The fact that accurately predicted information can serve as an energy source paves the way for new approaches to autonomous learning. The energy derived from a sequence of successful predictions can be recycled as an immediate incentive and resource, driving the enhancement of predictive capabilities in AI agents. We propose that, through a series of straightforward meta-architectural adjustments, any unsupervised learning apparatus could achieve complete independence from external energy sources, evolving into a self-sustaining physical system with a strong intrinsic 'drive' for continual learning. This concept, while still purely theoretical, is exemplified through the autoencoder, a quintessential model for unsupervised efficient coding. We use this model to demonstrate how progressive paradigm shifts can profoundly alter our comprehension of learning and intelligence. By reconceptualizing learning as an energy-seeking process, we highlight the potential for achieving true autonomy in learning systems, thereby bridging the gap between algorithmic concepts and physical models of intelligence.

Intention is an important and challenging concept in AI. It is important because it underlies many other concepts we care about, such as agency, manipulation, legal responsibility, and blame. However, ascribing intent to AI systems is contentious, and there is no universally accepted theory of intention applicable to AI agents. We operationalise the intention with which an agent acts, relating to the reasons it chooses its decision. We introduce a formal definition of intention in structural causal influence models, grounded in the philosophy literature on intent and applicable to real-world machine learning systems. Through a number of examples and results, we show that our definition captures the intuitive notion of intent and satisfies desiderata set-out by past work. In addition, we show how our definition relates to past concepts, including actual causality, and the notion of instrumental goals, which is a core idea in the literature on safe AI agents. Finally, we demonstrate how our definition can be used to infer the intentions of reinforcement learning agents and language models from their behaviour.

Optimal allocation of agricultural water in the event of droughts is an important global problem. In addressing this problem, many aspects, including the welfare of farmers, the economy, and the environment, must be considered. Under this backdrop, our work focuses on several resource-matching problems accounting for agents with multi-crop portfolios, geographic constraints, and fairness. First, we address a matching problem where the goal is to maximize a welfare function in two-sided markets where buyers' requirements and sellers' supplies are represented by value functions that assign prices (or costs) to specified volumes of water. For the setting where the value functions satisfy certain monotonicity properties, we present an efficient algorithm that maximizes a social welfare function. When there are minimum water requirement constraints, we present a randomized algorithm which ensures that the constraints are satisfied in expectation. For a single seller--multiple buyers setting with fairness constraints, we design an efficient algorithm that maximizes the minimum level of satisfaction of any buyer. We also present computational complexity results that highlight the limits on the generalizability of our results. We evaluate the algorithms developed in our work with experiments on both real-world and synthetic data sets with respect to drought severity, value functions, and seniority of agents.

Trajectory planning is a fundamental problem in robotics. It facilitates a wide range of applications in navigation and motion planning, control, and multi-agent coordination. Trajectory planning is a difficult problem due to its computational complexity and real-world environment complexity with uncertainty, non-linearity, and real-time requirements. The multi-agent trajectory planning problem adds another dimension of difficulty due to inter-agent interaction. Existing solutions are either search-based or optimization-based approaches with simplified assumptions of environment, limited planning speed, and limited scalability in the number of agents. In this work, we make the first attempt to reformulate single agent and multi-agent trajectory planning problem as query problems over an implicit neural representation of trajectories. We formulate such implicit representation as Neural Trajectory Models (NTM) which can be queried to generate nearly optimal trajectory in complex environments. We conduct experiments in simulation environments and demonstrate that NTM can solve single-agent and multi-agent trajectory planning problems. In the experiments, NTMs achieve (1) sub-millisecond panning time using GPUs, (2) almost avoiding all environment collision, (3) almost avoiding all inter-agent collision, and (4) generating almost shortest paths. We also demonstrate that the same NTM framework can also be used for trajectories correction and multi-trajectory conflict resolution refining low quality and conflicting multi-agent trajectories into nearly optimal solutions efficiently. (Open source code will be available at https://github.com/laser2099/neural-trajectory-model)

Markov Games (MG) is an important model for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). It was long believed that the "curse of multi-agents" (i.e., the algorithmic performance drops exponentially with the number of agents) is unavoidable until several recent works (Daskalakis et al., 2023; Cui et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023. While these works did resolve the curse of multi-agents, when the state spaces are prohibitively large and (linear) function approximations are deployed, they either had a slower convergence rate of $O(T^{-1/4})$ or brought a polynomial dependency on the number of actions $A_{\max}$ -- which is avoidable in single-agent cases even when the loss functions can arbitrarily vary with time (Dai et al., 2023). This paper first refines the `AVLPR` framework by Wang et al. (2023), with an insight of *data-dependent* (i.e., stochastic) pessimistic estimation of the sub-optimality gap, allowing a broader choice of plug-in algorithms. When specialized to MGs with independent linear function approximations, we propose novel *action-dependent bonuses* to cover occasionally extreme estimation errors. With the help of state-of-the-art techniques from the single-agent RL literature, we give the first algorithm that tackles the curse of multi-agents, attains the optimal $O(T^{-1/2})$ convergence rate, and avoids $\text{poly}(A_{\max})$ dependency simultaneously.

Reward allocation, also known as the credit assignment problem, has been an important topic in economics, engineering, and machine learning. An important concept in credit assignment is the core, which is the set of stable allocations where no agent has the motivation to deviate from the grand coalition. In this paper, we consider the stable allocation learning problem of stochastic cooperative games, where the reward function is characterised as a random variable with an unknown distribution. Given an oracle that returns a stochastic reward for an enquired coalition each round, our goal is to learn the expected core, that is, the set of allocations that are stable in expectation. Within the class of strictly convex games, we present an algorithm named \texttt{Common-Points-Picking} that returns a stable allocation given a polynomial number of samples, with high probability. The analysis of our algorithm involves the development of several new results in convex geometry, including an extension of the separation hyperplane theorem for multiple convex sets, and may be of independent interest.

In the field of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), known for their openness, dynamism, and cooperative nature, the ability to trust the resources and services of other agents is crucial. Trust, in this setting, is the reliance and confidence an agent has in the information, behaviors, intentions, truthfulness, and capabilities of others within the system. Our paper introduces a new graphical approach that utilizes factor graphs to represent the interdependent behaviors and trustworthiness among agents. This includes modeling the behavior of robots as a trajectory of actions using a Gaussian process factor graph, which accounts for smoothness, obstacle avoidance, and trust-related factors. Our method for evaluating trust is decentralized and considers key interdependent sub-factors such as proximity safety, consistency, and cooperation. The overall system comprises a network of factor graphs that interact through trust-related factors and employs a Bayesian inference method to dynamically assess trust-based decisions with informed consent. The effectiveness of this method is validated via simulations and empirical tests with autonomous robots navigating unsignalized intersections.

In multi-agent settings with mixed incentives, methods developed for zero-sum games have been shown to lead to detrimental outcomes. To address this issue, opponent shaping (OS) methods explicitly learn to influence the learning dynamics of co-players and empirically lead to improved individual and collective outcomes. However, OS methods have only been evaluated in low-dimensional environments due to the challenges associated with estimating higher-order derivatives or scaling model-free meta-learning. Alternative methods that scale to more complex settings either converge to undesirable solutions or rely on unrealistic assumptions about the environment or co-players. In this paper, we successfully scale an OS-based approach to general-sum games with temporally-extended actions and long-time horizons for the first time. After analysing the representations of the meta-state and history used by previous algorithms, we propose a simplified version called Shaper. We show empirically that Shaper leads to improved individual and collective outcomes in a range of challenging settings from literature. We further formalize a technique previously implicit in the literature, and analyse its contribution to opponent shaping. We show empirically that this technique is helpful for the functioning of prior methods in certain environments. Lastly, we show that previous environments, such as the CoinGame, are inadequate for analysing temporally-extended general-sum interactions.

An urban planner might design the spatial layout of transportation amenities so as to improve accessibility for underserved communities -- a fairness objective. However, implementing such a design might trigger processes of neighborhood change that change who benefits from these amenities in the long term. If so, has the planner really achieved their fairness objective? Can algorithmic decision-making anticipate second order effects? In this paper, we take a step in this direction by formulating processes of neighborhood change as instances of no-regret dynamics; a collective learning process in which a set of strategic agents rapidly reach a state of approximate equilibrium. We mathematize concepts of neighborhood change to model the incentive structures impacting individual dwelling-site decision-making. Our model accounts for affordability, access to relevant transit amenities, community ties, and site upkeep. We showcase our model with computational experiments that provide semi-quantitative insights on the spatial economics of neighborhood change, particularly on the influence of residential zoning policy and the placement of transit amenities.

Deceptive path planning (DPP) is the problem of designing a path that hides its true goal from an outside observer. Existing methods for DPP rely on unrealistic assumptions, such as global state observability and perfect model knowledge, and are typically problem-specific, meaning that even minor changes to a previously solved problem can force expensive computation of an entirely new solution. Given these drawbacks, such methods do not generalize to unseen problem instances, lack scalability to realistic problem sizes, and preclude both on-the-fly tunability of deception levels and real-time adaptivity to changing environments. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based scheme for training policies to perform DPP over arbitrary weighted graphs that overcomes these issues. The core of our approach is the introduction of a local perception model for the agent, a new state space representation distilling the key components of the DPP problem, the use of graph neural network-based policies to facilitate generalization and scaling, and the introduction of new deception bonuses that translate the deception objectives of classical methods to the RL setting. Through extensive experimentation we show that, without additional fine-tuning, at test time the resulting policies successfully generalize, scale, enjoy tunable levels of deception, and adapt in real-time to changes in the environment.