With impressive achievements made, artificial intelligence is on the path forward to artificial general intelligence. Sora, developed by OpenAI, which is capable of minute-level world-simulative abilities can be considered as a milestone on this developmental path. However, despite its notable successes, Sora still encounters various obstacles that need to be resolved. In this survey, we embark from the perspective of disassembling Sora in text-to-video generation, and conducting a comprehensive review of literature, trying to answer the question, \textit{From Sora What We Can See}. Specifically, after basic preliminaries regarding the general algorithms are introduced, the literature is categorized from three mutually perpendicular dimensions: evolutionary generators, excellent pursuit, and realistic panorama. Subsequently, the widely used datasets and metrics are organized in detail. Last but more importantly, we identify several challenges and open problems in this domain and propose potential future directions for research and development.

In this paper, we introduce an alternative approach to enhancing Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) through the integration of domain knowledge and attention-based policy mechanisms. Our methodology focuses on the incorporation of domain-specific expertise into the learning process, which simplifies the development of collaborative behaviors. This approach aims to reduce the complexity and learning overhead typically associated with MARL by enabling agents to concentrate on essential aspects of complex tasks, thus optimizing the learning curve. The utilization of attention mechanisms plays a key role in our model. It allows for the effective processing of dynamic context data and nuanced agent interactions, leading to more refined decision-making. Applied in standard MARL scenarios, such as the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL) Pursuit and Multi-Particle Environments (MPE) Simple Spread, our method has been shown to improve both learning efficiency and the effectiveness of collaborative behaviors. The results indicate that our attention-based approach can be a viable approach for improving the efficiency of MARL training process, integrating domain-specific knowledge at the action level.

AI has become pervasive in recent years, but state-of-the-art approaches predominantly neglect the need for AI systems to be contestable. Instead, contestability is advocated by AI guidelines (e.g. by the OECD) and regulation of automated decision-making (e.g. GDPR). In this position paper we explore how contestability can be achieved computationally in and for AI. We argue that contestable AI requires dynamic (human-machine and/or machine-machine) explainability and decision-making processes, whereby machines can (i) interact with humans and/or other machines to progressively explain their outputs and/or their reasoning as well as assess grounds for contestation provided by these humans and/or other machines, and (ii) revise their decision-making processes to redress any issues successfully raised during contestation. Given that much of the current AI landscape is tailored to static AIs, the need to accommodate contestability will require a radical rethinking, that, we argue, computational argumentation is ideally suited to support.

Over the last few years, 360{\deg} video traffic on the network has grown significantly. A key challenge of 360{\deg} video playback is ensuring a high quality of experience (QoE) with limited network bandwidth. Currently, most studies focus on tile-based adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming based on single viewport prediction to reduce bandwidth consumption. However, the performance of models for single-viewpoint prediction is severely limited by the inherent uncertainty in head movement, which can not cope with the sudden movement of users very well. This paper first presents a multimodal spatial-temporal attention transformer to generate multiple viewpoint trajectories with their probabilities given a historical trajectory. The proposed method models viewpoint prediction as a classification problem and uses attention mechanisms to capture the spatial and temporal characteristics of input video frames and viewpoint trajectories for multi-viewpoint prediction. After that, a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL)-based ABR algorithm utilizing multi-viewpoint prediction for 360{\deg} video streaming is proposed for maximizing different QoE objectives under various network conditions. We formulate the ABR problem as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP) problem and present a MAPPO algorithm based on centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) framework to solve the problem. The experimental results show that our proposed method improves the defined QoE metric by up to 85.5% compared to existing ABR methods.

To support the testing of AVs, CETRAN has created a guideline for the evaluation of complex multi agent test scenarios presented in this report. This allows for a clear structured manner in evaluating complexity elements based on the corresponding difficulties an AV might encounter in Singapore traffic. This study aims to understand the source of complexity for AVs from traffic hazard, by breaking down the difficulties on AV capabilities as perception, situation awareness and decision-making. Guidelines created through this study are composed by a list of elements to be considered in the future as selection criteria to evaluate complexity of scenarios to support AV behaviour assessment. This study is intended to be a guide to understand the sources of complexity for Avs and can be used to challenge the risk management ability of autonomous vehicles in a scenario-based test approach or traffic situations faced on road trials. The report includes the usage of the guidelines created as application to evaluate the complexity of a set of 5 real events that occur on Singapore roads from Resembler webtool which is a database of real human accidents/incidents. Four scenarios were also designed for creation in simulation by the CETRAN team, applying the guidelines for complexity elements created in this work, to illustrate the difficulties an ADS could experience with such scenarios.

Pragmatic or goal-oriented communication can optimize communication decisions beyond the reliable transmission of data, instead aiming at directly affecting application performance with the minimum channel utilization. In this paper, we develop a general theoretical framework for the remote control of finite-state Markov processes, using pragmatic communication over a costly zero-delay communication channel. To that end, we model a cyber-physical system composed of an encoder, which observes and transmits the states of a process in real-time, and a decoder, which receives that information and controls the behavior of the process. The encoder and the decoder should cooperatively optimize the trade-off between the control performance (i.e., reward) and the communication cost (i.e., channel use). This scenario underscores a pragmatic (i.e., goal-oriented) communication problem, where the purpose is to convey only the data that is most valuable for the underlying task, taking into account the state of the decoder (hence, the pragmatic aspect). We investigate two different decision-making architectures: in pull-based remote control, the decoder is the only decision-maker, while in push-based remote control, the encoder and the decoder constitute two independent decision-makers, leading to a multi-agent scenario. We propose three algorithms to optimize our system (i.e., design the encoder and the decoder policies), discuss the optimality guarantees ofs the algorithms, and shed light on their computational complexity and fundamental limits.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great abilities in various tasks, including question answering, arithmetic problem solving, and poem writing, among others. Although research on LLM-as-an-agent has shown that LLM can be applied to Reinforcement Learning (RL) and achieve decent results, the extension of LLM-based RL to Multi-Agent System (MAS) is not trivial, as many aspects, such as coordination and communication between agents, are not considered in the RL frameworks of a single agent. To inspire more research on LLM-based MARL, in this letter, we survey the existing LLM-based single-agent and multi-agent RL frameworks and provide potential research directions for future research. In particular, we focus on the cooperative tasks of multiple agents with a common goal and communication among them. We also consider human-in/on-the-loop scenarios enabled by the language component in the framework.

Transformers are one of the key assets in AC distribution grids and renewable power integration. During transformer energization inrush currents appear, which lead to transformer degradation and can cause grid instability events. These inrush currents are a consequence of the transformer's magnetic core saturation during its connection to the grid. Transformer cores are normally modelled by the Jiles-Atherton (JA) model which contains five parameters. These parameters can be estimated by metaheuristic-based search algorithms. The parameter initialization of these algorithms plays an important role in the algorithm convergence. The most popular strategy used for JA parameter initialization is a random uniform distribution. However, techniques such as parameter initialization by Probability Density Functions (PDFs) have shown to improve accuracy over random methods. In this context, this research work presents a framework to assess the impact of different parameter initialization strategies on the performance of the JA parameter estimation for inrush current studies. Depending on available data and expert knowledge, uncertainty levels are modelled with different PDFs. Moreover, three different metaheuristic-search algorithms are employed on two different core materials and their accuracy and computational time are compared. Results show an improvement in the accuracy and computational time of the metaheuristic-based algorithms when PDF parameter initialization is used.

We consider a distributed learning problem, where agents minimize a global objective function by exchanging information over a network. Our approach has two distinct features: (i) It substantially reduces communication by triggering communication only when necessary, and (ii) it is agnostic to the data-distribution among the different agents. We can therefore guarantee convergence even if the local data-distributions of the agents are arbitrarily distinct. We analyze the convergence rate of the algorithm and derive accelerated convergence rates in a convex setting. We also characterize the effect of communication drops and demonstrate that our algorithm is robust to communication failures. The article concludes by presenting numerical results from a distributed LASSO problem, and distributed learning tasks on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. The experiments underline communication savings of 50% or more due to the event-based communication strategy, show resilience towards heterogeneous data-distributions, and highlight that our approach outperforms common baselines such as FedAvg, FedProx, and FedADMM.

Budgetary constraints force organizations to pursue only a subset of possible innovation projects. Identifying which subset is most promising is an error-prone exercise, and involving multiple decision makers may be prudent. This raises the question of how to most effectively aggregate their collective nous. Our model of organizational portfolio selection provides some first answers. We show that portfolio performance can vary widely. Delegating evaluation makes sense when organizations employ the relevant experts and can assign projects to them. In most other settings, aggregating the impressions of multiple agents leads to better performance than delegation. In particular, letting agents rank projects often outperforms alternative aggregation rules -- including averaging agents' project scores as well as counting their approval votes -- especially when organizations have tight budgets and can select only a few project alternatives out of many.