Agents
Conversational Language Models for Human-in-the-Loop Multi-Robot Coordination
Hunt, William, Godfrey, Toby, Soorati, Mohammad D.
With the increasing prevalence and diversity of robots interacting in the real world, there is need for flexible, on-the-fly planning and cooperation. Large Language Models are starting to be explored in a multimodal setup for communication, coordination, and planning in robotics. Existing approaches generally use a single agent building a plan, or have multiple homogeneous agents coordinating for a simple task. We present a decentralised, dialogical approach in which a team of agents with different abilities plans solutions through peer-to-peer and human-robot discussion. We suggest that argument-style dialogues are an effective way to facilitate adaptive use of each agent's abilities within a cooperative team. Two robots discuss how to solve a cleaning problem set by a human, define roles, and agree on paths they each take. Each step can be interrupted by a human advisor and agents check their plans with the human. Agents then execute this plan in the real world, collecting rubbish from people in each room. Our implementation uses text at every step, maintaining transparency and effective human-multi-robot interaction.
Understanding Iterative Combinatorial Auction Designs via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
d'Eon, Greg, Newman, Neil, Leyton-Brown, Kevin
Iterative combinatorial auctions are widely used in high stakes settings such as spectrum auctions. Such auctions can be hard to understand analytically, making it difficult for bidders to determine how to behave and for designers to optimize auction rules to ensure desirable outcomes such as high revenue or welfare. In this paper, we investigate whether multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms can be used to understand iterative combinatorial auctions, given that these algorithms have recently shown empirical success in several other domains. We find that MARL can indeed benefit auction analysis, but that deploying it effectively is nontrivial. We begin by describing modelling decisions that keep the resulting game tractable without sacrificing important features such as imperfect information or asymmetry between bidders. We also discuss how to navigate pitfalls of various MARL algorithms, how to overcome challenges in verifying convergence, and how to generate and interpret multiple equilibria. We illustrate the promise of our resulting approach by using it to evaluate a specific rule change to a clock auction, finding substantially different auction outcomes due to complex changes in bidders' behavior.
Leveraging Team Correlation for Approximating Equilibrium in Two-Team Zero-Sum Games
Liu, Naming, Wang, Mingzhi, Zhang, Youzhi, Yang, Yaodong, An, Bo, Wen, Ying
Two-team zero-sum games are one of the most important paradigms in game theory. In this paper, we focus on finding an unexploitable equilibrium in large team games. An unexploitable equilibrium is a worst-case policy, where members in the opponent team cannot increase their team reward by taking any policy, e.g., cooperatively changing to other joint policies. As an optimal unexploitable equilibrium in two-team zero-sum games, correlated-team maxmin equilibrium remains unexploitable even in the worst case where players in the opponent team can achieve arbitrary cooperation through a joint team policy. However, finding such an equilibrium in large games is challenging due to the impracticality of evaluating the exponentially large number of joint policies. To solve this problem, we first introduce a general solution concept called restricted correlated-team maxmin equilibrium, which solves the problem of being impossible to evaluate all joint policy by a sample factor while avoiding an exploitation problem under the incomplete joint policy evaluation. We then develop an efficient sequential correlation mechanism, and based on which we propose an algorithm for approximating the unexploitable equilibrium in large games. We show that our approach achieves lower exploitability than the state-of-the-art baseline when encountering opponent teams with different exploitation ability in large team games including Google Research Football.
OmniACT: A Dataset and Benchmark for Enabling Multimodal Generalist Autonomous Agents for Desktop and Web
Kapoor, Raghav, Butala, Yash Parag, Russak, Melisa, Koh, Jing Yu, Kamble, Kiran, Alshikh, Waseem, Salakhutdinov, Ruslan
For decades, human-computer interaction has fundamentally been manual. Even today, almost all productive work done on the computer necessitates human input at every step. Autonomous virtual agents represent an exciting step in automating many of these menial tasks. Virtual agents would empower users with limited technical proficiency to harness the full possibilities of computer systems. They could also enable the efficient streamlining of numerous computer tasks, ranging from calendar management to complex travel bookings, with minimal human intervention. In this paper, we introduce OmniACT, the first-of-a-kind dataset and benchmark for assessing an agent's capability to generate executable programs to accomplish computer tasks. Our scope extends beyond traditional web automation, covering a diverse range of desktop applications. The dataset consists of fundamental tasks such as "Play the next song", as well as longer horizon tasks such as "Send an email to John Doe mentioning the time and place to meet". Specifically, given a pair of screen image and a visually-grounded natural language task, the goal is to generate a script capable of fully executing the task. We run several strong baseline language model agents on our benchmark. The strongest baseline, GPT-4, performs the best on our benchmark However, its performance level still reaches only 15% of the human proficiency in generating executable scripts capable of completing the task, demonstrating the challenge of our task for conventional web agents. Our benchmark provides a platform to measure and evaluate the progress of language model agents in automating computer tasks and motivates future work towards building multimodal models that bridge large language models and the visual grounding of computer screens.
Embodied Supervision: Haptic Display of Automation Command to Improve Supervisory Performance
Gilbert, Alia, Krishnan, Sachit, Gillespie, R. Brent
It seems plausible then, that if the supervisor has a As the capabilities of automation advance, humans copy of u(t), the same benefits afforded the operator are promoted from the role of operator to supervisor, might also accrue for the supervisor. By placing a often being asked to monitor multiple automated agents manual control interface that moves under the action simultaneously. As supervisors, humans are expected to of another agent into the passive hand of a human detect automation faults, to intervene when recovery supervisor (who does not generate the control signal), is beyond automation capabilities, and to re-program we hypothesize that the supervisor's ability to anticipate automation objectives when necessary. Yet humans are the response y(t) will improve. We also hypothesize that notoriously ill-equipped to supervise [1]. Humans lose the supervisor will be in a better position to determine vigilance when sustained attention is required [2] and the control intent of the operator.
Position Paper: Agent AI Towards a Holistic Intelligence
Huang, Qiuyuan, Wake, Naoki, Sarkar, Bidipta, Durante, Zane, Gong, Ran, Taori, Rohan, Noda, Yusuke, Terzopoulos, Demetri, Kuno, Noboru, Famoti, Ade, Llorens, Ashley, Langford, John, Vo, Hoi, Fei-Fei, Li, Ikeuchi, Katsu, Gao, Jianfeng
Recent advancements in large foundation models have remarkably enhanced our understanding of sensory information in open-world environments. In leveraging the power of foundation models, it is crucial for AI research to pivot away from excessive reductionism and toward an emphasis on systems that function as cohesive wholes. Specifically, we emphasize developing Agent AI -- an embodied system that integrates large foundation models into agent actions. The emerging field of Agent AI spans a wide range of existing embodied and agent-based multimodal interactions, including robotics, gaming, and healthcare systems, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel large action model to achieve embodied intelligent behavior, the Agent Foundation Model. On top of this idea, we discuss how agent AI exhibits remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. Furthermore, we discuss the potential of Agent AI from an interdisciplinary perspective, underscoring AI cognition and consciousness within scientific discourse. We believe that those discussions serve as a basis for future research directions and encourage broader societal engagement.
Rethinking the Bounds of LLM Reasoning: Are Multi-Agent Discussions the Key?
Wang, Qineng, Wang, Zihao, Su, Ying, Tong, Hanghang, Song, Yangqiu
Recent progress in LLMs discussion suggests that multi-agent discussion improves the reasoning abilities of LLMs. In this work, we reevaluate this claim through systematic experiments, where we propose a novel group discussion framework to enrich the set of discussion mechanisms. Interestingly, our results show that a single-agent LLM with strong prompts can achieve almost the same performance as the best existing discussion approach on a wide range of reasoning tasks and backbone LLMs. We observe that the multi-agent discussion performs better than a single agent only when there is no demonstration in the prompt. Further study reveals the common interaction mechanisms of LLMs during the discussion.
Solving Multi-Entity Robotic Problems Using Permutation Invariant Neural Networks
An, Tianxu, Lee, Joonho, Bjelonic, Marko, De Vincenti, Flavio, Hutter, Marco
Abstract--Challenges in real-world robotic applications often stem from managing multiple, dynamically varying entities such as neighboring robots, manipulable objects, and navigation goals. Existing multi-agent control strategies face scalability limitations, struggling to handle arbitrary numbers of entities. Additionally, they often rely on engineered heuristics for assigning entities among agents. We propose a data driven approach to address these limitations by introducing a decentralized control system using neural network policies trained in simulation. Leveraging permutation invariant neural network architectures and modelfree reinforcement learning, our approach allows control agents to autonomously determine the relative importance of different entities without being biased by ordering or limited by a fixed capacity. We prove the effectiveness of our architectural choice through experiments with three exemplary multi-entity problems. Our analysis underscores the pivotal role of the end-to-end trained permutation invariant encoders in achieving scalability and improving the task performance in multi-object manipulation or multi-goal navigation problems. Multi-entity problems studied in this work. For example, human workers collaborate with problem where robots are given multiple navigation goals, co-workers to construct structures, or a group of friends Figure 1B illustrates box packing problem where robots have splits up to find various products in a grocery store.
MOSAIC: A Modular System for Assistive and Interactive Cooking
Wang, Huaxiaoyue, Kedia, Kushal, Ren, Juntao, Abdullah, Rahma, Bhardwaj, Atiksh, Chao, Angela, Chen, Kelly Y, Chin, Nathaniel, Dan, Prithwish, Fan, Xinyi, Gonzalez-Pumariega, Gonzalo, Kompella, Aditya, Pace, Maximus Adrian, Sharma, Yash, Sun, Xiangwan, Sunkara, Neha, Choudhury, Sanjiban
We present MOSAIC, a modular architecture for home robots to perform complex collaborative tasks, such as cooking with everyday users. MOSAIC tightly collaborates with humans, interacts with users using natural language, coordinates multiple robots, and manages an open vocabulary of everyday objects. At its core, MOSAIC employs modularity: it leverages multiple large-scale pre-trained models for general tasks like language and image recognition, while using streamlined modules designed for task-specific control. We extensively evaluate MOSAIC on 60 end-to-end trials where two robots collaborate with a human user to cook a combination of 6 recipes. We also extensively test individual modules with 180 episodes of visuomotor picking, 60 episodes of human motion forecasting, and 46 online user evaluations of the task planner. We show that MOSAIC is able to efficiently collaborate with humans by running the overall system end-to-end with a real human user, completing 68.3% (41/60) collaborative cooking trials of 6 different recipes with a subtask completion rate of 91.6%. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the current system and exciting open challenges in this domain. The project's website is at https://portal-cornell.github.io/MOSAIC/
GenAINet: Enabling Wireless Collective Intelligence via Knowledge Transfer and Reasoning
Zou, Hang, Zhao, Qiyang, Bariah, Lina, Tian, Yu, Bennis, Mehdi, Lasaulce, Samson, Debbah, Merouane, Bader, Faouzi
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and communication networks are expected to have groundbreaking synergies in 6G. Connecting GenAI agents over a wireless network can potentially unleash the power of collective intelligence and pave the way for artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, current wireless networks are designed as a "data pipe" and are not suited to accommodate and leverage the power of GenAI. In this paper, we propose the GenAINet framework in which distributed GenAI agents communicate knowledge (high-level concepts or abstracts) to accomplish arbitrary tasks. We first provide a network architecture integrating GenAI capabilities to manage both network protocols and applications. Building on this, we investigate effective communication and reasoning problems by proposing a semantic-native GenAINet. Specifically, GenAI agents extract semantic concepts from multi-modal raw data, build a knowledgebase representing their semantic relations, which is retrieved by GenAI models for planning and reasoning. Under this paradigm, an agent can learn fast from other agents' experience for making better decisions with efficient communications. Furthermore, we conduct two case studies where in wireless device query, we show that extracting and transferring knowledge can improve query accuracy with reduced communication; and in wireless power control, we show that distributed agents can improve decisions via collaborative reasoning. Finally, we address that developing a hierarchical semantic level Telecom world model is a key path towards network of collective intelligence.