Thanks to the advantages of flexible deployment and high mobility, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely applied in the areas of disaster management, agricultural plant protection, environment monitoring and so on. With the development of UAV and sensor technologies, UAV assisted data collection for Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted increasing attentions. In this article, the scenarios and key technologies of UAV assisted data collection are comprehensively reviewed. First, we present the system model including the network model and mathematical model of UAV assisted data collection for IoT. Then, we review the key technologies including clustering of sensors, UAV data collection mode as well as joint path planning and resource allocation. Finally, the open problems are discussed from the perspectives of efficient multiple access as well as joint sensing and data collection. This article hopefully provides some guidelines and insights for researchers in the area of UAV assisted data collection for IoT.

Embodied AI agents continue to become more capable every year with the advent of new models, environments, and benchmarks, but are still far away from being performant and reliable enough to be deployed in real, user-facing, applications. In this paper, we ask: can we bridge this gap by enabling agents to ask for assistance from an expert such as a human being? To this end, we propose the Ask4Help policy that augments agents with the ability to request, and then use expert assistance. Ask4Help policies can be efficiently trained without modifying the original agent's parameters and learn a desirable trade-off between task performance and the amount of requested help, thereby reducing the cost of querying the expert. We evaluate Ask4Help on two different tasks -- object goal navigation and room rearrangement and see substantial improvements in performance using minimal help. On object navigation, an agent that achieves a $52\%$ success rate is raised to $86\%$ with $13\%$ help and for rearrangement, the state-of-the-art model with a $7\%$ success rate is dramatically improved to $90.4\%$ using $39\%$ help. Human trials with Ask4Help demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in practical scenarios. We release the code for Ask4Help here: https://github.com/allenai/ask4help.

Recent hype surrounding the increasing sophistication of language processing models has renewed optimism regarding machines achieving a human-like command of natural language. Research in the area of natural language understanding (NLU) in artificial intelligence claims to have been making great strides in this area, however, the lack of conceptual clarity/consistency in how 'understanding' is used in this and other disciplines makes it difficult to discern how close we actually are. In this interdisciplinary research thesis, I integrate insights from cognitive science/psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive linguistics, and evaluate it against a critical review of current approaches in NLU to explore the basic requirements--and remaining challenges--for developing artificially intelligent systems with human-like capacities for language use and comprehension.

We study the fairness of dynamic resource allocation problem under the $\alpha$-fairness criterion. We recognize two different fairness objectives that naturally arise in this problem: the well-understood slot-fairness objective that aims to ensure fairness at every timeslot, and the less explored horizon-fairness objective that aims to ensure fairness across utilities accumulated over a time horizon. We argue that horizon-fairness comes at a lower price in terms of social welfare. We study horizon-fairness with the regret as a performance metric and show that vanishing regret cannot be achieved in presence of an unrestricted adversary. We propose restrictions on the adversary's capabilities corresponding to realistic scenarios and an online policy that indeed guarantees vanishing regret under these restrictions. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed fairness framework to a representative resource management problem considering a virtualized caching system where different caches cooperate to serve content requests.

Building autonomous agents able to grow open-ended repertoires of skills across their lives is a fundamental goal of artificial intelligence (AI). A promising developmental approach recommends the design of intrinsically motivated agents that learn new skills by generating and pursuing their own goals -- autotelic agents. But despite recent progress, existing algorithms still show serious limitations in terms of goal diversity, exploration, generalisation or skill composition. This perspective calls for the immersion of autotelic agents into rich socio-cultural worlds, an immensely important attribute of our environment that shapes human cognition but is mostly omitted in modern AI. Inspired by the seminal work of Vygotsky, we propose Vygotskian autotelic agents -- agents able to internalise their interactions with others and turn them into cognitive tools. We focus on language and show how its structure and informational content may support the development of new cognitive functions in artificial agents as it does in humans. We justify the approach by uncovering several examples of new artificial cognitive functions emerging from interactions between language and embodiment in recent works at the intersection of deep reinforcement learning and natural language processing. Looking forward, we highlight future opportunities and challenges for Vygotskian Autotelic AI research, including the use of language models as cultural models supporting artificial cognitive development.

Finding equilibria via gradient play in competitive multi-agent games has been attracting a growing amount of attention in recent years, with emphasis on designing efficient strategies where the agents operate in a decentralized and symmetric manner with guaranteed convergence. While significant efforts have been made in understanding zero-sum two-player matrix games, the performance in zero-sum multi-agent games remains inadequately explored, especially in the presence of delayed feedbacks, leaving the scalability and resiliency of gradient play open to questions. In this paper, we make progress by studying asynchronous gradient plays in zero-sum polymatrix games under delayed feedbacks. We first establish that the last iterate of entropy-regularized optimistic multiplicative weight updates (OMWU) method converges linearly to the quantal response equilibrium (QRE), the solution concept under bounded rationality, in the absence of delays. While the linear convergence continues to hold even when the feedbacks are randomly delayed under mild statistical assumptions, it converges at a noticeably slower rate due to a smaller tolerable range of learning rates. Moving beyond, we demonstrate entropy-regularized OMWU -- by adopting two-timescale learning rates in a delay-aware manner -- enjoys faster last-iterate convergence under fixed delays, and continues to converge provably even when the delays are arbitrarily bounded in an average-iterate manner. Our methods also lead to finite-time guarantees to approximate the Nash equilibrium (NE) by moderating the amount of regularization. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first that aims to understand asynchronous gradient play in zero-sum polymatrix games under a wide range of delay assumptions, highlighting the role of learning rates separation.

In recent years, the role of artificially intelligent (AI) agents has evolved from being basic tools to socially intelligent agents working alongside humans towards common goals. In such scenarios, the ability to predict future behavior by observing past actions of their human teammates is highly desirable in an AI agent. Goal-oriented human behavior is complex, hierarchical, and unfolds across multiple timescales. Despite this observation, relatively little attention has been paid towards using multi-timescale features to model such behavior. In this paper, we propose an LSTM network architecture that processes behavioral information at multiple timescales to predict future behavior. We demonstrate that our approach for modeling behavior in multiple timescales substantially improves prediction of future behavior compared to methods that do not model behavior at multiple timescales. We evaluate our architecture on data collected in an urban search and rescue scenario simulated in a virtual Minecraft-based testbed, and compare its performance to that of a number of valid baselines as well as other methods that do not process inputs at multiple timescales.

In robotic networks relying on noisy range measurements between agents for cooperative localization, the achievable positioning accuracy strongly strongly depends on the network geometry. This motivates the problem of planning robot trajectories in such multi-robot systems in a way that maintains high localization accuracy. We present potential-based planning methods, where localizability potentials are introduced to characterize the quality of the network geometry for cooperative position estimation. These potentials are based on Cramer Rao Lower Bounds (CRLB) and provide a theoretical lower bound on the error covariance achievable by any unbiased position estimator. In the process, we establish connections between CRLBs and the theory of graph rigidity, which has been previously used to plan the motion of robotic networks. We develop decentralized deployment algorithms appropriate for large networks, and we use equality-constrained CRLBs to extend the concept of localizability to scenarios where additional information about the relative positions of the ranging sensors is known. We illustrate the resulting robot deployment methodology through simulated examples and an experiment.

This work presents AutoDRIVE, a comprehensive research and education platform for implementing and validating intelligent transportation algorithms pertaining to vehicular autonomy as well as smart city management. It is an openly accessible platform featuring a 1:14 scale car with realistic drive and steering actuators, redundant sensing modalities, high-performance computational resources, and standard vehicular lighting system. Additionally, the platform also offers a range of modules for rapid design and development of the infrastructure. The AutoDRIVE platform encompasses Devkit, Simulator and Testbed, a harmonious trio to develop, simulate and deploy autonomy algorithms. It is compatible with a variety of software development packages, and supports single as well as multi-agent paradigms through local and distributed computing. AutoDRIVE is a product-level implementation, with a vast scope for commercialization. This versatile platform has numerous applications, and they are bound to keep increasing as new features are added. This work demonstrates four such applications including autonomous parking, behavioural cloning, intersection traversal and smart city management, each exploiting distinct features of the platform.

The active inference framework (AIF) is a promising new computational framework grounded in contemporary neuroscience that can produce human-like behavior through reward-based learning. In this study, we test the ability for the AIF to capture the role of anticipation in the visual guidance of action in humans through the systematic investigation of a visual-motor task that has been well-explored -- that of intercepting a target moving over a ground plane. Previous research demonstrated that humans performing this task resorted to anticipatory changes in speed intended to compensate for semi-predictable changes in target speed later in the approach. To capture this behavior, our proposed "neural" AIF agent uses artificial neural networks to select actions on the basis of a very short term prediction of the information about the task environment that these actions would reveal along with a long-term estimate of the resulting cumulative expected free energy. Systematic variation revealed that anticipatory behavior emerged only when required by limitations on the agent's movement capabilities, and only when the agent was able to estimate accumulated free energy over sufficiently long durations into the future. In addition, we present a novel formulation of the prior function that maps a multi-dimensional world-state to a uni-dimensional distribution of free-energy. Together, these results demonstrate the use of AIF as a plausible model of anticipatory visually guided behavior in humans.