Between 2021 and 2023, AI-Olympics, a series of online AI competitions was hosted by the online evaluation platform Jidi in collaboration with the IJCAI committee. In these competitions, an agent is required to accomplish diverse sports tasks in a two-dimensional continuous world, while competing against an opponent. This paper provides a brief overview of the competition series and highlights notable findings. We aim to contribute insights to the field of multi-agent decision-making and explore the generalization of agents through engineering efforts.

Freight forwarding plays a crucial role in facilitating global trade and logistics. However, as the freight forwarding market is extremely fragmented, freight forwarders often face the issue of not being able to fill the available shipping capacity. This recurrent issue motivates the creation of various freight forwarding networks that aim at exchanging capacities and demands so that the resource utilization of individual freight forwarders can be maximized. In this paper, we focus on how to design such a collaborative network based on collaborative game theory, with the Shapley value representing a fair scheme for profit sharing. Noting that the exact computation of Shapley values is intractable for large-scale real-world scenarios, we incorporate the observation that collaboration among two forwarders is only possible if their service routes and demands overlap. This leads to a new class of collaborative games called the Locally Collaborative Games (LCGs), where agents can only collaborate with their neighbors. We propose an efficient approach to compute Shapley values for LCGs, and numerically demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approach for a wide variety of network structures.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as integral tools for reasoning, planning, and decision-making, drawing upon their extensive world knowledge and proficiency in language-related tasks. LLMs thus hold tremendous potential for natural language interaction within multi-agent systems to foster cooperation. However, LLM agents tend to over-report and comply with any instruction, which may result in information redundancy and confusion in multi-agent cooperation. Inspired by human organizations, this paper introduces a framework that imposes prompt-based organization structures on LLM agents to mitigate these problems. Through a series of experiments with embodied LLM agents and human-agent collaboration, our results highlight the impact of designated leadership on team efficiency, shedding light on the leadership qualities displayed by LLM agents and their spontaneous cooperative behaviors. Further, we harness the potential of LLMs to propose enhanced organizational prompts, via a Criticize-Reflect process, resulting in novel organization structures that reduce communication costs and enhance team efficiency.

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) can be an efficient way to train systems with analogous agents by enabling ``Student'' agents to learn from the demonstrations of the most experienced ``Teacher'' agent, instead of training their policy in parallel. However, when there are discrepancies in agent capabilities, such as divergent actuator power or joint angle constraints, naively replicating demonstrations that are out of bounds for the Student's capability can limit efficient learning. We present a Teacher-Student learning framework specifically tailored to address the challenge of heterogeneity between the Teacher and Student agents. Our framework is based on the concept of ``surprise'', inspired by its application in exploration incentivization in sparse-reward environments. Surprise is repurposed to enable the Teacher to detect and adapt to differences between itself and the Student. By focusing on maximizing its surprise in response to the environment while concurrently minimizing the Student's surprise in response to the demonstrations, the Teacher agent can effectively tailor its demonstrations to the Student's specific capabilities and constraints. We validate our method by demonstrating improvements in the Student's learning in control tasks within sparse-reward environments.

We introduce UFO, an innovative UI-Focused agent to fulfill user requests tailored to applications on Windows OS, harnessing the capabilities of GPT-Vision. UFO employs a dual-agent framework to meticulously observe and analyze the graphical user interface (GUI) and control information of Windows applications. This enables the agent to seamlessly navigate and operate within individual applications and across them to fulfill user requests, even when spanning multiple applications. The framework incorporates a control interaction module, facilitating action grounding without human intervention and enabling fully automated execution. Consequently, UFO transforms arduous and time-consuming processes into simple tasks achievable solely through natural language commands. We conducted testing of UFO across 9 popular Windows applications, encompassing a variety of scenarios reflective of users' daily usage. The results, derived from both quantitative metrics and real-case studies, underscore the superior effectiveness of UFO in fulfilling user requests. To the best of our knowledge, UFO stands as the first UI agent specifically tailored for task completion within the Windows OS environment. The open-source code for UFO is available on https://github.com/microsoft/UFO.

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) hold promise for tasks requiring extensive collaboration, traditional multi-agent simulators have facilitated rich explorations of an interactive artificial society that reflects collective behavior. However, these existing simulators face significant limitations. Firstly, they struggle with handling large numbers of agents due to high resource demands. Secondly, they often assume agents possess perfect information and limitless capabilities, hindering the ecological validity of simulated social interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose a multi-agent Minecraft simulator, MineLand, that bridges this gap by introducing three key features: large-scale scalability, limited multimodal senses, and physical needs. Our simulator supports 64 or more agents. Agents have limited visual, auditory, and environmental awareness, forcing them to actively communicate and collaborate to fulfill physical needs like food and resources. Additionally, we further introduce an AI agent framework, Alex, inspired by multitasking theory, enabling agents to handle intricate coordination and scheduling. Our experiments demonstrate that the simulator, the corresponding benchmark, and the AI agent framework contribute to more ecological and nuanced collective behavior.The source code of MineLand and Alex is openly available at https://github.com/cocacola-lab/MineLand.

Navigating efficiently across vortical flow fields presents a significant challenge in various robotic applications. The dynamic and unsteady nature of vortical flows often disturbs the control of underwater robots, complicating their operation in hydrodynamic environments. Conventional control methods, which depend on accurate modeling, fail in these settings due to the complexity of fluid-structure interactions (FSI) caused by unsteady hydrodynamics. This study proposes a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm, trained in a data-driven manner, to enable efficient navigation of a robotic fish swimming across vortical flows. Our proposed algorithm incorporates the LSTM architecture and uses several recent consecutive observations as the state to address the issue of partial observation, often due to sensor limitations. We present a numerical study of navigation within a Karman vortex street, created by placing a stationary cylinder in a uniform flow, utilizing the immersed boundary-lattice Boltzmann method (IB-LBM). The aim is to train the robotic fish to discover efficient navigation policies, enabling it to reach a designated target point across the Karman vortex street from various initial positions. After training, the fish demonstrates the ability to rapidly reach the target from different initial positions, showcasing the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed algorithm. Analysis of the results reveals that the robotic fish can leverage velocity gains and pressure differences induced by the vortices to reach the target, underscoring the potential of our proposed algorithm in enhancing navigation in complex hydrodynamic environments.

The spatiotemporal data generated by massive sensors in the Internet of Things (IoT) is extremely dynamic, heterogeneous, large scale and time-dependent. It poses great challenges (e.g. accuracy, reliability, and stability) in real-time analysis and decision making for different IoT applications. The complexity of IoT data prevents the common people from gaining a deeper understanding of it. Agentized systems help address the lack of data insight for the common people. We propose a generic framework, namely CityGPT, to facilitate the learning and analysis of IoT time series with an end-to-end paradigm. CityGPT employs three agents to accomplish the spatiotemporal analysis of IoT data. The requirement agent facilitates user inputs based on natural language. Then, the analysis tasks are decomposed into temporal and spatial analysis processes, completed by corresponding data analysis agents (temporal and spatial agents). Finally, the spatiotemporal fusion agent visualizes the system's analysis results by receiving analysis results from data analysis agents and invoking sub-visualization agents, and can provide corresponding textual descriptions based on user demands. To increase the insight for common people using our framework, we have agnentized the framework, facilitated by a large language model (LLM), to increase the data comprehensibility. Our evaluation results on real-world data with different time dependencies show that the CityGPT framework can guarantee robust performance in IoT computing.

This study examines the global behavior of dynamics in learning in games between two players, X and Y. We consider the simplest situation for memory asymmetry between two players: X memorizes the other Y's previous action and uses reactive strategies, while Y has no memory. Although this memory complicates the learning dynamics, we discover two novel quantities that characterize the global behavior of such complex dynamics. One is an extended Kullback-Leibler divergence from the Nash equilibrium, a well-known conserved quantity from previous studies. The other is a family of Lyapunov functions of X's reactive strategy. These two quantities capture the global behavior in which X's strategy becomes more exploitative, and the exploited Y's strategy converges to the Nash equilibrium. Indeed, we theoretically prove that Y's strategy globally converges to the Nash equilibrium in the simplest game equipped with an equilibrium in the interior of strategy spaces. Furthermore, our experiments also suggest that this global convergence is universal for more advanced zero-sum games than the simplest game. This study provides a novel characterization of the global behavior of learning in games through a couple of indicators.

Microscopic traffic simulation plays a crucial role in transportation engineering by providing insights into individual vehicle behavior and overall traffic flow. However, creating a realistic simulator that accurately replicates human driving behaviors in various traffic conditions presents significant challenges. Traditional simulators relying on heuristic models often fail to deliver accurate simulations due to the complexity of real-world traffic environments. Due to the covariate shift issue, existing imitation learning-based simulators often fail to generate stable long-term simulations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called learner-aware supervised imitation learning to address the covariate shift problem in multi-agent imitation learning. By leveraging a variational autoencoder simultaneously modeling the expert and learner state distribution, our approach augments expert states such that the augmented state is aware of learner state distribution. Our method, applied to urban traffic simulation, demonstrates significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art baselines in both short-term microscopic and long-term macroscopic realism when evaluated on the real-world dataset pNEUMA.