We present AVOCADO (AdaptiVe Optimal Collision Avoidance Driven by Opinion), a novel navigation approach to address holonomic robot collision avoidance when the degree of cooperation of the other agents in the environment is unknown. AVOCADO departs from a Velocity Obstacle's formulation akin to the Optimal Reciprocal Collision Avoidance method. However, instead of assuming reciprocity, AVOCADO poses an adaptive control problem that aims at adapting in real-time to the cooperation degree of other robots and agents. Adaptation is achieved through a novel nonlinear opinion dynamics design that relies solely on sensor observations. As a by-product, based on the nonlinear opinion dynamics, we propose a novel method to avoid the deadlocks under geometrical symmetries among robots and agents. Extensive numerical simulations show that AVOCADO surpasses existing geometrical, learning and planning-based approaches in mixed cooperative/non-cooperative navigation environments in terms of success rate, time to goal and computational time. In addition, we conduct multiple real experiments that verify that AVOCADO is able to avoid collisions in environments crowded with other robots and humans.

Consider $N$ players each with a $d$-dimensional action set. Each of the players' utility functions includes their reward function and a linear term for each dimension, with coefficients that are controlled by the manager. We assume that the game is strongly monotone, so if each player runs gradient descent, the dynamics converge to a unique Nash equilibrium (NE). The NE is typically inefficient in terms of global performance. The resulting global performance of the system can be improved by imposing $K$-dimensional linear constraints on the NE. We therefore want the manager to pick the controlled coefficients that impose the desired constraint on the NE. However, this requires knowing the players' reward functions and their action sets. Obtaining this game structure information is infeasible in a large-scale network and violates the users' privacy. To overcome this, we propose a simple algorithm that learns to shift the NE of the game to meet the linear constraints by adjusting the controlled coefficients online. Our algorithm only requires the linear constraints violation as feedback and does not need to know the reward functions or the action sets. We prove that our algorithm, which is based on two time-scale stochastic approximation, guarantees convergence with probability 1 to the set of NE that meet target linear constraints. We then provide a mean square convergence rate of $O(t^{-1/4})$ for our algorithm. This is the first such bound for two time-scale stochastic approximation where the slower time-scale is a fixed point iteration with a non-expansive mapping. We demonstrate how our scheme can be applied to optimizing a global quadratic cost at NE and load balancing in resource allocation games. We provide simulations of our algorithm for these scenarios.

Artificially intelligent agents deployed in the real-world will require the ability to reliably \textit{cooperate} with humans (as well as other, heterogeneous AI agents). To provide formal guarantees of successful cooperation, we must make some assumptions about how partner agents could plausibly behave. Any realistic set of assumptions must account for the fact that other agents may be just as adaptable as our agent is. In this work, we consider the problem of cooperating with a \textit{population} of agents in a finitely-repeated, two player general-sum matrix game with private utilities. Two natural assumptions in such settings are that: 1) all agents in the population are individually rational learners, and 2) when any two members of the population are paired together, with high-probability they will achieve at least the same utility as they would under some Pareto efficient equilibrium strategy. Our results first show that these assumptions alone are insufficient to ensure \textit{zero-shot} cooperation with members of the target population. We therefore consider the problem of \textit{learning} a strategy for cooperating with such a population using prior observations its members interacting with one another. We provide upper and lower bounds on the number of samples needed to learn an effective cooperation strategy. Most importantly, we show that these bounds can be much stronger than those arising from a "naive'' reduction of the problem to one of imitation learning.

Message passing graph neural networks (GNNs) would appear to be powerful tools to learn distributed algorithms via gradient descent, but generate catastrophically incorrect predictions when nodes update asynchronously during inference. This failure under asynchrony effectively excludes these architectures from many potential applications, such as learning local communication policies between resource-constrained agents in, e.g., robotic swarms or sensor networks. In this work we explore why this failure occurs in common GNN architectures, and identify "implicitly-defined" GNNs as a class of architectures which is provably robust to partially asynchronous "hogwild" inference, adapting convergence guarantees from work in asynchronous and distributed optimization, e.g., Bertsekas (1982); Niu et al. (2011). We then propose a novel implicitly-defined GNN architecture, which we call an energy GNN. We show that this architecture outperforms other GNNs from this class on a variety of synthetic tasks inspired by multi-agent systems, and achieves competitive performance on real-world datasets.

Pursuing artificial intelligence for biomedical science, a.k.a. AI Scientist, draws increasing attention, where one common approach is to build a copilot agent driven by Large Language Models (LLMs). However, to evaluate such systems, people either rely on direct Question-Answering (QA) to the LLM itself, or in a biomedical experimental manner. How to precisely benchmark biomedical agents from an AI Scientist perspective remains largely unexplored. To this end, we draw inspiration from one most important abilities of scientists, understanding the literature, and introduce BioKGBench. In contrast to traditional evaluation benchmark that only focuses on factual QA, where the LLMs are known to have hallucination issues, we first disentangle "Understanding Literature" into two atomic abilities, i) "Understanding" the unstructured text from research papers by performing scientific claim verification, and ii) Ability to interact with structured Knowledge-Graph Question-Answering (KGQA) as a form of "Literature" grounding. We then formulate a novel agent task, dubbed KGCheck, using KGQA and domain-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to identify the factual errors of existing large-scale knowledge graph databases. We collect over two thousand data for two atomic tasks and 225 high-quality annotated data for the agent task. Surprisingly, we discover that state-of-the-art agents, both daily scenarios and biomedical ones, have either failed or inferior performance on our benchmark. We then introduce a simple yet effective baseline, dubbed BKGAgent. On the widely used popular knowledge graph, we discover over 90 factual errors which provide scenarios for agents to make discoveries and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The code and data are available at https://github.com/westlake-autolab/BioKGBench.

Algorithmic reasoning is a fundamental cognitive ability that plays a pivotal role in problem-solving and decision-making processes. Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated remarkable proficiency in tasks such as motor control, handling perceptual input, and managing stochastic environments. These advancements have been enabled in part by the availability of benchmarks. In this work we introduce PUZZLES, a benchmark based on Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection, aimed at fostering progress in algorithmic and logical reasoning in RL. PUZZLES contains 40 diverse logic puzzles of adjustable sizes and varying levels of complexity; many puzzles also feature a diverse set of additional configuration parameters. The 40 puzzles provide detailed information on the strengths and generalization capabilities of RL agents. Furthermore, we evaluate various RL algorithms on PUZZLES, providing baseline comparisons and demonstrating the potential for future research. All the software, including the environment, is available at https://github.com/ETH-DISCO/rlp.

We present an architectural alternative to global digital platforms termed grassroots, designed to serve the social, economic, civic, and political needs of local digital communities, as well as their federation. Grassroots platforms may offer local communities an alternative to global digital platforms while operating solely on the smartphones of their members, forsaking any global resources other than the network itself. Such communities may form digital economies without initial capital or external credit, exercise sovereign democratic governance, and federate, ultimately resulting in the grassroots formation of a global digital democracy.

This study introduces LLM4DESIGN, a highly automated system for generating architectural and environmental design proposals. LLM4DESIGN, relying solely on site conditions and design requirements, employs Multi-Agent systems to foster creativity, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to ground designs in realism, and Visual Language Models (VLM) to synchronize all information. This system resulting in coherent, multi-illustrated, and multi-textual design schemes. The system meets the dual needs of narrative storytelling and objective drawing presentation in generating architectural and environmental design proposals. Extensive comparative and ablation experiments confirm the innovativeness of LLM4DESIGN's narrative and the grounded applicability of its plans, demonstrating its superior performance in the field of urban renewal design. Lastly, we have created the first cross-modal design scheme dataset covering architecture, landscape, interior, and urban design, providing rich resources for future research.

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) algorithms enable humans to teach new skills to robots through demonstrations. The learned skills can be robustly reproduced from the identical or near boundary conditions (e.g., initial point). However, when generalizing a learned skill over boundary conditions with higher variance, the similarity of the reproductions changes from one boundary condition to another, and a single LfD representation cannot preserve a consistent similarity across a generalization region. We propose a novel similarity-aware framework including multiple LfD representations and a similarity metric that can improve skill generalization by finding reproductions with the highest similarity values for a given boundary condition. Given a demonstration of the skill, our framework constructs a similarity region around a point of interest (e.g., initial point) by evaluating individual LfD representations using the similarity metric. Any point within this volume corresponds to a representation that reproduces the skill with the greatest similarity. We validate our multi-representational framework in three simulated and four sets of real-world experiments using a physical 6-DOF robot. We also evaluate 11 different similarity metrics and categorize them according to their biases in 286 simulated experiments.

Frontier AI systems, including large language models (LLMs), hold increasing influence over the epistemology of human users. Such influence can reinforce prevailing societal values, potentially contributing to the lock-in of misguided moral beliefs and, consequently, the perpetuation of problematic moral practices on a broad scale. We introduce progress alignment as a technical solution to mitigate this imminent risk. Progress alignment algorithms learn to emulate the mechanics of human moral progress, thereby addressing the susceptibility of existing alignment methods to contemporary moral blindspots. To empower research in progress alignment, we introduce ProgressGym, an experimental framework allowing the learning of moral progress mechanics from history, in order to facilitate future progress in real-world moral decisions. Leveraging 9 centuries of historical text and 18 historical LLMs, ProgressGym enables codification of real-world progress alignment challenges into concrete benchmarks. Specifically, we introduce three core challenges: tracking evolving values (PG-Follow), preemptively anticipating moral progress (PG-Predict), and regulating the feedback loop between human and AI value shifts (PG-Coevolve). Alignment methods without a temporal dimension are inapplicable to these tasks. In response, we present lifelong and extrapolative algorithms as baseline methods of progress alignment, and build an open leaderboard soliciting novel algorithms and challenges. The framework and the leaderboard are available at https://github.com/PKU-Alignment/ProgressGym and https://huggingface.co/spaces/PKU-Alignment/ProgressGym-LeaderBoard respectively.