Agents
A New Dynamic Distributed Planning Approach: Application to DPDP Problems
In this work, we proposed a new dynamic distributed planning approach that is able to take into account the changes that the agent introduces on his set of actions to be planned in order to take into account the changes that occur in his environment. Our approach fits into the context of distributed planning for distributed plans where each agent can produce its own plans. According to our approach the generation of the plans is based on the satisfaction of the constraints by the use of the genetic algorithms. Our approach is to generate, a new plan by each agent, whenever there is a change in its set of actions to plan. This in order to take into account the new actions introduced in its new plan. In this new plan, the agent takes, each time, as a new action set to plan all the old un-executed actions of the old plan and the new actions engendered by the changes and as a new initial state; the state in which the set of actions of the agent undergoes a change. In our work, we used a concrete case to illustrate and demonstrate the utility of our approach.
Complex behavior from intrinsic motivation to occupy action-state path space
Ramรญrez-Ruiz, Jorge, Grytskyy, Dmytro, Mastrogiuseppe, Chiara, Habib, Yamen, Moreno-Bote, Rubรฉn
Most theories of behavior posit that agents tend to maximize some form of reward or utility. However, animals very often move with curiosity and seem to be motivated in a reward-free manner. Here we abandon the idea of reward maximization, and propose that the goal of behavior is maximizing occupancy of future paths of actions and states. According to this maximum occupancy principle, rewards are the means to occupy path space, not the goal per se; goal-directedness simply emerges as rational ways of searching for resources so that movement, understood amply, never ends. We find that action-state path entropy is the only measure consistent with additivity and other intuitive properties of expected future action-state path occupancy. We provide analytical expressions that relate the optimal policy and state-value function, and prove convergence of our value iteration algorithm. Using discrete and continuous state tasks, including a high--dimensional controller, we show that complex behaviors such as `dancing', hide-and-seek and a basic form of altruistic behavior naturally result from the intrinsic motivation to occupy path space. All in all, we present a theory of behavior that generates both variability and goal-directedness in the absence of reward maximization.
Cooperation and Control in Delegation Games
Sourbut, Oliver, Hammond, Lewis, Wood, Harriet
With the continuing development of powerful and increasing general AI systems, we are likely to see many more Control and cooperation can in turn be broken down into tasks delegated to autonomous machines, from writing problems of alignment and of capabilities [7, 9, 22]. For example, emails to driving us from place to place. Moreover, these in the control failure above, the first AV might drive machines are increasingly likely to come into contact with undesirably by taking route A even though their passenger each other when acting on behalf of their human principals, prefers the scenic beachfront (an alignment problem), whether they are virtual personal assistants attempting to or the second AV might undesirably take route B because schedule a meeting or autonomous vehicles (AVs) using it is incapable of calculating the best route accurately (a the same road network. We refer to these multi-principal, capabilities problem). Similarly, in the cooperation failure, multi-agent scenarios as delegation games, an example of the AVs might cause congestion because they cannot which is as follows, and is shown in Figure 1.
What Do Computing and Economics Have to Say to Each Other?
I described a 1999 result by Elias Koutsoupias and Christos Papadimitriou, regarding multi-agent systems. They studied systems in which non-cooperative agents share a common resource and proposed the ratio between the worst possible Nash equilibrium and the social optimum as a measure of the effectiveness of the system. This ratio has become known as the "Price of Anarchy," as it measures how far from optimal such non-cooperative systems can be. They showed that the price of anarchy could be arbitrarily high, depending on the complexity of the system. The Price-of-Anarchy concept has later been extended to other types of equilibria--for example, Pareto-Optimal Equilibria.b
Large Multimodal Agents: A Survey
Xie, Junlin, Chen, Zhihong, Zhang, Ruifei, Wan, Xiang, Li, Guanbin
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved superior performance in powering text-based AI agents, endowing them with decision-making and reasoning abilities akin to humans. Concurrently, there is an emerging research trend focused on extending these LLM-powered AI agents into the multimodal domain. This extension enables AI agents to interpret and respond to diverse multimodal user queries, thereby handling more intricate and nuanced tasks. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of LLM-driven multimodal agents, which we refer to as large multimodal agents ( LMAs for short). First, we introduce the essential components involved in developing LMAs and categorize the current body of research into four distinct types. Subsequently, we review the collaborative frameworks integrating multiple LMAs , enhancing collective efficacy. One of the critical challenges in this field is the diverse evaluation methods used across existing studies, hindering effective comparison among different LMAs . Therefore, we compile these evaluation methodologies and establish a comprehensive framework to bridge the gaps. This framework aims to standardize evaluations, facilitating more meaningful comparisons. Concluding our review, we highlight the extensive applications of LMAs and propose possible future research directions. Our discussion aims to provide valuable insights and guidelines for future research in this rapidly evolving field. An up-to-date resource list is available at https://github.com/jun0wanan/awesome-large-multimodal-agents.
AgentLite: A Lightweight Library for Building and Advancing Task-Oriented LLM Agent System
Liu, Zhiwei, Yao, Weiran, Zhang, Jianguo, Yang, Liangwei, Liu, Zuxin, Tan, Juntao, Choubey, Prafulla K., Lan, Tian, Wu, Jason, Wang, Huan, Heinecke, Shelby, Xiong, Caiming, Savarese, Silvio
The booming success of LLMs initiates rapid development in LLM agents. Though the foundation of an LLM agent is the generative model, it is critical to devise the optimal reasoning strategies and agent architectures. Accordingly, LLM agent research advances from the simple chain-of-thought prompting to more complex ReAct and Reflection reasoning strategy; agent architecture also evolves from single agent generation to multi-agent conversation, as well as multi-LLM multi-agent group chat. However, with the existing intricate frameworks and libraries, creating and evaluating new reasoning strategies and agent architectures has become a complex challenge, which hinders research investigation into LLM agents. Thus, we open-source a new AI agent library, AgentLite, which simplifies this process by offering a lightweight, user-friendly platform for innovating LLM agent reasoning, architectures, and applications with ease. AgentLite is a task-oriented framework designed to enhance the ability of agents to break down tasks and facilitate the development of multi-agent systems. Furthermore, we introduce multiple practical applications developed with AgentLite to demonstrate its convenience and flexibility. Get started now at: \url{https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/AgentLite}.
Designing Multispecies Worlds for Robots, Cats, and Humans
Schneiders, Eike, Benford, Steve, Chamberlain, Alan, Mancini, Clara, Castle-Green, Simon, Ngo, Victor, Farr, Ju Row, Adams, Matt, Tandavanitj, Nick, Fischer, Joel
We reflect on the design of a multispecies world centred around a bespoke enclosure in which three cats and a robot arm coexist for six hours a day during a twelve-day installation as part of an artist-led project. In this paper, we present the project's design process, encompassing various interconnected components, including the cats, the robot and its autonomous systems, the custom end-effectors and robot attachments, the diverse roles of the humans-in-the-loop, and the custom-designed enclosure. Subsequently, we provide a detailed account of key moments during the deployment and discuss the design implications for future multispecies systems. Specifically, we argue that designing the technology and its interactions is not sufficient, but that it is equally important to consider the design of the `world' in which the technology operates. Finally, we highlight the necessity of human involvement in areas such as breakdown recovery, animal welfare, and their role as audience.
Platforms for Efficient and Incentive-Aware Collaboration
Haghtalab, Nika, Qiao, Mingda, Yang, Kunhe
Collaboration is crucial for reaching collective goals. However, its effectiveness is often undermined by the strategic behavior of individual agents -- a fact that is captured by a high Price of Stability (PoS) in recent literature [Blum et al., 2021]. Implicit in the traditional PoS analysis is the assumption that agents have full knowledge of how their tasks relate to one another. We offer a new perspective on bringing about efficient collaboration among strategic agents using information design. Inspired by the growing importance of collaboration in machine learning (such as platforms for collaborative federated learning and data cooperatives), we propose a framework where the platform has more information about how the agents' tasks relate to each other than the agents themselves. We characterize how and to what degree such platforms can leverage their information advantage to steer strategic agents toward efficient collaboration. Concretely, we consider collaboration networks where each node is a task type held by one agent, and each task benefits from contributions made in their inclusive neighborhood of tasks. This network structure is known to the agents and the platform, but only the platform knows each agent's real location -- from the agents' perspective, their location is determined by a random permutation. We employ private Bayesian persuasion and design two families of persuasive signaling schemes that the platform can use to ensure a small total workload when agents follow the signal. The first family aims to achieve the minmax optimal approximation ratio compared to the optimal collaboration, which is shown to be $\Theta(\sqrt{n})$ for unit-weight graphs, $\Theta(n^{2/3})$ for graphs with constant minimum edge weights, and $O(n^{3/4})$ for general weighted graphs. The second family ensures per-instance strict improvement compared to full information disclosure.
HiMAP: Learning Heuristics-Informed Policies for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Pathfinding
Tang, Huijie, Berto, Federico, Ma, Zihan, Hua, Chuanbo, Ahn, Kyuree, Park, Jinkyoo
Large-scale multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) presents significant challenges in several areas. As systems grow in complexity with a multitude of autonomous agents operating simultaneously, efficient and collision-free coordination becomes paramount. Traditional algorithms often fall short in scalability, especially in intricate scenarios. Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown potential to address the intricacies of MAPF; however, it has also been shown to struggle with scalability, demanding intricate implementation, lengthy training, and often exhibiting unstable convergence, limiting its practical application. In this paper, we introduce Heuristics-Informed Multi-Agent Pathfinding (HiMAP), a novel scalable approach that employs imitation learning with heuristic guidance in a decentralized manner. We train on small-scale instances using a heuristic policy as a teacher that maps each single agent observation information to an action probability distribution. During pathfinding, we adopt several inference techniques to improve performance. With a simple training scheme and implementation, HiMAP demonstrates competitive results in terms of success rate and scalability in the field of imitation-learning-only MAPF, showing the potential of imitation-learning-only MAPF equipped with inference techniques.
Artificial Intelligence for Complex Network: Potential, Methodology and Application
Ding, Jingtao, Liu, Chang, Zheng, Yu, Zhang, Yunke, Yu, Zihan, Li, Ruikun, Chen, Hongyi, Piao, Jinghua, Wang, Huandong, Liu, Jiazhen, Li, Yong
For example, cells are described as complex networks of chemicals linked by chemical reactions [7]; ecological networks link populations together through food chains [64]; and the World Wide Web is a vast virtual network of web pages and hyperlinks [47]. These complex networks are just a few of many examples. The local microscopic behavior of these complex networks often shows disorder. However, at the macroscopic scale, they show simple and even symmetrical structures. In order to understand the transition and evolution of complex systems from microscopic disorder to macroscopic order, current complex network studies mainly fall into the following paradigm: the combination of graph theory and statistical mechanics [3]. They construct the core principle of complex network science, that is, simple random rules and network dynamics together drive the emergence of non-trivial topological structures. Early works mainly focused on the topology of the interactions between the components, i.e., the birth-death process of edges on the graph. The two representative works, the Watts-Strogatz (WS) model and the scale-free model [11, 252], embody this principle and successfully generate graphs that approach real-world complex networks with high clustering coefficients and small average paths or power-law degree distribution. Despite their success in certain domains [17, 221, 222, 235], they do not provide a way to model the dynamics of the nodes, i.e., the change in the node's features.