Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Agents





Counterbalancing Learning and Strategic Incentives in Allocation Markets

Neural Information Processing Systems

Motivated by the high discard rate of donated organs in the United States, we study an allocation problem in the presence of learning and strategic incentives. We consider a setting where a benevolent social planner decides whether and how to allocate a single indivisible object to a queue of strategic agents. The object has a common true quality, good or bad, which is ex-ante unknown to everyone. Each agent holds an informative, yet noisy, private signal about the quality.


LiveMCP-101: Stress Testing and Diagnosing MCP-enabled Agents on Challenging Queries

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Tool calling has emerged as a critical capability for AI agents to interact with the real world and solve complex tasks. While the Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides a powerful standardized framework for tool integration, there is a significant gap in benchmarking how well AI agents can effectively solve multi-step tasks using diverse MCP tools in realistic, dynamic scenarios. In this work, we present LiveMCP-101, a benchmark of 101 carefully curated real-world queries, refined through iterative LLM rewriting and manual review, that require coordinated use of multiple MCP tools including web search, file operations, mathematical reasoning, and data analysis. Moreover, we introduce a novel evaluation approach that leverages ground-truth execution plans rather than raw API outputs, better reflecting the evolving nature of real-world environments. Experiments show that even frontier LLMs achieve a success rate below 60\%, highlighting major challenges in tool orchestration. Detailed ablations and error analysis further reveal distinct failure modes and inefficiencies in token usage, pointing to concrete directions for advancing current models. LiveMCP-101 sets a rigorous standard for evaluating real-world agent capabilities, advancing toward autonomous AI systems that reliably execute complex tasks through tool use.


An Efficient Open World Environment for Multi-Agent Social Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Many challenges remain before AI agents can be deployed in real-world environments. However, one virtue of such environments is that they are inherently multi-agent and contain human experts. Using advanced social intelligence in such an environment can help an AI agent learn adaptive skills and behaviors that a known expert exhibits. While social intelligence could accelerate training, it is currently difficult to study due to the lack of open-ended multi-agent environments. In this work, we present an environment in which multiple self-interested agents can pursue complex and independent goals, reflective of real world challenges. This environment will enable research into the development of socially intelligent AI agents in open-ended multi-agent settings, where agents may be implicitly incentivized to cooperate to defeat common enemies, build and share tools, and achieve long horizon goals. In this work, we investigate the impact on agent performance due to social learning in the presence of experts and implicit cooperation such as emergent collaborative tool use, and whether agents can benefit from either cooperation or competition in this environment.


HEAS: Hierarchical Evolutionary Agent Simulation Framework for Cross-Scale Modeling and Multi-Objective Search

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Hierarchical Evolutionary Agent Simulation (HEAS) is a Python framework that unifies layered agent-based modeling with evolutionary optimization and tournament evaluation in a single, reproducible workflow. HEAS represents models as hierarchies of lightweight processes ("streams") scheduled in deterministic layers that read and write a shared context, making cross-scale couplings explicit and auditable. A compact API and CLI-simulate, optimize, evaluate-expose single- and multi-objective evolution, PyTorch policy integration via parameter flattening/unflattening, and general tournament tooling with user-defined scoring and voting rules. The framework standardizes evaluation through uniform per-step and episode metrics, persists seeds, logbooks, and hall-of-fame archives, and provides plotting helpers for traces, Pareto fronts, and comparative outcomes, reducing glue code and improving comparability across studies. HEAS emphasizes separation of mechanism from orchestration, allowing exogenous drivers, endogenous agents, and aggregators to be composed and swapped without refactoring, while the same model can be used for forward simulation, optimization, or systematic comparison. We illustrate usage with two compact examples-an ecological system and an enterprise decision-making setting. HEAS offers a practical foundation for cross-disciplinary, multi-level inquiry, yielding reliable, reproducible results.


Super-additive Cooperation in Language Model Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the prospect of autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents, studying their tendency for cooperative behavior becomes an increasingly relevant topic. This study is inspired by the super-additive cooperation theory, where the combined effects of repeated interactions and inter-group rivalry have been argued to be the cause for cooperative tendencies found in humans. We devised a virtual tournament where language model agents, grouped into teams, face each other in a Prisoner's Dilemma game. By simulating both internal team dynamics and external competition, we discovered that this blend substantially boosts both overall and initial, one-shot cooperation levels (the tendency to cooperate in one-off interactions). This research provides a novel framework for large language models to strategize and act in complex social scenarios and offers evidence for how intergroup competition can, counter-intuitively, result in more cooperative behavior. These insights are crucial for designing future multi-agent AI systems that can effectively work together and better align with human values.


A "good regulator theorem" for embodied agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In a classic paper, Conant and Ashby claimed that "every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system." Artificial Life has produced many examples of systems that perform tasks with apparently no model in sight; these suggest Conant and Ashby's theorem doesn't easily generalise beyond its restricted setup. Nevertheless, here we show that a similar intuition can be fleshed out in a different way: whenever an agent is able to perform a regulation task, it is possible for an observer to interpret it as having "beliefs" about its environment, which it "updates" in response to sensory input. This notion of belief updating provides a notion of model that is more sophisticated than Conant and Ashby's, as well as a theorem that is more broadly applicable. However, it necessitates a change in perspective, in that the observer plays an essential role in the theory: models are not a mere property of the system but are imposed on it from outside. Our theorem holds regardless of whether the system is regulating its environment in a classic control theory setup, or whether it's regulating its own internal state; the model is of its environment either way. The model might be trivial, however, and this is how the apparent counterexamples are resolved.


RETAIL: Towards Real-world Travel Planning for Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Although large language models have enhanced automated travel planning abilities, current systems remain misaligned with real-world scenarios. First, they assume users provide explicit queries, while in reality requirements are often implicit. Second, existing solutions ignore diverse environmental factors and user preferences, limiting the feasibility of plans. Third, systems can only generate plans with basic POI arrangements, failing to provide all-in-one plans with rich details. To mitigate these challenges, we construct a novel dataset \textbf{RETAIL}, which supports decision-making for implicit queries while covering explicit queries, both with and without revision needs. It also enables environmental awareness to ensure plan feasibility under real-world scenarios, while incorporating detailed POI information for all-in-one travel plans. Furthermore, we propose a topic-guided multi-agent framework, termed TGMA. Our experiments reveal that even the strongest existing model achieves merely a 1.0% pass rate, indicating real-world travel planning remains extremely challenging. In contrast, TGMA demonstrates substantially improved performance 2.72%, offering promising directions for real-world travel planning.