With more advanced natural language understanding and reasoning capabilities, large language model (LLM)-powered agents are increasingly developed in simulated environments to perform complex tasks, interact with other agents, and exhibit emergent behaviors relevant to social science and gaming. However, current multi-agent simulations frequently suffer from inefficiencies due to the limited parallelism caused by false dependencies, resulting in performance bottlenecks. In this paper, we introduce AI Metropolis, a simulation engine that improves the efficiency of LLM agent simulations by incorporating out-of-order execution scheduling. By dynamically tracking real dependencies between agents, AI Metropolis minimizes false dependencies, enhancing parallelism and enabling efficient hardware utilization. Our evaluations demonstrate that AI Metropolis achieves speedups from 1.3x to 4.15x over standard parallel simulation with global synchronization, approaching optimal performance as the number of agents increases.

Socio-technical networks represent emerging cyber-physical infrastructures that are tightly interwoven with human networks. The coupling between human and technical networks presents significant challenges in managing, controlling, and securing these complex, interdependent systems. This paper investigates game-theoretic frameworks for the design and control of socio-technical networks, with a focus on critical applications such as misinformation management, infrastructure optimization, and resilience in socio-cyber-physical systems (SCPS). Core methodologies, including Stackelberg games, mechanism design, and dynamic game theory, are examined as powerful tools for modeling interactions in hierarchical, multi-agent environments. Key challenges addressed include mitigating human-driven vulnerabilities, managing large-scale system dynamics, and countering adversarial threats. By bridging individual agent behaviors with overarching system goals, this work illustrates how the integration of game theory and control theory can lead to robust, resilient, and adaptive socio-technical networks. This paper highlights the potential of these frameworks to dynamically align decentralized agent actions with system-wide objectives of stability, security, and efficiency.

Data science tasks involving tabular data present complex challenges that require sophisticated problem-solving approaches. We propose AutoKaggle, a powerful and user-centric framework that assists data scientists in completing daily data pipelines through a collaborative multi-agent system. AutoKaggle implements an iterative development process that combines code execution, debugging, and comprehensive unit testing to ensure code correctness and logic consistency. The framework offers highly customizable workflows, allowing users to intervene at each phase, thus integrating automated intelligence with human expertise. Our universal data science toolkit, comprising validated functions for data cleaning, feature engineering, and modeling, forms the foundation of this solution, enhancing productivity by streamlining common tasks. We selected 8 Kaggle competitions to simulate data processing workflows in real-world application scenarios. Evaluation results demonstrate that AutoKaggle achieves a validation submission rate of 0.85 and a comprehensive score of 0.82 in typical data science pipelines, fully proving its effectiveness and practicality in handling complex data science tasks.

Dynamic dispatching rules that allocate resources to tasks in real-time play a critical role in ensuring efficient operations of many automated material handling systems across industries. Traditionally, the dispatching rules deployed are typically the result of manually crafted heuristics based on domain experts' knowledge. Generating these rules is time-consuming and often sub-optimal. As enterprises increasingly accumulate vast amounts of operational data, there is significant potential to leverage this big data to enhance the performance of automated systems. One promising approach is to use Decision Transformers, which can be trained on existing enterprise data to learn better dynamic dispatching rules for improving system throughput. In this work, we study the application of Decision Transformers as dynamic dispatching policies within an actual multi-agent material handling system and identify scenarios where enterprises can effectively leverage Decision Transformers on existing big data to gain business value. Our empirical results demonstrate that Decision Transformers can improve the material handling system's throughput by a considerable amount when the heuristic originally used in the enterprise data exhibits moderate performance and involves no randomness. When the original heuristic has strong performance, Decision Transformers can still improve the throughput but with a smaller improvement margin. However, when the original heuristics contain an element of randomness or when the performance of the dataset is below a certain threshold, Decision Transformers fail to outperform the original heuristic. These results highlight both the potential and limitations of Decision Transformers as dispatching policies for automated industrial material handling systems.

Effective communication is an essential component in collaborative multi-agent systems. Situations where explicit messaging is not feasible have been common in human society throughout history, which motivate the study of implicit communication. Previous works on learning implicit communication mostly rely on theory of mind (ToM), where agents infer the mental states and intentions of others by interpreting their actions. However, ToM-based methods become less effective in making accurate inferences in complex tasks. In this work, we propose the Implicit Channel Protocol (ICP) framework, which allows agents to construct implicit communication channels similar to the explicit ones. ICP leverages a subset of actions, denoted as the scouting actions, and a mapping between information and these scouting actions that encodes and decodes the messages. We propose training algorithms for agents to message and act, including learning with a randomly initialized information map and with a delayed information map. The efficacy of ICP has been tested on the tasks of Guessing Number, Revealing Goals, and Hanabi, where ICP significantly outperforms baseline methods through more efficient information transmission.

In numerous artificial intelligence applications, the collaborative efforts of multiple intelligent agents are imperative for the successful attainment of target objectives. To enhance coordination among these agents, a distributed communication framework is often employed. However, indiscriminate information sharing among all agents can be resource-intensive, and the adoption of manually pre-defined communication architectures imposes constraints on inter-agent communication, thus limiting the potential for effective collaboration. Moreover, the communication framework often remains static during inference, which may result in sustained high resource consumption, as in most cases, only key decisions necessitate information sharing among agents. In this study, we introduce a novel approach wherein we conceptualize the communication architecture among agents as a learnable graph. We formulate this problem as the task of determining the communication graph while enabling the architecture parameters to update normally, thus necessitating a bi-level optimization process. Utilizing continuous relaxation of the graph representation and incorporating attention units, our proposed approach, CommFormer, efficiently optimizes the communication graph and concurrently refines architectural parameters through gradient descent in an end-to-end manner. Additionally, we introduce a temporal gating mechanism for each agent, enabling dynamic decisions on whether to receive shared information at a given time, based on current observations, thus improving decision-making efficiency. Extensive experiments on a variety of cooperative tasks substantiate the robustness of our model across diverse cooperative scenarios, where agents are able to develop more coordinated and sophisticated strategies regardless of changes in the number of agents.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that has been successfully applied to a wide variety of problems. However, it can be unpredictable and produce suboptimal results in complicated learning environments. This is especially true when multiple agents learn simultaneously, which creates a complex system that is often analytically intractable. Our work considers the fundamental framework of Q-learning in Public Goods Games, where RL individuals must work together to achieve a common goal. This setting allows us to study the tragedy of the commons and free rider effects in AI cooperation, an emerging field with potential to resolve challenging obstacles to the wider application of artificial intelligence. While this social dilemma has been mainly investigated through traditional and evolutionary game theory, our approach bridges the gap between these two by studying agents with an intermediate level of intelligence. Specifically, we consider the influence of learning parameters on cooperation levels in simulations and a limiting system of differential equations, as well as the effect of evolutionary pressures on exploration rate in both of these models. We find selection for higher and lower levels of exploration, as well as attracting values, and a condition that separates these in a restricted class of games. Our work enhances the theoretical understanding of evolutionary Q-learning, and extends our knowledge of the evolution of machine behavior in social dilemmas.

AI agents have been evaluated in isolation or within small groups, where interactions remain limited in scope and complexity. Large-scale simulations involving many autonomous agents -- reflecting the full spectrum of civilizational processes -- have yet to be explored. Here, we demonstrate how 10 - 1000+ AI agents behave and progress within agent societies. We first introduce the PIANO (Parallel Information Aggregation via Neural Orchestration) architecture, which enables agents to interact with humans and other agents in real-time while maintaining coherence across multiple output streams. We then evaluate agent performance in agent simulations using civilizational benchmarks inspired by human history. These simulations, set within a Minecraft environment, reveal that agents are capable of meaningful progress -- autonomously developing specialized roles, adhering to and changing collective rules, and engaging in cultural and religious transmission. These preliminary results show that agents can achieve significant milestones towards AI civilizations, opening new avenues for large simulations, agentic organizational intelligence, and integrating AI into human civilizations.

The cooperative driving technology of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) is crucial for improving the efficiency and safety of transportation systems. Learning-based methods, such as Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), have demonstrated strong capabilities in cooperative decision-making tasks. However, existing MARL approaches still face challenges in terms of learning efficiency and performance. In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly advanced and shown remarkable abilities in various sequential decision-making tasks. To enhance the learning capabilities of cooperative agents while ensuring decision-making efficiency and cost-effectiveness, we propose LDPD, a language-driven policy distillation method for guiding MARL exploration. In this framework, a teacher agent based on LLM trains smaller student agents to achieve cooperative decision-making through its own decision-making demonstrations. The teacher agent enhances the observation information of CAVs and utilizes LLMs to perform complex cooperative decision-making reasoning, which also leverages carefully designed decision-making tools to achieve expert-level decisions, providing high-quality teaching experiences. The student agent then refines the teacher's prior knowledge into its own model through gradient policy updates. The experiments demonstrate that the students can rapidly improve their capabilities with minimal guidance from the teacher and eventually surpass the teacher's performance. Extensive experiments show that our approach demonstrates better performance and learning efficiency compared to baseline methods.

We study the cooperative stochastic $k$-armed bandit problem, where a network of $m$ agents collaborate to find the optimal action. In contrast to most prior work on this problem, which focuses on extending a specific algorithm to the multi-agent setting, we provide a black-box reduction that allows us to extend any single-agent bandit algorithm to the multi-agent setting. Under mild assumptions on the bandit environment, we prove that our reduction transfers the regret guarantees of the single-agent algorithm to the multi-agent setting. These guarantees are tight in subgaussian environments, in that using a near minimax optimal single-player algorithm is near minimax optimal in the multi-player setting up to an additive graph-dependent quantity. Our reduction and theoretical results are also general, and apply to many different bandit settings. By plugging in appropriate single-player algorithms, we can easily develop provably efficient algorithms for many multi-player settings such as heavy-tailed bandits, duelling bandits and bandits with local differential privacy, among others. Experimentally, our approach is competitive with or outperforms specialised multi-agent algorithms.