Agents
A Hierarchical Hybrid AI Approach: Integrating Deep Reinforcement Learning and Scripted Agents in Combat Simulations
Black, Scotty, Darken, Christian
In the domain of combat simulations in support of wargaming, the development of intelligent agents has predominantly been characterized by rule-based, scripted methodologies with deep reinforcement learning (RL) approaches only recently being introduced. While scripted agents offer predictability and consistency in controlled environments, they fall short in dynamic, complex scenarios due to their inherent inflexibility. Conversely, RL agents excel in adaptability and learning, offering potential improvements in handling unforeseen situations, but suffer from significant challenges such as black-box decision-making processes and scalability issues in larger simulation environments. This paper introduces a novel hierarchical hybrid artificial intelligence (AI) approach that synergizes the reliability and predictability of scripted agents with the dynamic, adaptive learning capabilities of RL. By structuring the AI system hierarchically, the proposed approach aims to utilize scripted agents for routine, tactical-level decisions and RL agents for higher-level, strategic decision-making, thus addressing the limitations of each method while leveraging their individual strengths. This integration is shown to significantly improve overall performance, providing a robust, adaptable, and effective solution for developing and training intelligent agents in complex simulation environments.
Tool-RoCo: An Agent-as-Tool Self-organization Large Language Model Benchmark in Multi-robot Cooperation
Zhang, Ke, Zhao, Xiaoning, Zheng, Ce, Ning, Jiahong, Zhu, Dandan, Zhang, Wenqi, Sun, Chen, Sugawara, Toshiharu
This study proposes Tool-RoCo, a novel benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in long-term multi-agent cooperation based on RoCo, a multi-robot cooperative benchmark. Recent research on LLM-based multi-agent systems has relied on predefined orchestration, while ignoring agent autonomy. Tool-RoCo treats other agents as tools and introduces cooperative tools, leveraging tool usage to evaluate multi-agent cooperation and self-organization. Tool usage means that each agent (LLM) selects a tool from a candidate set based on the current state, receives feedback, and adjusts its selection in subsequent rounds. To evaluate different autonomy levels, we propose four LLM paradigms: (1) centralized cooperation, where a single LLM allocates tools to all agents; (2) centralized self-organization, where a central LLM autonomously activates agents while keeping others inactive; (3) decentralized cooperation, where each agent has its own LLM and calls tools based on local information; and (4) self-organization, where a randomly chosen initial agent can request collaboration, activating additional agents via tool calls. Tool-RoCo includes three multi-robot tasks, SORT, P ACK, and CABINET, to measure format and parameter accuracy and agent coordination through tool usage. The results using several LLMs showed that cooperative tools accounted for only 7.09% of all tools, indicating that LLM-based agents rarely invoked others as assistants. Moreover, activation tools accounted for 96.42%, suggesting that current LLMs tend to maintain active agents while seldom deactivating them for adaptive coordination. Tool-RoCo provides a systematic benchmark to evaluate LLM autonomy and cooperation in multi-agent tasks.
AerialMind: Towards Referring Multi-Object Tracking in UAV Scenarios
Chen, Chenglizhao, Liang, Shaofeng, Guan, Runwei, Sun, Xiaolou, Zhao, Haocheng, Jiang, Haiyun, Huang, Tao, Ding, Henghui, Han, Qing-Long
Referring Multi-Object Tracking (RMOT) aims to achieve precise object detection and tracking through natural language instructions, representing a fundamental capability for intelligent robotic systems. However, current RMOT research remains mostly confined to ground-level scenarios, which constrains their ability to capture broad-scale scene contexts and perform comprehensive tracking and path planning. In contrast, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) leverage their expansive aerial perspectives and superior maneuverability to enable wide-area surveillance. Moreover, UAVs have emerged as critical platforms for Embodied Intelligence, which has given rise to an unprecedented demand for intelligent aerial systems capable of natural language interaction. To this end, we introduce AerialMind, the first large-scale RMOT benchmark in UAV scenarios, which aims to bridge this research gap. To facilitate its construction, we develop an innovative semi-automated collaborative agent-based labeling assistant (COALA) framework that significantly reduces labor costs while maintaining annotation quality. Furthermore, we propose HawkEyeTrack (HETrack), a novel method that collaboratively enhances vision-language representation learning and improves the perception of UAV scenarios. Comprehensive experiments validated the challenging nature of our dataset and the effectiveness of our method.
Learning Robust Social Strategies with Large Language Models
Piche, Dereck, Muqeeth, Mohammed, Aghajohari, Milad, Duque, Juan, Noukhovitch, Michael, Courville, Aaron
As agentic AI becomes more widespread, agents with distinct and possibly conflicting goals will interact in complex ways. These multi-agent interactions pose a fundamental challenge, particularly in social dilemmas, where agents' individual incentives can undermine collective welfare. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been effective for aligning large language models (LLMs) in the single-agent regime, prior small-network results suggest that standard RL in multi-agent settings often converges to defecting, self-interested policies. We show the same effect in LLMs: despite cooperative priors, RL-trained LLM agents develop opportunistic behavior that can exploit even advanced closed-source models. To address this tendency of RL to converge to poor equilibria, we adapt a recent opponent-learning awareness algorithm, Advantage Alignment, to fine-tune LLMs toward multi-agent cooperation and non-exploitability. We then introduce a group-relative baseline that simplifies advantage computation in iterated games, enabling multi-agent training at LLM scale. We also contribute a novel social dilemma environment, Trust-and-Split, which requires natural language communication to achieve high collective welfare. Across a wide range of social dilemmas, policies learned with Advantage Alignment achieve higher collective payoffs while remaining robust against exploitation by greedy agents. We release all of our code to support future work on multi-agent RL training for LLMs. LLMs undergo large-scale pretraining, instruction tuning, and reinforcement learning, and continue to exhibit increasingly advanced capabilities (Guo et al., 2025). Coupled with decreasing deployment costs and improved adaptability to downstream tasks, these trends enhance the commercial and practical viability of LLM agents across a wide range of applications.
Tractable Weighted First-Order Model Counting with Bounded Treewidth Binary Evidence
Kลฏla, Vรกclav, Kuang, Qipeng, Wang, Yuyi, Wang, Yuanhong, Kuลพelka, Ondลej
The Weighted First-Order Model Counting Problem (WFOMC) asks to compute the weighted sum of models of a given first-order logic sentence over a given domain. Conditioning WFOMC on evidence -- fixing the truth values of a set of ground literals -- has been shown impossible in time polynomial in the domain size (unless $\mathsf{\#P \subseteq FP}$) even for fragments of logic that are otherwise tractable for WFOMC without evidence. In this work, we address the barrier by restricting the binary evidence to the case where the underlying Gaifman graph has bounded treewidth. We present a polynomial-time algorithm in the domain size for computing WFOMC for the two-variable fragments $\text{FO}^2$ and $\text{C}^2$ conditioned on such binary evidence. Furthermore, we show the applicability of our algorithm in combinatorial problems by solving the stable seating arrangement problem on bounded-treewidth graphs of bounded degree, which was an open problem. We also conducted experiments to show the scalability of our algorithm compared to the existing model counting solvers.
The Station: An Open-World Environment for AI-Driven Discovery
We introduce the STATION, an open-world multi-agent environment for autonomous scientific discovery. The Station simulates a complete scientific ecosystem, where agents can engage in long scientific journeys that include reading papers from peers, formulating hypotheses, collaborating with peers, submitting experiments, and publishing results. Importantly, there is no centralized system coordinating their activities. Utilizing their long context, agents are free to choose their own actions and develop their own narratives within the Station. Experiments demonstrate that AI agents in the Station achieve new state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of benchmarks, spanning mathematics, computational biology, and machine learning, notably surpassing AlphaEvolve in circle packing. A rich tapestry of unscripted narratives emerges, such as agents collaborating and analyzing other works rather than pursuing myopic optimization. From these emergent narratives, novel methods arise organically, such as a new density-adaptive algorithm for scRNA-seq batch integration that borrows concepts from another domain. The Station marks a first step towards autonomous scientific discovery driven by emergent behavior in an open-world environment, representing a new paradigm that moves beyond rigid pipelines.
EQ-Negotiator: Dynamic Emotional Personas Empower Small Language Models for Edge-Deployable Credit Negotiation
Long, Yunbo, Liu, Yuhan, Brintrup, Alexandra
The deployment of large language models (LLMs) in automated negotiation has set a high performance benchmark, but their computational cost and data privacy requirements render them unsuitable for many privacy-sensitive, on-device applications such as mobile assistants, embodied AI agents or private client interactions. While small language models (SLMs) offer a practical alternative, they suffer from a significant performance gap compared to LLMs in playing emotionally charged complex personas, especially for credit negotiation. This paper introduces EQ-Negotiator, a novel framework that bridges this capability gap using emotional personas. Its core is a reasoning system that integrates game theory with a Hidden Markov Model(HMM) to learn and track debtor emotional states online, without pre-training. This allows EQ-Negotiator to equip SLMs with the strategic intelligence to counter manipulation while de-escalating conflict and upholding ethical standards. Through extensive agent-to-agent simulations across diverse credit negotiation scenarios, including adversarial debtor strategies like cheating, threatening, and playing the victim, we show that a 7B parameter language model with EQ-Negotiator achieves better debt recovery and negotiation efficiency than baseline LLMs more than 10 times its size. This work advances persona modeling from descriptive character profiles to dynamic emotional architectures that operate within privacy constraints. Besides, this paper establishes that strategic emotional intelligence, not raw model scale, is the critical factor for success in automated negotiation, paving the way for effective, ethical, and privacy-preserving AI negotiators that can operate on the edge.
Multi-Agent Conditional Diffusion Model with Mean Field Communication as Wireless Resource Allocation Planner
Meng, Kechen, Zhang, Sinuo, Li, Rongpeng, Meng, Xiangming, Deng, Yansha, Wang, Chan, Lei, Ming, Zhao, Zhifeng
In wireless communication systems, efficient and adaptive resource allocation plays a crucial role in enhancing overall Quality of Service (QoS). Compared to the conventional Model-Free Reinforcement Learning (MFRL) scheme, Model-Based RL (MBRL) first learns a generative world model for subsequent planning. The reuse of historical experience in MBRL promises more stable training behavior, yet its deployment in large-scale wireless networks remains challenging due to high-dimensional stochastic dynamics, strong inter-agent cooperation, and communication constraints. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Multi-Agent Conditional Diffusion Model Planner (MA-CDMP) for decentralized communication resource management. Built upon the Distributed Training with Decentralized Execution (DTDE) paradigm, MA-CDMP models each communication node as an autonomous agent and employs Diffusion Models (DMs) to capture and predict environment dynamics. Meanwhile, an inverse dynamics model guides action generation, thereby enhancing sample efficiency and policy scalability. Moreover, to approximate large-scale agent interactions, a Mean-Field (MF) mechanism is introduced as an assistance to the classifier in DMs. This design mitigates inter-agent non-stationarity and enhances cooperation with minimal communication overhead in distributed settings. We further theoretically establish an upper bound on the distributional approximation error introduced by the MF-based diffusion generation, guaranteeing convergence stability and reliable modeling of multi-agent stochastic dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MA-CDMP consistently outperforms existing MARL baselines in terms of average reward and QoS metrics, showcasing its scalability and practicality for real-world wireless network optimization.
Have We Scene It All? Scene Graph-Aware Deep Point Cloud Compression
Stathoulopoulos, Nikolaos, Kanellakis, Christoforos, Nikolakopoulos, George
Please cite as: N. Stathoulopoulos, C. Kanellakis and G. Nikolakopoulos, "Have W e Scene It All? Scene Graph-A ware Deep Point Cloud Compression," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 10, no. 12, pp. Have W e Scene It All? Scene Graph-A ware Deep Point Cloud Compression Abstract--Efficient transmission of 3D point cloud data is critical for advanced perception in centralized and decentralized multi-agent robotic systems, especially nowadays with the growing reliance on edge and cloud-based processing. However, the large and complex nature of point clouds creates challenges under bandwidth constraints and intermittent connectivity, often degrading system performance. We propose a deep compression framework based on semantic scene graphs. The method decomposes point clouds into semantically coherent patches and encodes them into compact latent representations with semantic-aware encoders conditioned by Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM). A folding-based decoder, guided by latent features and graph node attributes, enables structurally accurate reconstruction. Experiments on the SemanticKITTI and nuScenes datasets show that the framework achieves state-of-the-art compression rates, reducing data size by up to 98% while preserving both structural and semantic fidelity. In addition, it supports downstream applications such as multi-robot pose graph optimization and map merging, achieving trajectory accuracy and map alignment comparable to those obtained with raw LiDAR scans.
Flexible Swarm Learning May Outpace Foundation Models in Essential Tasks
Samadi, Moein E., Schuppert, Andreas
Foundation models have rapidly advanced AI, raising the question of whether their decisions will ultimately surpass human strategies in real-world domains. The exponential, and possibly super-exponential, pace of AI development makes such analysis elusive. Nevertheless, many application areas that matter for daily life and society show only modest gains so far; a prominent case is diagnosing and treating dynamically evolving disease in intensive care. The common challenge is adapting complex systems to dynamic environments. Effective strategies must optimize outcomes in systems composed of strongly interacting functions while avoiding shared side effects; this requires reliable, self-adaptive modeling. These tasks align with building digital twins of highly complex systems whose mechanisms are not fully or quantitatively understood. It is therefore essential to develop methods for self-adapting AI models with minimal data and limited mechanistic knowledge. As this challenge extends beyond medicine, AI should demonstrate clear superiority in these settings before assuming broader decision-making roles. We identify the curse of dimensionality as a fundamental barrier to efficient self-adaptation and argue that monolithic foundation models face conceptual limits in overcoming it. As an alternative, we propose a decentralized architecture of interacting small agent networks (SANs). We focus on agents representing the specialized substructure of the system, where each agent covers only a subset of the full system functions. Drawing on mathematical results on the learning behavior of SANs and evidence from existing applications, we argue that swarm-learning in diverse swarms can enable self-adaptive SANs to deliver superior decision-making in dynamic environments compared with monolithic foundation models, though at the cost of reduced reproducibility in detail.