Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in understanding language and executing complex reasoning tasks. However, LLMs with long context windows have been notorious for their expensive training costs and high inference latency. Even the most advanced models such as GPT-4 and Claude2 often make mistakes when processing inputs of over $100k$ tokens, a phenomenon also known as \textit{lost in the middle}. In this paper, we propose \textsc{LongAgent}, a method based on multi-agent collaboration, which scales LLMs (e.g., LLaMA) to a context of 128K and demonstrates potential superiority in long-text processing compared to GPT-4. In \textsc{LongAgent}, a leader is responsible for understanding user intent and directing team members to acquire information from documents. Due to members' hallucinations, it is non-trivial for a leader to obtain accurate information from the responses of dozens to hundreds of members. To address this, we develop an \textit{inter-member communication} mechanism to resolve response conflicts caused by hallucinations through information sharing. Our experimental results indicate that \textsc{LongAgent} offers a promising alternative for long-text processing. The agent team instantiated with LLaMA-7B achieves significant improvements in tasks such as 128k-long text retrieval, multi-hop question answering, compared to GPT-4.

It is promising but challenging to design flocking control for a robot swarm to autonomously follow changing patterns or shapes in a optimal distributed manner. The optimal flocking control with dynamic pattern formation is, therefore, investigated in this paper. A predictive flocking control algorithm is proposed based on a Gibbs random field (GRF), where bio-inspired potential energies are used to charaterize ``robot-robot'' and ``robot-environment'' interactions. Specialized performance-related energies, e.g., motion smoothness, are introduced in the proposed design to improve the flocking behaviors. The optimal control is obtained by maximizing a posterior distribution of a GRF. A region-based shape control is accomplished for pattern formation in light of a mean shift technique. The proposed algorithm is evaluated via the comparison with two state-of-the-art flocking control methods in an environment with obstacles. Both numerical simulations and real-world experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed design.

We design a concept for an autonomous underground freight transport system for Hanover, Germany. To evaluate the resulting system changes in overall traffic flows from an environmental perspective, we carried out an agent-based traffic simulation with MATSim. Our simulations indicate comparatively low impacts on network-wide traffic volumes. Local CO2 emissions, on the other hand, could be reduced by up to 32 %. In total, the shuttle system can replace more than 18 % of the vehicles in use with conventional combustion engines. Thus, an autonomous underground freight transportation system can contribute to environmentally friendly and economical transportation of urban goods on the condition of cooperative use of the system.

Research in cultural evolution aims at providing causal explanations for the change of culture over time. Over the past decades, this field has generated an important body of knowledge, using experimental, historical, and computational methods. While computational models have been very successful at generating testable hypotheses about the effects of several factors, such as population structure or transmission biases, some phenomena have so far been more complex to capture using agent-based and formal models. This is in particular the case for the effect of the transformations of social information induced by evolved cognitive mechanisms. We here propose that leveraging the capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to mimic human behavior may be fruitful to address this gap. On top of being an useful approximation of human cultural dynamics, multi-agents models featuring generative agents are also important to study for their own sake. Indeed, as artificial agents are bound to participate more and more to the evolution of culture, it is crucial to better understand the dynamics of machine-generated cultural evolution. We here present a framework for simulating cultural evolution in populations of LLMs, allowing the manipulation of variables known to be important in cultural evolution, such as network structure, personality, and the way social information is aggregated and transformed. The software we developed for conducting these simulations is open-source and features an intuitive user-interface, which we hope will help to build bridges between the fields of cultural evolution and generative artificial intelligence.

We anticipate increased instances of humans and AI systems working together in what we refer to as a hybrid team. The increase in collaboration is expected as AI systems gain proficiency and their adoption becomes more widespread. However, their behavior is not error-free, making hybrid teams a very suitable solution. As such, we consider methods for improving performance for these teams of humans and AI systems. For hybrid teams, we will refer to both the humans and AI systems as agents. To improve team performance over that seen for agents operating individually, we propose a manager which learns, through a standard Reinforcement Learning scheme, how to best delegate, over time, the responsibility of taking a decision to any of the agents. We further guide the manager's learning so they also minimize how many changes in delegation are made resulting from undesirable team behavior. We demonstrate the optimality of our manager's performance in several grid environments which include failure states which terminate an episode and should be avoided. We perform our experiments with teams of agents with varying degrees of acceptable risk, in the form of proximity to a failure state, and measure the manager's ability to make effective delegation decisions with respect to its own risk-based constraints, then compare these to the optimal decisions. Our results show our manager can successfully learn desirable delegations which result in team paths near/exactly optimal with respect to path length and number of delegations.

Data augmentation is arguably the most important regularization technique commonly used to improve generalization performance of machine learning models. It primarily involves the application of appropriate data transformation operations to create new data samples with desired properties. Despite its effectiveness, the process is often challenging because of the time-consuming trial and error procedures for creating and testing different candidate augmentations and their hyperparameters manually. Automated data augmentation methods aim to automate the process. State-of-the-art approaches typically rely on automated machine learning (AutoML) principles. This work presents a comprehensive survey of AutoML-based data augmentation techniques. We discuss various approaches for accomplishing data augmentation with AutoML, including data manipulation, data integration and data synthesis techniques. We present extensive discussion of techniques for realizing each of the major subtasks of the data augmentation process: search space design, hyperparameter optimization and model evaluation. Finally, we carried out an extensive comparison and analysis of the performance of automated data augmentation techniques and state-of-the-art methods based on classical augmentation approaches. The results show that AutoML methods for data augmentation currently outperform state-of-the-art techniques based on conventional approaches.

Object permanence, which refers to the concept that objects continue to exist even when they are no longer perceivable through the senses, is a crucial aspect of human cognitive development. In this work, we seek to incorporate this understanding into interactive robots by proposing a set of assumptions and rules to represent object permanence in multi-object, multi-agent interactive scenarios. We integrate these rules into the particle filter, resulting in the Object Permanence Filter (OPF). For multi-object scenarios, we propose an ensemble of K interconnected OPFs, where each filter predicts plausible object tracks that are resilient to missing, noisy, and kinematically or dynamically infeasible measurements, thus bringing perceptional robustness. Through several interactive scenarios, we demonstrate that the proposed OPF approach provides robust tracking in human-robot interactive tasks agnostic to measurement type, even in the presence of prolonged and complete occlusion. Webpage: https://opfilter.github.io/.

A growing body of work in economics and computation focuses on the trade-off between implementability and simplicity in mechanism design. The goal is to develop a theory that not only allows to design an incentive structure easy to grasp for imperfectly rational agents, but also understand the ensuing limitations on the class of mechanisms that enforce it. In this context, the concept of OSP mechanisms has assumed a prominent role since they provably account for the absence of contingent reasoning skills, a specific cognitive limitation. For single-dimensional agents, it is known that OSP mechanisms need to use certain greedy algorithms. In this work, we introduce a notion that interpolates between OSP and SOSP, a more stringent notion where agents only plan a subset of their own future moves. We provide an algorithmic characterization of this novel class of mechanisms for single-dimensional domains and binary allocation problems, that precisely measures the interplay between simplicity and implementability. We build on this to show how mechanisms based on reverse greedy algorithms (a.k.a., deferred acceptance auctions) are algorithmically more robust to imperfectly rationality than those adopting greedy algorithms.

Prediction markets are economic mechanisms for aggregating information about future events through sequential interactions with traders. The pricing mechanisms in these markets are known to be related to optimization algorithms in machine learning and through these connections we have some understanding of how equilibrium market prices relate to the beliefs of the traders in a market. However, little is known about rates and guarantees for the convergence of these sequential mechanisms, and two recent papers cite this as an important open question. In this paper we show how some previously studied prediction market trading models can be understood as a natural generalization of randomized coordinate descent which we call randomized subspace descent (RSD). We establish convergence rates for RSD and leverage them to prove rates for the two prediction market models above, answering the open questions. Our results extend beyond standard centralized markets to arbitrary trade networks.

A market scoring rule (MSR) - a popular tool for designing algorithmic prediction markets - is an incentive-compatible mechanism for the aggregation of probabilistic beliefs from myopic risk-neutral agents. In this paper, we add to a growing body of research aimed at understanding the precise manner in which the price process induced by a MSR incorporates private information from agents who deviate from the assumption of risk-neutrality. We first establish that, for a myopic trading agent with a risk-averse utility function, a MSR satisfying mild regularity conditions elicits the agent's risk-neutral probability conditional on the latest market state rather than her true subjective probability. Hence, we show that a MSR under these conditions effectively behaves like a more traditional method of belief aggregation, namely an opinion pool, for agents' true probabilities.