Decision making and planning have long relied heavily on AI-driven forecasts. The government and the general public are working to minimize the risks while maximizing benefits in the face of potential future public health uncertainties. This study used an improved method of forecasting utilizing the Random Descending Velocity Inertia Weight (RDV IW) technique to improve the convergence of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and the accuracy of Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The IW technique, inspired by the motions of a golf ball, modified the particles' velocities as they approached the solution point to a parabolically descending structure. Simulation results revealed that the proposed forecasting model with [0.4, 0.9] combination of alpha and alpha_dump exhibits a 6.36% improvement in position error and 11.75% improvement in computational time compared to the old model, thus, improving its convergence. It reached the optimum level at minimal steps with 12.50% improvement as against the old model since it provides better velocity averages when speed stabilization occurs at the 24th iteration. Meanwhile, the computed p-values for NRMSE (0.04889174), MAE (0.02829063), MAPE (0.02226053), WAPE (0.01701545), and R2 (0.00000021) of the proposed algorithm are less than the set 0.05 level of significance, thus the values indicated a significant result in terms of accuracy performance. Applying the modified ANN-PSO using RDV IW technique greatly improved the new HIV/AIDS forecasting model compared with the two models.

This paper develops a graph reinforcement learning approach to online planning of the schedule and destinations of electric aircraft that comprise an urban air mobility (UAM) fleet operating across multiple vertiports. This fleet scheduling problem is formulated to consider time-varying demand, constraints related to vertiport capacity, aircraft capacity and airspace safety guidelines, uncertainties related to take-off delay, weather-induced route closures, and unanticipated aircraft downtime. Collectively, such a formulation presents greater complexity, and potentially increased realism, than in existing UAM fleet planning implementations. To address these complexities, a new policy architecture is constructed, primary components of which include: graph capsule conv-nets for encoding vertiport and aircraft-fleet states both abstracted as graphs; transformer layers encoding time series information on demand and passenger fare; and a Multi-head Attention-based decoder that uses the encoded information to compute the probability of selecting each available destination for an aircraft. Trained with Proximal Policy Optimization, this policy architecture shows significantly better performance in terms of daily averaged profits on unseen test scenarios involving 8 vertiports and 40 aircraft, when compared to a random baseline and genetic algorithm-derived optimal solutions, while being nearly 1000 times faster in execution than the latter.

We present a novel framework for open-set Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) in unstructured environments that uses segmentation to create a map of objects and geometric relationships between objects for localization. Our system consists of 1) a front-end mapping pipeline using a zero-shot segmentation model to extract object masks from images and track them across frames to generate an object-based map and 2) a frame alignment pipeline that uses the geometric consistency of objects to efficiently localize within maps taken in a variety of conditions. This approach is shown to be more robust to changes in lighting and appearance than traditional feature-based SLAM systems or global descriptor methods. This is established by evaluating SOS-SLAM on the Batvik seasonal dataset which includes drone flights collected over a coastal plot of southern Finland during different seasons and lighting conditions. Across flights during varying environmental conditions, our approach achieves higher recall than benchmark methods with precision of 1.0. SOS-SLAM localizes within a reference map up to 14x faster than other feature based approaches and has a map size less than 0.4% the size of the most compact other maps. When considering localization performance from varying viewpoints, our approach outperforms all benchmarks from the same viewpoint and most benchmarks from different viewpoints. SOS-SLAM is a promising new approach for SLAM in unstructured environments that is robust to changes in lighting and appearance and is more computationally efficient than other approaches. We release our code and datasets: https://acl.mit.edu/SOS-SLAM/.

Multi-agent multi-target tracking has a wide range of applications, including wildlife patrolling, security surveillance or environment monitoring. Such algorithms often make restrictive assumptions: the number of targets and/or their initial locations may be assumed known, or agents may be pre-assigned to monitor disjoint partitions of the environment, reducing the burden of exploration. This also limits applicability when there are fewer agents than targets, since agents are unable to continuously follow the targets in their fields of view. Multi-agent tracking algorithms additionally assume inter-agent synchronization of observations, or the presence of a central controller to coordinate joint actions. Instead, we focus on the setting of decentralized multi-agent, multi-target, simultaneous active search-and-tracking with asynchronous inter-agent communication. Our proposed algorithm DecSTER uses a sequential monte carlo implementation of the probability hypothesis density filter for posterior inference combined with Thompson sampling for decentralized multi-agent decision making. We compare different action selection policies, focusing on scenarios where targets outnumber agents. In simulation, we demonstrate that DecSTER is robust to unreliable inter-agent communication and outperforms information-greedy baselines in terms of the Optimal Sub-Pattern Assignment (OSPA) metric for different numbers of targets and varying teamsizes.

The conservation of hydrological resources involves continuously monitoring their contamination. A multi-agent system composed of autonomous surface vehicles is proposed in this paper to efficiently monitor the water quality. To achieve a safe control of the fleet, the fleet policy should be able to act based on measurements and to the the fleet state. It is proposed to use Local Gaussian Processes and Deep Reinforcement Learning to jointly obtain effective monitoring policies. Local Gaussian processes, unlike classical global Gaussian processes, can accurately model the information in a dissimilar spatial correlation which captures more accurately the water quality information. A Deep convolutional policy is proposed, that bases the decisions on the observation on the mean and variance of this model, by means of an information gain reward. Using a Double Deep Q-Learning algorithm, agents are trained to minimize the estimation error in a safe manner thanks to a Consensus-based heuristic. Simulation results indicate an improvement of up to 24% in terms of the mean absolute error with the proposed models. Also, training results with 1-3 agents indicate that our proposed approach returns 20% and 24% smaller average estimation errors for, respectively, monitoring water quality variables and monitoring algae blooms, as compared to state-of-the-art approaches

Companies, organizations, and governments increasingly exploit Language Models' (LM) remarkable capability to display agent-like behavior. As LMs are adopted to perform tasks with growing autonomy, there exists an urgent need for reliable and scalable evaluation benchmarks. Current, predominantly static LM benchmarks are ill-suited to evaluate such dynamic applications. Thus, we propose jointly evaluating LM performance and alignment through the lenses of negotiation games. We argue that this common task better reflects real-world deployment conditions while offering insights into LMs' decision-making processes. Crucially, negotiation games allow us to study multi-turn, and cross-model interactions, modulate complexity, and side-step accidental data leakage in evaluation. We report results for six publicly accessible LMs from several major providers on a variety of negotiation games, evaluating both self-play and cross-play performance. Noteworthy findings include: (i) open-source models are currently unable to complete these tasks; (ii) cooperative bargaining games prove challenging; and (iii) the most powerful models do not always "win".

Spatial reasoning tasks in multi-agent environments such as event prediction, agent type identification, or missing data imputation are important for multiple applications (e.g., autonomous surveillance over sensor networks and subtasks for reinforcement learning (RL)). StarCraft II game replays encode intelligent (and adversarial) multi-agent behavior and could provide a testbed for these tasks; however, extracting simple and standardized representations for prototyping these tasks is laborious and hinders reproducibility. In contrast, MNIST and CIFAR10, despite their extreme simplicity, have enabled rapid prototyping and reproducibility of ML methods. Following the simplicity of these datasets, we construct a benchmark spatial reasoning dataset based on StarCraft II replays that exhibit complex multi-agent behaviors, while still being as easy to use as MNIST and CIFAR10. Specifically, we carefully summarize a window of 255 consecutive game states to create 3.6 million summary images from 60,000 replays, including all relevant metadata such as game outcome and player races. We develop three formats of decreasing complexity: Hyperspectral images that include one channel for every unit type (similar to multispectral geospatial images), RGB images that mimic CIFAR10, and grayscale images that mimic MNIST. We show how this dataset can be used for prototyping spatial reasoning methods. All datasets, code for extraction, and code for dataset loading can be found at https://starcraftdata.davidinouye.com

We study the ability of LLMs to generate feedback for scientific papers and develop MARG, a feedback generation approach using multiple LLM instances that engage in internal discussion. By distributing paper text across agents, MARG can consume the full text of papers beyond the input length limitations of the base LLM, and by specializing agents and incorporating sub-tasks tailored to different comment types (experiments, clarity, impact) it improves the helpfulness and specificity of feedback. In a user study, baseline methods using GPT-4 were rated as producing generic or very generic comments more than half the time, and only 1.7 comments per paper were rated as good overall in the best baseline. Our system substantially improves the ability of GPT-4 to generate specific and helpful feedback, reducing the rate of generic comments from 60% to 29% and generating 3.7 good comments per paper (a 2.2x improvement).

Human communication is a complex and diverse process that not only involves multiple factors such as language, commonsense, and cultural backgrounds but also requires the participation of multimodal information, such as speech. Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems have demonstrated promising performance in simulating human society. Can we leverage LLM-based multi-agent systems to simulate human communication? However, current LLM-based multi-agent systems mainly rely on text as the primary medium. In this paper, we propose SpeechAgents, a multi-modal LLM based multi-agent system designed for simulating human communication. SpeechAgents utilizes multi-modal LLM as the control center for individual agent and employes multi-modal signals as the medium for exchanged messages among agents. Additionally, we propose Multi-Agent Tuning to enhance the multi-agent capabilities of LLM without compromising general abilities. To strengthen and evaluate the effectiveness of human communication simulation, we build the Human-Communication Simulation Benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that SpeechAgents can simulate human communication dialogues with consistent content, authentic rhythm, and rich emotions and demonstrate excellent scalability even with up to 25 agents, which can apply to tasks such as drama creation and audio novels generation. Code and models will be open-sourced at https://github. com/0nutation/SpeechAgents

Recently it has been shown that tensor networks (TNs) have the ability to represent the expected return of a single-agent finite Markov decision process (FMDP). The TN represents a distribution model, where all possible trajectories are considered. When extending these ideas to a multi-agent setting, distribution models suffer from the curse of dimensionality: the exponential relation between the number of possible trajectories and the number of agents. The key advantage of using TNs in this setting is that there exists a large number of established optimisation and decomposition techniques that are specific to TNs, that one can apply to ensure the most efficient representation is found. In this report, these methods are used to form a TN that represents the expected return of a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) task. This model is then applied to a 2 agent random walker example, where it was shown that the policy is correctly optimised using a DMRG technique. Finally, I demonstrate the use of an exact decomposition technique, reducing the number of elements in the tensors by 97.5%, without experiencing any loss of information.