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 Agent Societies


LEED: A Highly Efficient and Scalable LLM-Empowered Expert Demonstrations Framework for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) holds substantial promise for intelligent decision-making in complex environments. However, it suffers from a coordination and scalability bottleneck as the number of agents increases. To address these issues, we propose the LLM-empowered expert demonstrations framework for multi-agent reinforcement learning (LEED). LEED consists of two components: a demonstration generation (DG) module and a policy optimization (PO) module. Specifically, the DG module leverages large language models to generate instructions for interacting with the environment, thereby producing high-quality demonstrations. The PO module adopts a decentralized training paradigm, where each agent utilizes the generated demonstrations to construct an expert policy loss, which is then integrated with its own policy loss. This enables each agent to effectively personalize and optimize its local policy based on both expert knowledge and individual experience. Experimental results show that LEED achieves superior sample efficiency, time efficiency, and robust scalability compared to state-of-the-art baselines.


Local-Canonicalization Equivariant Graph Neural Networks for Sample-Efficient and Generalizable Swarm Robot Control

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for coordinating swarms of agents in complex decision-making, yet major challenges remain. In competitive settings such as pursuer-evader tasks, simultaneous adaptation can destabilize training; non-kinetic countermeasures often fail under adverse conditions; and policies trained in one configuration rarely generalize to environments with a different number of agents. To address these issues, we propose the Local-Canonicalization Equivariant Graph Neural Networks (LEGO) framework, which integrates seamlessly with popular MARL algorithms such as MAPPO. LEGO employs graph neural networks to capture permutation equivariance and generalization to different agent numbers, canonicalization to enforce E(n)-equivariance, and heterogeneous representations to encode role-specific inductive biases. Experiments on cooperative and competitive swarm benchmarks show that LEGO outperforms strong baselines and improves generalization. In real-world experiments, LEGO demonstrates robustness to varying team sizes and agent failure.


MIMIC-D: Multi-modal Imitation for MultI-agent Coordination with Decentralized Diffusion Policies

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As robots become more integrated in society, their ability to coordinate with other robots and humans on multi-modal tasks (those with multiple valid solutions) is crucial. We propose to learn such behaviors from expert demonstrations via imitation learning (IL). However, when expert demonstrations are multi-modal, standard IL approaches can struggle to capture the diverse strategies, hindering effective coordination. Diffusion models are known to be effective at handling complex multi-modal trajectory distributions in single-agent systems. Diffusion models have also excelled in multi-agent scenarios where multi-modality is more common and crucial to learning coordinated behaviors. Typically, diffusion-based approaches require a centralized planner or explicit communication among agents, but this assumption can fail in real-world scenarios where robots must operate independently or with agents like humans that they cannot directly communicate with. Therefore, we propose MIMIC-D, a Centralized Training, Decentralized Execution (CTDE) paradigm for multi-modal multi-agent imitation learning using diffusion policies. Agents are trained jointly with full information, but execute policies using only local information to achieve implicit coordination. We demonstrate in both simulation and hardware experiments that our method recovers multi-modal coordination behavior among agents in a variety of tasks and environments, while improving upon state-of-the-art baselines.


Inject, Fork, Compare: Defining an Interaction Vocabulary for Multi-Agent Simulation Platforms

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

LLM-based multi-agent simulations are a rapidly growing field of research, but current simulations often lack clear modes for interaction and analysis, limiting the "what if" scenarios researchers are able to investigate. In this demo, we define three core operations for interacting with multi-agent simulations: inject, fork, and compare. Inject allows researchers to introduce external events at any point during simulation execution. Fork creates independent timeline branches from any timestamp, preserving complete state while allowing divergent exploration. Compare facilitates parallel observation of multiple branches, revealing how different interventions lead to distinct emergent behaviors. Together, these operations establish a vocabulary that transforms linear simulation workflows into interactive, explorable spaces. We demonstrate this vocabulary through a commodity market simulation with fourteen AI agents, where researchers can inject contrasting events and observe divergent outcomes across parallel timelines. By defining these fundamental operations, we provide a starting point for systematic causal investigation in LLM-based agent simulations, moving beyond passive observation toward active experimentation.


Emergent Social Dynamics of LLM Agents in the El Farol Bar Problem

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We investigate the emergent social dynamics of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in a spatially extended El Farol Bar problem, observing how they autonomously navigate this classic social dilemma. As a result, the LLM agents generated a spontaneous motivation to go to the bar and changed their decision making by becoming a collective. We also observed that the LLM agents did not solve the problem completely, but rather behaved more like humans. These findings reveal a complex interplay between external incentives (prompt-specified constraints such as the 60% threshold) and internal incentives (culturally-encoded social preferences derived from pre-training), demonstrating that LLM agents naturally balance formal game-theoretic rationality with social motivations that characterize human behavior. These findings suggest that a new model of group decision making, which could not be handled in the previous game-theoretic problem setting, can be realized by LLM agents.


A Visualized Framework for Event Cooperation with Generative Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the simulation of agent societies, enabling autonomous planning, memory formation, and social interactions. However, existing frameworks often overlook systematic evaluations for event organization and lack visualized integration with physically grounded environments, limiting agents' ability to navigate spaces and interact with items realistically. We develop Mini-AgentPro, a visualization platform featuring an intuitive map editor for customizing environments and a simulation player with smooth animations. Based on this tool, we introduce a comprehensive test set comprising eight diverse event scenarios with basic and hard variants to assess agents' ability. Evaluations using GPT -4o demonstrate strong performance in basic settings but highlight coordination challenges in hard variants.


Comprehend, Divide, and Conquer: Feature Subspace Exploration via Multi-Agent Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Feature selection aims to preprocess the target dataset, find an optimal and most streamlined feature subset, and enhance the downstream machine learning task. Among filter, wrapper, and embedded-based approaches, the reinforcement learning (RL)-based subspace exploration strategy provides a novel objective optimization-directed perspective and promising performance. Nevertheless, even with improved performance, current reinforcement learning approaches face challenges similar to conventional methods when dealing with complex datasets. These challenges stem from the inefficient paradigm of using one agent per feature and the inherent complexities present in the datasets. This observation motivates us to investigate and address the above issue and propose a novel approach, namely HRLFS. Our methodology initially employs a Large Language Model (LLM)-based hybrid state extractor to capture each feature's mathematical and semantic characteristics. Based on this information, features are clustered, facilitating the construction of hierarchical agents for each cluster and sub-cluster. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency, scalability, and robustness of our approach. Compared to contemporary or the one-feature-one-agent RL-based approaches, HRLFS improves the downstream ML performance with iterative feature subspace exploration while accelerating total run time by reducing the number of agents involved.


Self-Supervised Goal-Reaching Results in Multi-Agent Cooperation and Exploration

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

For groups of autonomous agents to achieve a particular goal, they must engage in coordination and long-horizon reasoning. However, designing reward functions to elicit such behavior is challenging. In this paper, we study how self-supervised goal-reaching techniques can be leveraged to enable agents to cooperate. The key idea is that, rather than have agents maximize some scalar reward, agents aim to maximize the likelihood of visiting a certain goal. This problem setting enables human users to specify tasks via a single goal state rather than implementing a complex reward function. While the feedback signal is quite sparse, we will demonstrate that self-supervised goal-reaching techniques enable agents to learn from such feedback. On MARL benchmarks, our proposed method outperforms alternative approaches that have access to the same sparse reward signal as our method. While our method has no explicit mechanism for exploration, we observe that self-supervised multi-agent goal-reaching leads to emergent cooperation and exploration in settings where alternative approaches never witness a single successful trial.


Federated Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Privacy-Preserving and Energy-Aware Resource Management in 6G Edge Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--As sixth-generation (6G) networks move toward ultra-dense, intelligent edge environments, efficient resource management under stringent privacy, mobility, and energy constraints becomes critical. This paper introduces a novel Federated Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (Fed-MARL) framework that incorporates cross-layer orchestration of both the MAC layer and application layer for energy-efficient, privacy-preserving, and real-time resource management across heterogeneous edge devices. Each agent uses a Deep Recurrent Q-Network (DRQN) to learn decentralized policies for task offloading, spectrum access, and CPU energy adaptation based on local observations (e.g., queue length, energy, CPU usage, and mobility). T o protect privacy, we introduce a secure aggregation protocol based on elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange, which ensures accurate model updates without exposing raw data to semi-honest adversaries. We formulate the resource management problem as a partially observable multi-agent Markov decision process (POMMDP) with a multi-objective reward function that jointly optimizes latency, energy efficiency, spectral efficiency, fairness, and reliability under 6G-specific service requirements such as URLLC, eMBB, and mMTC. Simulation results demonstrate that Fed-MARL outperforms centralized MARL and heuristic baselines in task success rate, latency, energy efficiency, and fairness, while ensuring robust privacy protection and scalability in dynamic, resource-constrained 6G edge networks. Sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks are poised to transform communication systems by enabling ultra-dense connectivity, low-latency services, and intelligent edge processing capabilities [1]. These advances are critical for emerging applications such as autonomous driving, augmented reality, and massive Internet of Things (IoT) deployments, each imposing diverse and stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirements [2], [3]. Efficiently meeting these demands requires decentralized, real-time resource management frameworks capable of operating in highly dynamic, interference-prone, and energy-constrained environments under strict privacy conditions. Traditional centralized resource management architectures, which depend on global network knowledge for task offload-ing, spectrum allocation, and computational scheduling, face significant limitations in 6G contexts [4], [5]. These include scalability bottlenecks, latency, communication overhead, and privacy concerns, particularly when raw user data must be aggregated [6].


Virtual Agent Economies

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rapid adoption of autonomous AI agents is giving rise to a new economic layer where agents transact and coordinate at scales and speeds beyond direct human oversight. We propose the "sandbox economy" as a framework for analyzing this emergent system, characterizing it along two key dimensions: its origins (emergent vs. intentional) and its degree of separateness from the established human economy (permeable vs. impermeable). Our current trajectory points toward a spontaneous emergence of a vast and highly permeable AI agent economy, presenting us with opportunities for an unprecedented degree of coordination as well as significant challenges, including systemic economic risk and exacerbated inequality. Here we discuss a number of possible design choices that may lead to safely steerable AI agent markets. In particular, we consider auction mechanisms for fair resource allocation and preference resolution, the design of AI "mission economies" to coordinate around achieving collective goals, and socio-technical infrastructure needed to ensure trust, safety, and accountability. By doing this, we argue for the proactive design of steerable agent markets to ensure the coming technological shift aligns with humanity's long-term collective flourishing.