Agents
Safe and Optimal Learning from Preferences via Weighted Temporal Logic with Applications in Robotics and Formula 1
Karagulle, Ruya, Vasile, Cristian-Ioan, Ozay, Necmiye
Abstract--Autonomous systems increasingly rely on human feedback to align their behavior, expressed as pairwise comparisons, rankings, or demonstrations. While existing methods can adapt behaviors, they often fail to guarantee safety in safety-critical domains. We propose a safety-guaranteed, optimal, and efficient approach to solve the learning problem from preferences, rankings, or demonstrations using Weighted Signal T emporal Logic (WSTL). WSTL learning problems, when implemented naively, lead to multi-linear constraints in the weights to be learned. By introducing structural pruning and log-transform procedures, we reduce the problem size and recast the problem as a Mixed-Integer Linear Program while preserving safety guarantees. Experiments on robotic navigation and real-world Formula 1 data demonstrate that the method effectively captures nuanced preferences and models complex task objectives. Autonomous systems are increasingly part of our daily lives, from driverless cars in urban navigation to household robots performing domestic chores. Since these systems operate closely alongside humans, learning from human feedback is a natural way to ensure their behaviors align with human desires.
ARAC: Adaptive Regularized Multi-Agent Soft Actor-Critic in Graph-Structured Adversarial Games
Shi, Ruochuan, Lu, Runyu, Zhu, Yuanheng, Zhao, Dongbin
In graph-structured multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) adversarial tasks such as pursuit and confrontation, agents must coordinate under highly dynamic interactions, where sparse rewards hinder efficient policy learning. We propose Adaptive Regularized Multi-Agent Soft Actor-Critic (ARAC), which integrates an attention-based graph neural network (GNN) for modeling agent dependencies with an adaptive divergence regularization mechanism. The GNN enables expressive representation of spatial relations and state features in graph environments. Divergence regularization can serve as policy guidance to alleviate the sparse reward problem, but it may lead to suboptimal convergence when the reference policy itself is imperfect. The adaptive divergence regularization mechanism enables the framework to exploit reference policies for efficient exploration in the early stages, while gradually reducing reliance on them as training progresses to avoid inheriting their limitations. Experiments in pursuit and confrontation scenarios demonstrate that ARAC achieves faster convergence, higher final success rates, and stronger scalability across varying numbers of agents compared with MARL baselines, highlighting its effectiveness in complex graph-structured environments.
LPPG-RL: Lexicographically Projected Policy Gradient Reinforcement Learning with Subproblem Exploration
Qiu, Ruiyu, Wang, Rui, Yang, Guanghui, Li, Xiang, Shao, Zhijiang
Lexicographic multi-objective problems, which consist of multiple conflicting subtasks with explicit priorities, are common in real-world applications. Despite the advantages of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in single tasks, extending conventional RL methods to prioritized multiple objectives remains challenging. In particular, traditional Safe RL and Multi-Objective RL (MORL) methods have difficulty enforcing priority orderings efficiently. Therefore, Lexicographic Multi-Objective RL (LMORL) methods have been developed to address these challenges. However, existing LMORL methods either rely on heuristic threshold tuning with prior knowledge or are restricted to discrete domains. To overcome these limitations, we propose Lexicographically Projected Policy Gradient RL (LPPG-RL), a novel LMORL framework which leverages sequential gradient projections to identify feasible policy update directions, thereby enabling LPPG-RL broadly compatible with all policy gradient algorithms in continuous spaces. LPPG-RL reformulates the projection step as an optimization problem, and utilizes Dykstra's projection rather than generic solvers to deliver great speedups, especially for small- to medium-scale instances. In addition, LPPG-RL introduces Subproblem Exploration (SE) to prevent gradient vanishing, accelerate convergence and enhance stability. We provide theoretical guarantees for convergence and establish a lower bound on policy improvement. Finally, through extensive experiments in a 2D navigation environment, we demonstrate the effectiveness of LPPG-RL, showing that it outperforms existing state-of-the-art continuous LMORL methods.
Adaptive Multi-Agent Response Refinement in Conversational Systems
Jeong, Soyeong, Elangovan, Aparna, Yilmaz, Emine, Rokhlenko, Oleg
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in conversational systems by generating human-like responses. However, they can fall short, especially when required to account for personalization or specific knowledge. In real-life settings, it is impractical to rely on users to detect these errors and request a new response. One way to address this problem is to refine the response before returning it to the user. While existing approaches focus on refining responses within a single LLM, this method struggles to consider diverse aspects needed for effective conversations. In this work, we propose refining responses through a multi-agent framework, where each agent is assigned a specific role for each aspect. We focus on three key aspects crucial to conversational quality: factuality, personalization, and coherence. Each agent is responsible for reviewing and refining one of these aspects, and their feedback is then merged to improve the overall response. To enhance collaboration among them, we introduce a dynamic communication strategy. Instead of following a fixed sequence of agents, our approach adaptively selects and coordinates the most relevant agents based on the specific requirements of each query. We validate our framework on challenging conversational datasets, demonstrating that ours significantly outperforms relevant baselines, particularly in tasks involving knowledge or user's persona, or both.
Smarter Together: Creating Agentic Communities of Practice through Shared Experiential Learning
Tablan, Valentin, Taylor, Scott, Hurtado, Gabriel, Bernhem, Kristoffer, Uhrenholt, Anders, Farei, Gabriele, Moilanen, Karo
The transition from human-centric to agent-centric software development practices is disrupting existing knowledge sharing environments for software developers. Traditional peer-to-peer repositories and developer communities for shared technical knowledge and best practice have witnessed dramatic drops in participation in a short period of time. At the same time, agentic functional equivalents are yet to emerge leaving AI agents, which already generate a significant proportion of all new software code produced, without access to repositories of valuable shared learning. In this paper, we introduce Spark, a novel shared agentic memory architecture which is designed to emulate the collective intelligence and know-how of human developer communities. Spark enables AI coding agents to both contribute to and draw from a persistent and continuously evolving experiential memory. Agents operating in the same general problem space use the Spark shared memory as a repository of new knowledge to achieve collective continual learning. We evaluate Spark as a coach for AI coding agents performing software development tasks. We demonstrate that recommendations made by Spark improve the quality of code generated by generic code generation models at varying sizes and capability tiers. Boosted by Spark, a small open-weights model with 30 billion parameters was able to match the code quality afforded by a much larger state-of-the-art model. Separately, we measure the intrinsic quality of recommendations generated by Spark against a wide range of criteria inspired by software development best practice, and achieve helpfulness levels of up to 98.2% in the top two (out of five) qualitative helpfulness bands.
Multi-Agent GraphRAG: A Text-to-Cypher Framework for Labeled Property Graphs
Gusarov, Anton, Volkova, Anastasia, Khrulkov, Valentin, Kuznetsov, Andrey, Maslov, Evgenii, Oseledets, Ivan
While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods commonly draw information from unstructured documents, the emerging paradigm of GraphRAG aims to leverage structured data such as knowledge graphs. Most existing GraphRAG efforts focus on Resource Description Framework (RDF) knowledge graphs, relying on triple representations and SP ARQL queries. However, the potential of Cypher and Labeled Property Graph (LPG) databases to serve as scalable and effective reasoning engines within GraphRAG pipelines remains underexplored in current research literature. To fill this gap, we propose Multi-Agent GraphRAG, a modular LLM agentic system for text-to-Cypher query generation serving as a natural language interface to LPG-based graph data. Our proof-of-concept system features an LLMbased workflow for automated Cypher queries generation and execution, using Memgraph as the graph database backend. Iterative content-aware correction and normalization, reinforced by an aggregated feedback loop, ensures both semantic and syntactic refinement of generated queries. We evaluate our system on the CypherBench graph dataset covering several general domains with diverse types of queries. In addition, we demonstrate performance of the proposed workflow on a property graph derived from the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) data, representing a digital twin of a building. This highlights how such an approach can bridge AI with real-world applications at scale, enabling industrial digital automation use cases.
Towards Outcome-Oriented, Task-Agnostic Evaluation of AI Agents
AlShikh, Waseem, Ali, Muayad Sayed, Kennedy, Brian, Mozolevskyi, Dmytro
As AI agents proliferate across industries and applications, evaluating their performance based solely on infrastructural metrics such as latency, time-to-first-token, or token throughput is proving insufficient. These metrics fail to capture the quality of an agent's decisions, its operational autonomy, or its ultimate business value. This white paper proposes a novel, comprehensive framework of eleven outcome-based, task-agnostic performance metrics for AI agents that transcend domain boundaries. These metrics are designed to enable organizations to evaluate agents based on the quality of their decisions, their degree of autonomy, their adaptability to new challenges, and the tangible business value they deliver, regardless of the underlying model architecture or specific use case. We introduce metrics such as Goal Completion Rate (GCR), Autonomy Index (AIx), Multi-Step Task Resilience (MTR), and Business Impact Efficiency (BIE). Through a large-scale simulated experiment involving four distinct agent architectures (ReAct, Chain-of-Thought, Tool-Augmented, Hybrid) across five diverse domains (Healthcare, Finance, Marketing, Legal, and Customer Service), we demonstrate the framework's efficacy. Our results reveal significant performance trade-offs between different agent designs, highlighting the Hybrid Agent as the most consistently high-performing model across the majority of our proposed metrics, achieving an average Goal Completion Rate of 88.8\% and the highest Return on Investment (ROI). This work provides a robust, standardized methodology for the holistic evaluation of AI agents, paving the way for more effective development, deployment, and governance.
PerspAct: Enhancing LLM Situated Collaboration Skills through Perspective Taking and Active Vision
Patania, Sabrina, Annese, Luca, Pellegrini, Anita, Serino, Silvia, Lambiase, Anna, Pallonetto, Luca, Rossi, Silvia, Colombani, Simone, Foulsham, Tom, Ruggeri, Azzurra, Ognibene, Dimitri
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal foundation models have significantly broadened their application in robotics and collaborative systems. However, effective multi-agent interaction necessitates robust perspective-taking capabilities, enabling models to interpret both physical and epistemic viewpoints. Current training paradigms often neglect these interactive contexts, resulting in challenges when models must reason about the subjectivity of individual perspectives or navigate environments with multiple observers. This study evaluates whether explicitly incorporating diverse points of view using the ReAct framework, an approach that integrates reasoning and acting, can enhance an LLM's ability to understand and ground the demands of other agents. We extend the classic Director task by introducing active visual exploration across a suite of seven scenarios of increasing perspective-taking complexity. These scenarios are designed to challenge the agent's capacity to resolve referential ambiguity based on visual access and interaction, under varying state representations and prompting strategies, including ReAct-style reasoning. Our results demonstrate that explicit perspective cues, combined with active exploration strategies, significantly improve the model's interpretative accuracy and collaborative effectiveness.
Clustering-based Anomaly Detection in Multivariate Time Series Data
Li, Jinbo, Izakian, Hesam, Pedrycz, Witold, Jamal, Iqbal
Multivariate time series data come as a collection of time series describing different aspects of a certain temporal phenomenon. Anomaly detection in this type of data constitutes a challenging problem yet with numerous applications in science and engineering because anomaly scores come from the simultaneous consideration of the temporal and variable relationships. In this paper, we propose a clustering-based approach to detect anomalies concerning the amplitude and the shape of multivariate time series. First, we use a sliding window to generate a set of multivariate subsequences and thereafter apply an extended fuzzy clustering to reveal a structure present within the generated multivariate subsequences. Finally, a reconstruction criterion is employed to reconstruct the multivariate subsequences with the optimal cluster centers and the partition matrix. We construct a confidence index to quantify a level of anomaly detected in the series and apply Particle Swarm Optimization as an optimization vehicle for the problem of anomaly detection. Experimental studies completed on several synthetic and six real-world datasets suggest that the proposed methods can detect the anomalies in multivariate time series. With the help of available clusters revealed by the extended fuzzy clustering, the proposed framework can detect anomalies in the multivariate time series and is suitable for identifying anomalous amplitude and shape patterns in various application domains such as health care, weather data analysis, finance, and disease outbreak detection.
AVOID-JACK: Avoidance of Jackknifing for Swarms of Long Heavy Articulated Vehicles
Schönnagel, Adrian, Dubé, Michael, Steup, Christoph, Keppler, Felix, Mostaghim, Sanaz
This paper presents a novel approach to avoiding jackknifing and mutual collisions in Heavy Articulated Vehicles (HAVs) by leveraging decentralized swarm intelligence. In contrast to typical swarm robotics research, our robots are elongated and exhibit complex kinematics, introducing unique challenges. Despite its relevance to real-world applications such as logistics automation, remote mining, airport baggage transport, and agricultural operations, this problem has not been addressed in the existing literature. To tackle this new class of swarm robotics problems, we propose a purely reaction-based, decentralized swarm intelligence strategy tailored to automate elongated, articulated vehicles. The method presented in this paper prioritizes jackknifing avoidance and establishes a foundation for mutual collision avoidance. We validate our approach through extensive simulation experiments and provide a comprehensive analysis of its performance. For the experiments with a single HAV, we observe that for 99.8% jackknifing was successfully avoided and that 86.7% and 83.4% reach their first and second goals, respectively. With two HAVs interacting, we observe 98.9%, 79.4%, and 65.1%, respectively, while 99.7% of the HAVs do not experience mutual collisions.