Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for coordinating swarms of agents in complex decision-making, yet major challenges remain. In competitive settings such as pursuer-evader tasks, simultaneous adaptation can destabilize training; non-kinetic countermeasures often fail under adverse conditions; and policies trained in one configuration rarely generalize to environments with a different number of agents. To address these issues, we propose the Local-Canonicalization Equivariant Graph Neural Networks (LEGO) framework, which integrates seamlessly with popular MARL algorithms such as MAPPO. LEGO employs graph neural networks to capture permutation equivariance and generalization to different agent numbers, canonicalization to enforce E(n)-equivariance, and heterogeneous representations to encode role-specific inductive biases. Experiments on cooperative and competitive swarm benchmarks show that LEGO outperforms strong baselines and improves generalization. In real-world experiments, LEGO demonstrates robustness to varying team sizes and agent failure.

Web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can autonomously perform complex, multistep tasks in dynamic web environments. However, current evaluations mostly focus on the overall success while overlooking intermediate errors. This limits insight into failure modes and hinders systematic improvement. This work analyzes existing benchmarks and highlights the lack of fine-grained diagnostic tools. To address this gap, we propose a modular evaluation framework that decomposes agent pipelines into interpretable stages for detailed error analysis. Using the SeeAct framework and the Mind2Web dataset as a case study, we show how this approach reveals actionable weaknesses missed by standard metrics - paving the way for more robust and generalizable web agents.

Professional sports teams pour millions of dollars into data analytics, using advanced tracking systems to study every sprint, pass, and decision on the field. The results of that analysis, however, are industry secrets, making many sports difficult for researchers to study. Now, two University of Waterloo researchers, Dr. David Radke and Kyle Tilbury, are using AI to level the playing field. By tapping into Google Research Football's reinforcement learning environment, the researchers developed a system that can simulate and record unlimited soccer matches. To get things started, they generated and saved data from 3,000 simulated soccer games, resulting in a rich and complex dataset of passes, goals, and player movements for researchers to study.

The challenge of aligning artificial intelligence (AI) with human values persists due to the abstract and often conflicting nature of moral principles and the opacity of existing approaches. This paper introduces CogniAlign, a multi-agent deliberation framework based on naturalistic moral realism, that grounds moral reasoning in survivability, defined across individual and collective dimensions, and operationalizes it through structured deliberations among discipline-specific scientist agents. Each agent, representing neuroscience, psychology, sociology, and evolutionary biology, provides arguments and rebuttals that are synthesized by an arbiter into transparent and empirically anchored judgments. We evaluate CogniAlign on classic and novel moral questions and compare its outputs against GPT-4o using a five-part ethical audit framework. Results show that CogniAlign consistently outperforms the baseline across more than sixty moral questions, with average performance gains of 16.2 points in analytic quality, 14.3 points in breadth, and 28.4 points in depth of explanation. In the Heinz dilemma, for example, CogniAlign achieved an overall score of 89.2 compared to GPT-4o's 69.2, demonstrating a decisive advantage in handling moral reasoning. By reducing black-box reasoning and avoiding deceptive alignment, CogniAlign highlights the potential of interdisciplinary deliberation as a scalable pathway for safe and transparent AI alignment.

Automated issue solving seeks to autonomously identify and repair defective code snippets across an entire codebase. SWE-Bench has emerged as the most widely adopted benchmark for evaluating progress in this area. While LLM-based agentic tools show great promise, they still fail on a substantial portion of tasks. Moreover, current evaluations primarily report aggregate issue-solving rates, which obscure the underlying causes of success and failure, making it challenging to diagnose model weaknesses or guide targeted improvements. To bridge this gap, we first analyze the performance and efficiency of three SOTA tools, spanning both pipeline-based and agentic architectures, in automated issue solving tasks of SWE-Bench-Verified under varying task characteristics. Furthermore, to move from high-level performance metrics to underlying cause analysis, we conducted a systematic manual analysis of 150 failed instances. From this analysis, we developed a comprehensive taxonomy of failure modes comprising 3 primary phases, 9 main categories, and 25 fine-grained subcategories. Then we systematically analyze the distribution of the identified failure modes, the results reveal distinct failure fingerprints between the two architectural paradigms, with the majority of agentic failures stemming from flawed reasoning and cognitive deadlocks. Motivated by these insights, we propose a collaborative Expert-Executor framework. It introduces a supervisory Expert agent tasked with providing strategic oversight and course-correction for a primary Executor agent. This architecture is designed to correct flawed reasoning and break the cognitive deadlocks that frequently lead to failure. Experiments show that our framework solves 22.2% of previously intractable issues for a leading single agent. These findings pave the way for building more robust agents through diagnostic evaluation and collaborative design.

The choice of action spaces is a critical yet unresolved challenge in developing capable, end-to-end trainable agents. This paper first presents a large-scale, systematic comparison of prominent abstracted action spaces and tokenizers for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) or hierarchical agent models in the open-ended Minecraft. Our analysis reveals that no single action space is universally optimal; instead, the most effective abstraction is highly task-dependent, creating a dilemma for building generalist agents. To resolve this, we introduce Chain of Action (CoA), a novel framework that unifies high-level planning and low-level control within a single, monolithic VLA model. CoA treats an abstracted action not as a command for a separate policy, but as an intermediate reasoning step--akin to a chain of thought--that guides the generation of the final, executable action. Furthermore, we demonstrate that an All-in-One agent trained on a diverse mixture of action spaces using the CoA paradigm learns a more robust and generalizable policy. This unified agent achieves a new state-of-the-art, improving the overall task success rate over strong, specialized baselines. To foster reproducible research, we release the OpenHA (Open Hierarchical Agents) suite, which includes our comprehensive benchmark of over 800 distinct tasks, curated datasets, source code, and all pretrained model checkpoints at https://github.com/CraftJarvis/OpenHA

This position paper contends that modern AI research must adopt an antifragile perspective on safety -- one in which the system's capacity to guarantee long-term AI safety such as handling rare or out-of-distribution (OOD) events expands over time. Conventional static benchmarks and single-shot robustness tests overlook the reality that environments evolve and that models, if left unchallenged, can drift into maladaptation (e.g., reward hacking, over-optimization, or atrophy of broader capabilities). We argue that an antifragile approach -- Rather than striving to rapidly reduce current uncertainties, the emphasis is on leveraging those uncertainties to better prepare for potentially greater, more unpredictable uncertainties in the future -- is pivotal for the long-term reliability of open-ended ML systems. In this position paper, we first identify key limitations of static testing, including scenario diversity, reward hacking, and over-alignment. We then explore the potential of antifragile solutions to manage rare events. Crucially, we advocate for a fundamental recalibration of the methods used to measure, benchmark, and continually improve AI safety over the long term, complementing existing robustness approaches by providing ethical and practical guidelines towards fostering an antifragile AI safety community.

Trajectory prediction is a critical component of autonomous driving, essential for ensuring both safety and efficiency on the road. However, traditional approaches often struggle with the scarcity of labeled data and exhibit suboptimal performance in multi-agent prediction scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce a disentangled context-aware pre-training framework for multi-agent motion prediction, named DECAMP. Unlike existing methods that entangle representation learning with pretext tasks, our framework decouples behavior pattern learning from latent feature reconstruction, prioritizing interpretable dynamics and thereby enhancing scene representation for downstream prediction. Additionally, our framework incorporates context-aware representation learning alongside collaborative spatial-motion pretext tasks, which enables joint optimization of structural and intentional reasoning while capturing the underlying dynamic intentions. Our experiments on the Argoverse 2 benchmark showcase the superior performance of our method, and the results attained underscore its effectiveness in multi-agent motion forecasting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first context autoencoder framework for multi-agent motion forecasting in autonomous driving. The code and models will be made publicly available.

Abstract-- Service robots have demonstrated significant potential for autonomous trolley collection and redistribution in public spaces like airports or warehouses to improve efficiency and reduce cost. Usually, a fully autonomous system for the collection and transportation of multiple trolleys is based on a Leader-Follower formation of mobile manipulators, where reliable docking maneuvers of the mobile base are essential to align trolleys into organized queues. However, developing a vision-based robotic docking system faces significant challenges: high precision requirements, environmental disturbances, and inherent robot constraints. T o address these challenges, we propose an optimization-based Visual Servoing scheme that incorporates active infrared markers for robust feature extraction across diverse lighting conditions. This framework explicitly models nonholonomic kinematics and visibility constraints within the Hybrid Visual Servoing problem, augmented with an observer for disturbance rejection to ensure precise and stable docking. Experimental results across diverse environments demonstrate the robustness of this system, with quantitative evaluations confirming high docking accuracy. Mobile manipulation robots are revolutionizing automated transportation by taking over repetitive and heavy-load tasks from humans [1]-[3].

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) presents a promising paradigm for training autonomous vehicle (AV) planning policies from large-scale, real-world driving logs. However, the extreme data imbalance in these logs, where mundane scenarios vastly outnumber rare "long-tail" events, leads to brittle and unsafe policies when using standard uniform data sampling. In this work, we address this challenge through a systematic, large-scale comparative study of data curation strategies designed to focus the learning process on information-rich samples. We investigate six distinct criticality weighting schemes which are categorized into three families: heuristic-based, uncertainty-based, and behavior-based. These are evaluated at two temporal scales, the individual timestep and the complete scenario. We train seven goal-conditioned Conservative Q-Learning (CQL) agents with a state-of-the-art, attention-based architecture and evaluate them in the high-fidelity Waymax simulator. Our results demonstrate that all data curation methods significantly outperform the baseline. Notably, data-driven curation using model uncertainty as a signal achieves the most significant safety improvements, reducing the collision rate by nearly three-fold (from 16.0% to 5.5%). Furthermore, we identify a clear trade-off where timestep-level weighting excels at reactive safety while scenario-level weighting improves long-horizon planning. Our work provides a comprehensive framework for data curation in Offline RL and underscores that intelligent, non-uniform sampling is a critical component for building safe and reliable autonomous agents.