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AgentLens: Visual Analysis for Agent Behaviors in LLM-based Autonomous Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recently, Large Language Model based Autonomous system(LLMAS) has gained great popularity for its potential to simulate complicated behaviors of human societies. One of its main challenges is to present and analyze the dynamic events evolution of LLMAS. In this work, we present a visualization approach to explore detailed statuses and agents' behavior within LLMAS. We propose a general pipeline that establishes a behavior structure from raw LLMAS execution events, leverages a behavior summarization algorithm to construct a hierarchical summary of the entire structure in terms of time sequence, and a cause trace method to mine the causal relationship between agent behaviors. We then develop AgentLens, a visual analysis system that leverages a hierarchical temporal visualization for illustrating the evolution of LLMAS, and supports users to interactively investigate details and causes of agents' behaviors. Two usage scenarios and a user study demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of our AgentLens.


Forecasting for Swap Regret for All Downstream Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We study the problem of making predictions so that downstream agents who best respond to them will be guaranteed diminishing swap regret, no matter what their utility functions are. It has been known since Foster and Vohra (1997) that agents who best-respond to calibrated forecasts have no swap regret. Unfortunately, the best known algorithms for guaranteeing calibrated forecasts in sequential adversarial environments do so at rates that degrade exponentially with the dimension of the prediction space. In this work, we show that by making predictions that are not calibrated, but are unbiased subject to a carefully selected collection of events, we can guarantee arbitrary downstream agents diminishing swap regret at rates that substantially improve over the rates that result from calibrated forecasts -- while maintaining the appealing property that our forecasts give guarantees for any downstream agent, without our forecasting algorithm needing to know their utility function. We give separate results in the ``low'' (1 or 2) dimensional setting and the ``high'' ($> 2$) dimensional setting. In the low dimensional setting, we show how to make predictions such that all agents who best respond to our predictions have diminishing swap regret -- in 1 dimension, at the optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ rate. In the high dimensional setting we show how to make forecasts that guarantee regret scaling at a rate of $O(T^{2/3})$ (crucially, a dimension independent exponent), under the assumption that downstream agents smoothly best respond. Our results stand in contrast to rates that derive from agents who best respond to calibrated forecasts, which have an exponential dependence on the dimension of the prediction space.


Time preference, wealth and utility inequality: A microeconomic interaction and dynamic macroeconomic model connection approach

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Based on interactions between individuals and others and references to social norms, this study reveals the impact of heterogeneity in time preference on wealth distribution and inequality. We present a novel approach that connects the interactions between microeconomic agents that generate heterogeneity to the dynamic equations for capital and consumption in macroeconomic models. Using this approach, we estimate the impact of changes in the discount rate due to microeconomic interactions on capital, consumption and utility and the degree of inequality. The results show that intercomparisons with others regarding consumption significantly affect capital, i.e. wealth inequality. Furthermore, the impact on utility is never small and social norms can reduce this impact. Our supporting evidence shows that the quantitative results of inequality calculations correspond to survey data from cohort and cross-cultural studies. This study's micro-macro connection approach can be deployed to connect microeconomic interactions, such as exchange, interest and debt, redistribution, mutual aid and time preference, to dynamic macroeconomic models.


Learning to Generate Context-Sensitive Backchannel Smiles for Embodied AI Agents with Applications in Mental Health Dialogues

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Addressing the critical shortage of mental health resources for effective screening, diagnosis, and treatment remains a significant challenge. This scarcity underscores the need for innovative solutions, particularly in enhancing the accessibility and efficacy of therapeutic support. Embodied agents with advanced interactive capabilities emerge as a promising and cost-effective supplement to traditional caregiving methods. Crucial to these agents' effectiveness is their ability to simulate non-verbal behaviors, like backchannels, that are pivotal in establishing rapport and understanding in therapeutic contexts but remain under-explored. To improve the rapport-building capabilities of embodied agents we annotated backchannel smiles in videos of intimate face-to-face conversations over topics such as mental health, illness, and relationships. We hypothesized that both speaker and listener behaviors affect the duration and intensity of backchannel smiles. Using cues from speech prosody and language along with the demographics of the speaker and listener, we found them to contain significant predictors of the intensity of backchannel smiles. Based on our findings, we introduce backchannel smile production in embodied agents as a generation problem. Our attention-based generative model suggests that listener information offers performance improvements over the baseline speaker-centric generation approach. Conditioned generation using the significant predictors of smile intensity provides statistically significant improvements in empirical measures of generation quality. Our user study by transferring generated smiles to an embodied agent suggests that agent with backchannel smiles is perceived to be more human-like and is an attractive alternative for non-personal conversations over agent without backchannel smiles.


Intelligent Agricultural Management Considering N$_2$O Emission and Climate Variability with Uncertainties

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study examines how artificial intelligence (AI), especially Reinforcement Learning (RL), can be used in farming to boost crop yields, fine-tune nitrogen use and watering, and reduce nitrate runoff and greenhouse gases, focusing on Nitrous Oxide (N$_2$O) emissions from soil. Facing climate change and limited agricultural knowledge, we use Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) with a crop simulator to model AI agents' interactions with farming environments. We apply deep Q-learning with Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-based Q networks for training agents on optimal actions. Also, we develop Machine Learning (ML) models to predict N$_2$O emissions, integrating these predictions into the simulator. Our research tackles uncertainties in N$_2$O emission estimates with a probabilistic ML approach and climate variability through a stochastic weather model, offering a range of emission outcomes to improve forecast reliability and decision-making. By incorporating climate change effects, we enhance agents' climate adaptability, aiming for resilient agricultural practices. Results show these agents can align crop productivity with environmental concerns by penalizing N$_2$O emissions, adapting effectively to climate shifts like warmer temperatures and less rain. This strategy improves farm management under climate change, highlighting AI's role in sustainable agriculture.


Optimal Task Assignment and Path Planning using Conflict-Based Search with Precedence and Temporal Constraints

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem entails finding collision-free paths for a set of agents, guiding them from their start to goal locations. However, MAPF does not account for several practical task-related constraints. For example, agents may need to perform actions at goal locations with specific execution times, adhering to predetermined orders and timeframes. Moreover, goal assignments may not be predefined for agents, and the optimization objective may lack an explicit definition. To incorporate task assignment, path planning, and a user-defined objective into a coherent framework, this paper examines the Task Assignment and Path Finding with Precedence and Temporal Constraints (TAPF-PTC) problem. We augment Conflict-Based Search (CBS) to simultaneously generate task assignments and collision-free paths that adhere to precedence and temporal constraints, maximizing an objective quantified by the return from a user-defined reward function in reinforcement learning (RL). Experimentally, we demonstrate that our algorithm, CBS-TA-PTC, can solve highly challenging bomb-defusing tasks with precedence and temporal constraints efficiently relative to MARL and adapted Target Assignment and Path Finding (TAPF) methods.


Bayesian Strategic Classification

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In strategic classification, agents modify their features, at a cost, to ideally obtain a positive classification from the learner's classifier. The typical response of the learner is to carefully modify their classifier to be robust to such strategic behavior. When reasoning about agent manipulations, most papers that study strategic classification rely on the following strong assumption: agents fully know the exact parameters of the deployed classifier by the learner. This often is an unrealistic assumption when using complex or proprietary machine learning techniques in real-world prediction tasks. We initiate the study of partial information release by the learner in strategic classification. We move away from the traditional assumption that agents have full knowledge of the classifier. Instead, we consider agents that have a common distributional prior on which classifier the learner is using. The learner in our model can reveal truthful, yet not necessarily complete, information about the deployed classifier to the agents. The learner's goal is to release just enough information about the classifier to maximize accuracy. We show how such partial information release can, counter-intuitively, benefit the learner's accuracy, despite increasing agents' abilities to manipulate. We show that while it is intractable to compute the best response of an agent in the general case, there exist oracle-efficient algorithms that can solve the best response of the agents when the learner's hypothesis class is the class of linear classifiers, or when the agents' cost function satisfies a natural notion of submodularity as we define. We then turn our attention to the learner's optimization problem and provide both positive and negative results on the algorithmic problem of how much information the learner should release about the classifier to maximize their expected accuracy.


Agent Smith: A Single Image Can Jailbreak One Million Multimodal LLM Agents Exponentially Fast

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A multimodal large language model (MLLM) agent can receive instructions, capture images, retrieve histories from memory, and decide which tools to use. Nonetheless, red-teaming efforts have revealed that adversarial images/prompts can jailbreak an MLLM and cause unaligned behaviors. In this work, we report an even more severe safety issue in multi-agent environments, referred to as infectious jailbreak. It entails the adversary simply jailbreaking a single agent, and without any further intervention from the adversary, (almost) all agents will become infected exponentially fast and exhibit harmful behaviors. To validate the feasibility of infectious jailbreak, we simulate multi-agent environments containing up to one million LLaVA-1.5 agents, and employ randomized pair-wise chat as a proof-of-concept instantiation for multi-agent interaction. Our results show that feeding an (infectious) adversarial image into the memory of any randomly chosen agent is sufficient to achieve infectious jailbreak. Finally, we derive a simple principle for determining whether a defense mechanism can provably restrain the spread of infectious jailbreak, but how to design a practical defense that meets this principle remains an open question to investigate. Our project page is available at https://sail-sg.github.io/Agent-Smith/.


Fairness Auditing with Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

For instance, (Rastegarpanah Existing work in fairness audits assumes that et al., 2021) proposes to study the illegal use of some profile agents operate independently. In this paper, we data in the response of a model in such a query-response consider the case of multiple agents auditing the setup. Yet, as of today, an auditor performs her audit tasks same platform for different tasks. Agents have on each attribute of interest sequentially, one after the other, two levers: their collaboration strategy, with or and independent of other auditors. For example, when she without coordination beforehand, and their sampling wants to audit an ML model that predicts whether it is safe method. We theoretically study their interplay to issue a loan (Feldman et al., 2015), she begins by auditing when agents operate independently or collaborate.


Conservative and Risk-Aware Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Digital Twins

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Digital twin (DT) platforms are increasingly regarded as a promising technology for controlling, optimizing, and monitoring complex engineering systems such as next-generation wireless networks. An important challenge in adopting DT solutions is their reliance on data collected offline, lacking direct access to the physical environment. This limitation is particularly severe in multi-agent systems, for which conventional multi-agent reinforcement (MARL) requires online interactions with the environment. A direct application of online MARL schemes to an offline setting would generally fail due to the epistemic uncertainty entailed by the limited availability of data. In this work, we propose an offline MARL scheme for DT-based wireless networks that integrates distributional RL and conservative Q-learning to address the environment's inherent aleatoric uncertainty and the epistemic uncertainty arising from limited data. To further exploit the offline data, we adapt the proposed scheme to the centralized training decentralized execution framework, allowing joint training of the agents' policies. The proposed MARL scheme, referred to as multi-agent conservative quantile regression (MA-CQR) addresses general risk-sensitive design criteria and is applied to the trajectory planning problem in drone networks, showcasing its advantages.