increase performance and sample efficiency in MARL. Multimedia results are available on the paper's website: https://sites.google.com/view/dico-marl.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as integral tools for reasoning, planning, and decision-making, drawing upon their extensive world knowledge and proficiency in language-related tasks. LLMs thus hold tremendous potential for natural language interaction within multi-agent systems to foster cooperation. However, LLM agents tend to over-report and comply with any instruction, which may result in information redundancy and confusion in multi-agent cooperation. Inspired by human organizations, this paper introduces a framework that imposes prompt-based organization structures on LLM agents to mitigate these problems. Through a series of experiments with embodied LLM agents and human-agent collaboration, our results highlight the impact of designated leadership on team efficiency, shedding light on the leadership qualities displayed by LLM agents and their spontaneous cooperative behaviors. Further, we harness the potential of LLMs to propose enhanced organizational prompts, via a Criticize-Reflect process, resulting in novel organization structures that reduce communication costs and enhance team efficiency.

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) hold promise for tasks requiring extensive collaboration, traditional multi-agent simulators have facilitated rich explorations of an interactive artificial society that reflects collective behavior. However, these existing simulators face significant limitations. Firstly, they struggle with handling large numbers of agents due to high resource demands. Secondly, they often assume agents possess perfect information and limitless capabilities, hindering the ecological validity of simulated social interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose a multi-agent Minecraft simulator, MineLand, that bridges this gap by introducing three key features: large-scale scalability, limited multimodal senses, and physical needs. Our simulator supports 64 or more agents. Agents have limited visual, auditory, and environmental awareness, forcing them to actively communicate and collaborate to fulfill physical needs like food and resources. Additionally, we further introduce an AI agent framework, Alex, inspired by multitasking theory, enabling agents to handle intricate coordination and scheduling. Our experiments demonstrate that the simulator, the corresponding benchmark, and the AI agent framework contribute to more ecological and nuanced collective behavior.The source code of MineLand and Alex is openly available at https://github.com/cocacola-lab/MineLand.

In numerous predictive scenarios, the predictive model affects the sampling distribution; for example, job applicants often meticulously craft their resumes to navigate through a screening systems. Such shifts in distribution are particularly prevalent in the realm of social computing, yet, the strategies to learn these shifts from data remain remarkably limited. Inspired by a microeconomic model that adeptly characterizes agents' behavior within labor markets, we introduce a novel approach to learn the distribution shift. Our method is predicated on a reverse causal model, wherein the predictive model instigates a distribution shift exclusively through a finite set of agents' actions. Within this framework, we employ a microfoundation model for the agents' actions and develop a statistically justified methodology to learn the distribution shift map, which we demonstrate to be effective in minimizing the performative prediction risk.

UPenn Wharton School Associate Professor Ethan Mollick weighs in on the Biden White House's new guidelines for artificial intelligence in the workplace on'Fox News Live.' South Korea's science and information technology minister said on Wednesday the world must cooperate to ensure the successful development of AI, as a global summit on the rapidly evolving technology hosted by his country wrapped up. A separate pledge was signed on Wednesday by 14 companies including Alphabet's Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and six Korean companies to use methods such as watermarking to help identify AI-generated content, as well as ensure job creation and help for socially vulnerable groups. "Cooperation is not an option, it is a necessity," Lee Jong-Ho, South Korea's Minister of Science and ICT (information and communication technologies), said in an interview with Reuters. Han Duck-soo, South Korean Prime Minister, gives a speech during the opening ceremony of the AI Global Forum in Seoul, South Korea, on May 22, 2024. South Korea's science and information technology minister said on Wednesday the world must cooperate to ensure the successful development of AI, as the summit on the rapidly evolving technology hosted by his country wrapped up.

Traditionally, cognitive and computer scientists have viewed intelligence solipsistically, as a property of unitary agents devoid of social context. Given the success of contemporary learning algorithms, we argue that the bottleneck in artificial intelligence (AI) progress is shifting from data assimilation to novel data generation. We bring together evidence showing that natural intelligence emerges at multiple scales in networks of interacting agents via collective living, social relationships and major evolutionary transitions, which contribute to novel data generation through mechanisms such as population pressures, arms races, Machiavellian selection, social learning and cumulative culture. Many breakthroughs in AI exploit some of these processes, from multi-agent structures enabling algorithms to master complex games like Capture-The-Flag and StarCraft II, to strategic communication in Diplomacy and the shaping of AI data streams by other AIs. Moving beyond a solipsistic view of agency to integrate these mechanisms suggests a path to human-like compounding innovation through ongoing novel data generation.

We study reinforcement learning for global decision-making in the presence of many local agents, where the global decision-maker makes decisions affecting all local agents, and the objective is to learn a policy that maximizes the rewards of both the global and the local agents. Such problems find many applications, e.g. demand response, EV charging, queueing, etc. In this setting, scalability has been a long-standing challenge due to the size of the state/action space which can be exponential in the number of agents. This work proposes the $\texttt{SUB-SAMPLE-Q}$ algorithm where the global agent subsamples $k\leq n$ local agents to compute an optimal policy in time that is only exponential in $k$, providing an exponential speedup from standard methods that are exponential in $n$. We show that the learned policy converges to the optimal policy in the order of $\tilde{O}(1/\sqrt{k}+\epsilon_{k,m})$ as the number of sub-sampled agents $k$ increases, where $\epsilon_{k,m}$ is the Bellman noise, by proving a novel generalization of the Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz inequality to the regime of sampling without replacement. We also conduct numerical simulations in a demand-response setting and a queueing setting.