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.

In online bilateral trade, a platform posts prices to incoming pairs of buyers and sellers that have private valuations for a certain good. If the price is lower than the buyers' valuation and higher than the sellers' valuation, then a trade takes place. Previous work focused on the platform perspective, with the goal of setting prices maximizing the gain from trade (the sum of sellers' and buyers' utilities). Gain from trade is, however, potentially unfair to traders, as they may receive highly uneven shares of the total utility. In this work we enforce fairness by rewarding the platform with the fair gain from trade, defined as the minimum between sellers' and buyers' utilities. After showing that any no-regret learning algorithm designed to maximize the sum of the utilities may fail badly with fair gain from trade, we present our main contribution: a complete characterization of the regret regimes for fair gain from trade when, after each interaction, the platform only learns whether each trader accepted the current price. Specifically, we prove the following regret bounds: $\Theta(\ln T)$ in the deterministic setting, $\Omega(T)$ in the stochastic setting, and $\tilde{\Theta}(T^{2/3})$ in the stochastic setting when sellers' and buyers' valuations are independent of each other. We conclude by providing tight regret bounds when, after each interaction, the platform is allowed to observe the true traders' valuations.

Reducing wealth inequality and increasing utility are critical issues. This study reveals the effects of redistribution and consumption morals on wealth inequality and utility. To this end, we present a novel approach that couples the dynamic model of capital, consumption, and utility in macroeconomics with the interaction model of joint business and redistribution in econophysics. With this approach, we calculate the capital (wealth), the utility based on consumption, and the Gini index of these inequality using redistribution and consumption thresholds as moral parameters. The results show that: under-redistribution and waste exacerbate inequality; conversely, over-redistribution and stinginess reduce utility; and a balanced moderate moral leads to achieve both reduced inequality and increased utility. These findings provide renewed economic and numerical support for the moral importance known from philosophy, anthropology, and religion. The revival of redistribution and consumption morals should promote the transformation to a human mutual-aid economy, as indicated by philosopher and anthropologist, instead of the capitalist economy that has produced the current inequality. The practical challenge is to implement bottom-up social business, on a foothold of worker coops and platform cooperatives as a community against the state and the market, with moral consensus and its operation.

With the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, the development of knowledgeable and personalized agents has become increasingly prevalent. However, the inherent variability in state variables and action spaces among personalized agents poses significant aggregation challenges for traditional federated learning algorithms. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Federated Split Decision Transformer (FSDT), an innovative framework designed explicitly for AI agent decision tasks. The FSDT framework excels at navigating the intricacies of personalized agents by harnessing distributed data for training while preserving data privacy. It employs a two-stage training process, with local embedding and prediction models on client agents and a global transformer decoder model on the server. Our comprehensive evaluation using the benchmark D4RL dataset highlights the superior performance of our algorithm in federated split learning for personalized agents, coupled with significant reductions in communication and computational overhead compared to traditional centralized training approaches. The FSDT framework demonstrates strong potential for enabling efficient and privacy-preserving collaborative learning in applications such as autonomous driving decision systems. Our findings underscore the efficacy of the FSDT framework in effectively leveraging distributed offline reinforcement learning data to enable powerful multi-type agent decision systems.

With their prominent scene understanding and reasoning capabilities, pre-trained visual-language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4V have attracted increasing attention in robotic task planning. Compared with traditional task planning strategies, VLMs are strong in multimodal information parsing and code generation and show remarkable efficiency. Although VLMs demonstrate great potential in robotic task planning, they suffer from challenges like hallucination, semantic complexity, and limited context. To handle such issues, this paper proposes a multi-agent framework, i.e., GameVLM, to enhance the decision-making process in robotic task planning. In this study, VLM-based decision and expert agents are presented to conduct the task planning. Specifically, decision agents are used to plan the task, and the expert agent is employed to evaluate these task plans. Zero-sum game theory is introduced to resolve inconsistencies among different agents and determine the optimal solution. Experimental results on real robots demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework, with an average success rate of 83.3%.

This paper presents an extended version of the SPADE platform, which aims to empower intelligent agent systems with normative reasoning and value alignment capabilities. Normative reasoning involves evaluating social norms and their impact on decision-making, while value alignment ensures agents' actions are in line with desired principles and ethical guidelines. The extended platform equips agents with normative awareness and reasoning capabilities based on deontic logic, allowing them to assess the appropriateness of their actions and make informed decisions. By integrating normative reasoning and value alignment, the platform enhances agents' social intelligence and promotes responsible and ethical behaviors in complex environments.

This paper introduces a novel bio-mimetic approach for distributed control of robotic swarms, inspired by the collective behaviors of swarms in nature such as schools of fish and flocks of birds. The agents are assumed to have limited sensory perception, lack memory, be Identical, anonymous, and operate without interagent explicit communication. Despite these limitations, we demonstrate that collaborative exploration and task allocation can be executed by applying simple local rules of interactions between the agents. A comprehensive model comprised of agent, formation, and swarm layers is proposed in this paper, where each layer performs a specific function in shaping the swarm's collective behavior, thereby contributing to the emergence of the anticipated behaviors. We consider four principles combined in the design of the distributed control process: Cohesiveness, Flexibility, Attraction-Repulsion, and Peristaltic Motion. We design the control algorithms as reactive behaviour that enables the swarm to maintain connectivity, adapt to dynamic environments, spread out and cover a region with a size determined by the number of agents, and respond to various local task requirements. We explore some simple broadcast control-based steering methods, that result in inducing "anonymous ad-hoc leaders" among the agents, capable of guiding the swarm towards yet unexplored regions with further tasks. Our analysis is complemented by simulations, validating the efficacy of our algorithms. The experiments with various scenarios showcase the swarm`s capability to self-organize and perform tasks effectively under the proposed framework. The possible implementations include domains that necessitate emergent coordination and control in multi-agent systems, without the need for advanced individual abilities or direct communication.

Generating videos with realistic and physically plausible motion is one of the main recent challenges in computer vision. While diffusion models are achieving compelling results in image generation, video diffusion models are limited by heavy training and huge models, resulting in videos that are still biased to the training dataset. In this work we propose MotionCraft, a new zero-shot video generator to craft physics-based and realistic videos. MotionCraft is able to warp the noise latent space of an image diffusion model, such as Stable Diffusion, by applying an optical flow derived from a physics simulation. We show that warping the noise latent space results in coherent application of the desired motion while allowing the model to generate missing elements consistent with the scene evolution, which would otherwise result in artefacts or missing content if the flow was applied in the pixel space. We compare our method with the state-of-the-art Text2Video-Zero reporting qualitative and quantitative improvements, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach to generate videos with finely-prescribed complex motion dynamics.

Non-deterministic planning aims to find a policy that achieves a given objective in an environment where actions have uncertain effects, and the agent - potentially - only observes parts of the current state. Hyperproperties are properties that relate multiple paths of a system and can, e.g., capture security and information-flow policies. Popular logics for expressing temporal hyperproperties - such as HyperLTL - extend LTL by offering selective quantification over executions of a system. In this paper, we show that planning offers a powerful intermediate language for the automated verification of hyperproperties. Concretely, we present an algorithm that, given a HyperLTL verification problem, constructs a non-deterministic multi-agent planning instance (in the form of a QDec-POMDP) that, when admitting a plan, implies the satisfaction of the verification problem. We show that for large fragments of HyperLTL, the resulting planning instance corresponds to a classical, FOND, or POND planning problem. We implement our encoding in a prototype verification tool and report on encouraging experimental results.

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.