Agents
CAML: Collaborative Auxiliary Modality Learning for Multi-Agent Systems
Multi-modal learning has emerged as a key technique for improving performance across domains such as autonomous driving, robotics, and reasoning. However, in certain scenarios, particularly in resource-constrained environments, some modalities available during training may be absent during inference. While existing frameworks effectively utilize multiple data sources during training and enable inference with reduced modalities, they are primarily designed for single-agent settings. This poses a critical limitation in dynamic environments such as connected autonomous vehicles (CAV), where incomplete data coverage can lead to decision-making blind spots. Conversely, some works explore multi-agent collaboration but without addressing missing modality at test time. To overcome these limitations, we propose Collaborative Auxiliary Modality Learning (CAML), a novel multi-modal multi-agent framework that enables agents to collaborate and share multi-modal data during training, while allowing inference with reduced modalities during testing. Experimental results in collaborative decision-making for CAV in accident-prone scenarios demonstrate that CAML achieves up to a 58.1% improvement in accident detection.
Scalable Neural Incentive Design with Parameterized Mean-Field Approximation
Designing incentives for a multi-agent system to induce a desirable Nash equilibrium is both a crucial and challenging problem appearing in many decision-making domains, especially for a large number of agents $N$. Under the exchangeability assumption, we formalize this incentive design (ID) problem as a parameterized mean-field game (PMFG), aiming to reduce complexity via an infinite-population limit. We first show that when dynamics and rewards are Lipschitz, the finite-$N$ ID objective is approximated by the PMFG at rate $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{N}})$. Moreover, beyond the Lipschitz-continuous setting, we prove the same $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{N}})$ decay for the important special case of sequential auctions, despite discontinuities in dynamics, through a tailored auction-specific analysis. Built on our novel approximation results, we further introduce our Adjoint Mean-Field Incentive Design (AMID) algorithm, which uses explicit differentiation of iterated equilibrium operators to compute gradients efficiently. By uniting approximation bounds with optimization guarantees, AMID delivers a powerful, scalable algorithmic tool for many-agent (large $N$) ID. Across diverse auction settings, the proposed AMID method substantially increases revenue over first-price formats and outperforms existing benchmark methods.
A Principle of Targeted Intervention for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Steering cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) towards desired outcomes is challenging, particularly when the global guidance from a human on the whole multi-agent system is impractical in a large-scale MARL. On the other hand, designing external mechanisms (e.g., intrinsic rewards and human feedback) to coordinate agents mostly relies on empirical studies, lacking a easy-to-use research tool. In this work, we employ multi-agent influence diagrams (MAIDs) as a graphical framework to address the above issues. First, we introduce the concept of MARL interaction paradigms (orthogonal to MARL learning paradigms), using MAIDs to analyze and visualize both unguided self-organization and global guidance mechanisms in MARL. Then, we design a new MARL interaction paradigm, referred to as the targeted intervention paradigm that is applied to only a single targeted agent, so the problem of global guidance can be mitigated. In implementation, we introduce a causal inference technique--referred to as Pre-Strategy Intervention (PSI)--to realize the targeted intervention paradigm. Since MAIDs can be regarded as a special class of causal diagrams, a composite desired outcome that integrates the primary task goal and an additional desired outcome can be achieved by maximizing the corresponding causal effect through the PSI. Moreover, the bundled relevance graph analysis of MAIDs provides a tool to identify whether an MARL learning paradigm is workable under the design of an MARL interaction paradigm. In experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed targeted intervention, and verify the result of relevance graph analysis.
REAL: Benchmarking Autonomous Agents on Deterministic Simulations of Real Websites
We introduce REAL, a benchmark and framework for multi-turn agent evaluations on deterministic simulations of real-world websites. REAL comprises high-fidelity, deterministic replicas of 11 widely-used websites across domains such as e-commerce, travel, communication, and professional networking. We also release a benchmark consisting of 112 practical tasks that mirror everyday complex user interactions requiring both accurate information retrieval and state-changing actions. All interactions occur within this fully controlled setting, eliminating safety risks and enabling robust, reproducible evaluation of agent capability and reliability. Our novel evaluation framework combines programmatic checks of website state for action-based tasks with rubric-guided LLM-based judgments for information retrieval. The framework supports both open-source and proprietary agent systems through a flexible evaluation harness that accommodates black-box commands within browser environments, allowing research labs to test agentic systems without modification. Our empirical results show that frontier language models achieve at most a 41% success rate on REAL, highlighting critical gaps in autonomous web navigation and task completion capabilities. Our framework supports easy integration of new tasks, reproducible evaluation, and scalable post-training data generation, marking a significant step forward in evaluating and advancing agent capabilities.
AutoToM: Scaling Model-based Mental Inference via Automated Agent Modeling
Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand people's minds based on their behavior, is key to developing socially intelligent agents. Current approaches to ToM reasoning either rely on prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), which are prone to systematic errors, or use handcrafted, rigid agent models for model-based inference, which are more robust but fail to generalize across domains. In this work, we introduce, an automated agent modeling method for scalable, robust, and interpretable mental inference. Given a ToM problem, first proposes an initial agent model and then performs automated Bayesian inverse planning based on this model, leveraging an LLM backend.
Policy Compatible Skill Incremental Learning via Lazy Learning Interface
Skill Incremental Learning (SIL) is the process by which an embodied agent expands and refines its skill set over time by leveraging experience gained through interaction with its environment or by the integration of additional data. SIL facilitates efficient acquisition of hierarchical policies grounded in reusable skills for downstream tasks. However, as the skill repertoire evolves, it can disrupt compatibility with existing skill-based policies, limiting their reusability and generalization. In this work, we propose SIL-C, a novel framework that ensures skill-policy compatibility, allowing improvements in incrementally learned skills to enhance the performance of downstream policies without requiring policy re-training or structural adaptation. SIL-C employs a bilateral lazy learning-based mapping technique to dynamically align the subtask space referenced by policies with the skill space decoded into agent behaviors. This enables each subtask, derived from the policy's decomposition of a complex task, to be executed by selecting an appropriate skill based on trajectory distribution similarity. We evaluate SIL-C across diverse SIL scenarios and demonstrate that it maintains compatibility between evolving skills and downstream policies while ensuring efficiency throughout the learning process.
SiriuS: Self-improving Multi-agent Systems via Bootstrapped Reasoning
Multi-agent AI systems powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to solve complex tasks. However, these systems often rely on fragile, manually designed prompts and heuristics, making optimization difficult. A key challenge in optimizing multi-agent systems is acquiring suitable training data for specialized agents. We introduce SiriuS, a self-improving, reasoning-driven optimization framework for multi-agent systems. Central to our approach is the construction of an experience library: a repository of high-quality reasoning trajectories. The library is built by retaining reasoning steps that lead to successful outcomes, providing a robust training set for optimizing multi-agent system. Additionally, we introduce a library augmentation procedure that refines unsuccessful trajectories, further enriching the library. SiriuS boosts performance by 2.86% to 21.88% on reasoning and biomedical QA and enhances agent negotiation in competitive settings. Our results show that SiriuS enhances multi-agent performance while generating reusable data for self-correction and self-play enhancement in the future.
Thought Communication in Multiagent Collaboration
Natural language has long enabled human cooperation, but its lossy, ambiguous, and indirect nature limits the potential of collective intelligence. While machines are not subject to these constraints, most LLM-based multi-agent systems still rely solely on natural language, exchanging tokens or their embeddings. To go beyond language, we introduce a new paradigm,, which enables agents to interact directly mind-to-mind, akin to telepathy. To uncover these latent thoughts in a principled way, we formalize the process as a general latent variable model, where agent states are generated by an unknown function of underlying thoughts. We prove that, in a nonparametric setting without auxiliary information, both shared and private latent thoughts between any pair of agents can be identified. Moreover, the global structure of thought sharing, including which agents share which thoughts and how these relationships are structured, can also be recovered with theoretical guarantees.
Impartial Selection with Predictions
We study the selection of agents based on mutual nominations, a theoretical problem with many applications from committee selection to AI alignment. As agents both select and are selected, they may be incentivized to misrepresent their true opinion about the eligibility of others to influence their own chances of selection. Impartial mechanisms circumvent this issue by guaranteeing that the selection of an agent is independent of the nominations cast by that agent. Previous research has established strong bounds on the performance of impartial mechanisms, measured by their ability to approximate the number of nominations for the most highly nominated agents. We study to what extent the performance of impartial mechanisms can be improved if they are given a prediction of a set of agents receiving a maximum number of nominations. Specifically, we provide bounds on the consistency and robustness of such mechanisms, where consistency measures the performance of the mechanisms when the prediction is correct and robustness its performance when the prediction is incorrect. For the general setting where up to $k$ agents are to be selected and agents nominate any number of other agents, we give a mechanism with consistency $1-O\big(\frac{1}{k}\big)$ and robustness $1-\frac{1}{e}-O\big(\frac{1}{k}\big)$. For the special case of selecting a single agent based on a single nomination per agent, we prove that $1$-consistency can be achieved while guaranteeing $\frac{1}{2}$-robustness. A close comparison with previous results shows that (asymptotically) optimal consistency can be achieved with little to no sacrifice in terms of robustness.