Leader election is one of the fundamental and well-studied problems in distributed computing. In this paper, we initiate the study of leader election using mobile agents. Suppose $n$ agents are positioned initially arbitrarily on the nodes of an arbitrary, anonymous, $n$-node, $m$-edge graph $G$. The agents relocate themselves autonomously on the nodes of $G$ and elect an agent as a leader such that the leader agent knows it is a leader and the other agents know they are not leaders. The objective is to minimize time and memory requirements. Following the literature, we consider the synchronous setting in which each agent performs its operations synchronously with others and hence the time complexity can be measured in rounds. The quest in this paper is to provide solutions without agents knowing any graph parameter, such as $n$, a priori. We first establish that, without agents knowing any graph parameter a priori, there exists a deterministic algorithm to elect an agent as a leader in $O(m)$ rounds with $O(n\log n)$ bits at each agent. Using this leader election result, we develop a deterministic algorithm for agents to construct a minimum spanning tree of $G$ in $O(m+n\log n)$ rounds using $O(n \log n)$ bits memory at each agent, without agents knowing any graph parameter a priori. Finally, using the same leader election result, we provide improved time/memory results for other fundamental distributed graph problems, namely, gathering, maximal independent set, and minimal dominating sets, removing the assumptions on agents knowing graph parameters a priori.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has witnessed a remarkable surge in interest, fueled by the empirical success achieved in applications of single-agent reinforcement learning (RL). In this study, we consider a distributed Q-learning scenario, wherein a number of agents cooperatively solve a sequential decision making problem without access to the central reward function which is an average of the local rewards.

While LLMs have shown impressive capabilities in solving math or coding problems, the ability to make scientific discoveries remains a distinct challenge. This paper proposes a "Turing test for an AI scientist" to assess whether an AI agent can conduct scientific research independently, without relying on human-generated knowledge. Drawing inspiration from the historical development of science, we propose seven benchmark tests that evaluate an AI agent's ability to make groundbreaking discoveries in various scientific domains. These tests include inferring the heliocentric model from celestial observations, discovering the laws of motion in a simulated environment, deriving the differential equation governing vibrating strings, inferring Maxwell's equations from electrodynamics simulations, inventing numerical methods for initial value problems, discovering Huffman coding for data compression, and developing efficient sorting algorithms. To ensure the validity of these tests, the AI agent is provided with interactive libraries or datasets specific to each problem, without access to human knowledge that could potentially contain information about the target discoveries. The ultimate goal is to create an AI scientist capable of making novel and impactful scientific discoveries, surpassing the best human experts in their respective fields. These "Turing tests" serve as intermediate milestones, assessing the AI agent's ability to make discoveries that were groundbreaking in their time. If an AI agent can pass the majority of these seven tests, it would indicate significant progress towards building an AI scientist, paving the way for future advancements in autonomous scientific discovery. This paper aims to establish a benchmark for the capabilities of AI in scientific research and to stimulate further research in this exciting field.

High-dimensional linear bandits with low-dimensional structure have received considerable attention in recent studies due to their practical significance. The most common structure in the literature is sparsity. However, it may not be available in practice. Symmetry, where the reward is invariant under certain groups of transformations on the set of arms, is another important inductive bias in the high-dimensional case that covers many standard structures, including sparsity. In this work, we study high-dimensional symmetric linear bandits where the symmetry is hidden from the learner, and the correct symmetry needs to be learned in an online setting. We examine the structure of a collection of hidden symmetry and provide a method based on model selection within the collection of low-dimensional subspaces. Our algorithm achieves a regret bound of $ O(d_0^{1/3} T^{2/3} \log(d))$, where $d$ is the ambient dimension which is potentially very large, and $d_0$ is the dimension of the true low-dimensional subspace such that $d_0 \ll d$. With an extra assumption on well-separated models, we can further improve the regret to $ O(d_0\sqrt{T\log(d)} )$.

Farm businesses are increasingly adopting renewables to enhance energy efficiency and reduce reliance on fossil fuels and the grid. This shift aims to decrease dairy farms' dependence on traditional electricity grids by enabling the sale of surplus renewable energy in Peer-to-Peer markets. However, the dynamic nature of farm communities poses challenges, requiring specialized algorithms for P2P energy trading. To address this, the Multi-Agent Peer-to-Peer Dairy Farm Energy Simulator (MAPDES) has been developed, providing a platform to experiment with Reinforcement Learning techniques. The simulations demonstrate significant cost savings, including a 43% reduction in electricity expenses, a 42% decrease in peak demand, and a 1.91% increase in energy sales compared to baseline scenarios lacking peer-to-peer energy trading or renewable energy sources.

Infrastructure systems play a critical role in providing essential products and services for the functioning of modern society; however, they are vulnerable to disasters and their service disruptions can cause severe societal impacts. To protect infrastructure from disasters and reduce potential impacts, great achievements have been made in modeling interdependent infrastructure systems in past decades. In recent years, scholars have gradually shifted their research focus to understanding and modeling societal impacts of disruptions considering the fact that infrastructure systems are critical because of their role in societal functioning, especially under situations of modern societies. Exploring how infrastructure disruptions impair society to enhance resilient city has become a key field of study. By comprehensively reviewing relevant studies, this paper demonstrated the definition and types of societal impact of infrastructure disruptions, and summarized the modeling approaches into four types: extended infrastructure modeling approaches, empirical approaches, agent-based approaches, and big data-driven approaches. For each approach, this paper organized relevant literature in terms of modeling ideas, advantages, and disadvantages. Furthermore, the four approaches were compared according to several criteria, including the input data, types of societal impact, and application scope. Finally, this paper illustrated the challenges and future research directions in the field.

In this paper, the authors investigate the Deep Sea Treasure (DST) problem as proposed by Vamplew et al. Through a number of proofs, the authors show the original DST problem to be quite basic, and not always representative of practical Multi-Objective Optimization problems. In an attempt to bring theory closer to practice, the authors propose an alternative, improved version of the DST problem, and prove that some of the properties that simplify the original DST problem no longer hold. The authors also provide a reference implementation and perform a comparison between their implementation, and other existing open-source implementations of the problem. Finally, the authors also provide a complete Pareto-front for their new DST problem.

Predictive Maintenance (PdM) emerged as one of the pillars of Industry 4.0, and became crucial for enhancing operational efficiency, allowing to minimize downtime, extend lifespan of equipment, and prevent failures. A wide range of PdM tasks can be performed using Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, which often use data generated from industrial sensors. The steel industry, which is an important branch of the global economy, is one of the potential beneficiaries of this trend, given its large environmental footprint, the globalized nature of the market, and the demanding working conditions. This survey synthesizes the current state of knowledge in the field of AI-based PdM within the steel industry and is addressed to researchers and practitioners. We identified 219 articles related to this topic and formulated five research questions, allowing us to gain a global perspective on current trends and the main research gaps. We examined equipment and facilities subjected to PdM, determined common PdM approaches, and identified trends in the AI methods used to develop these solutions. We explored the characteristics of the data used in the surveyed articles and assessed the practical implications of the research presented there. Most of the research focuses on the blast furnace or hot rolling, using data from industrial sensors. Current trends show increasing interest in the domain, especially in the use of deep learning. The main challenges include implementing the proposed methods in a production environment, incorporating them into maintenance plans, and enhancing the accessibility and reproducibility of the research.

Robots playing soccer often rely on hard-coded behaviors that struggle to generalize when the game environment change. In this paper, we propose a temporal logic based approach that allows robots' behaviors and goals to adapt to the semantics of the environment. In particular, we present a hierarchical representation of soccer in which the robot selects the level of operation based on the perceived semantic characteristics of the environment, thus modifying dynamically the set of rules and goals to apply. The proposed approach enables the robot to operate in unstructured environments, just as it happens when humans go from soccer played on an official field to soccer played on a street. Three different use cases set in different scenarios are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has exploded in popularity in recent years. Many approaches have been developed but they can be divided into three main types: centralized training and execution (CTE), centralized training for decentralized execution (CTDE), and Decentralized training and execution (DTE).Decentralized training and execution methods make the fewest assumptions and are often simple to implement. In fact, as I'll discuss, any single-agent RL method can be used for DTE by just letting each agent learn separately. Of course, there are pros and cons to such approaches as I discuss below. It is worth noting that DTE is required if no offline coordination is available. That is, if all agents must learn during online interactions without prior coordination, learning and execution must both be decentralized. DTE methods can be applied in cooperative, competitive, or mixed cases but this text will focus on the cooperative MARL case. In this text, I will first give a brief description of the cooperative MARL problem in the form of the Dec-POMDP. Then, I will discuss value-based DTE methods starting with independent Q-learning and its extensions and then discuss the extension to the deep case with DQN, the additional complications this causes, and methods that have been developed to (attempt to) address these issues. Next, I will discuss policy gradient DTE methods starting with independent REINFORCE (i.e., vanilla policy gradient), and then extending to the actor-critic case and deep variants (such as independent PPO). Finally, I will discuss some general topics related to DTE and future directions.