As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in morally sensitive domains, it is crucial to understand how persona traits affect their moral reasoning and persuasive behavior. We present the first large-scale study of multi-dimensional persona effects in AI-AI debates over real-world moral dilemmas. Using a 6-dimensional persona space (age, gender, country, class, ideology, and personality), we simulate structured debates between AI agents over 131 relationship-based cases. Our results show that personas affect initial moral stances and debate outcomes, with political ideology and personality traits exerting the strongest influence. Persuasive success varies across traits, with liberal and open personalities reaching higher consensus and win rates. While logit-based confidence grows during debates, emotional and credibility-based appeals diminish, indicating more tempered argumentation over time. These trends mirror findings from psychology and cultural studies, reinforcing the need for persona-aware evaluation frameworks for AI moral reasoning.

Opinion dynamics models such as the bounded confidence models (BCMs) describe how a population can reach consensus, fragmentation, or polarization, depending on a few parameters. Connecting such models to real-world data could help understanding such phenomena, testing model assumptions. To this end, estimation of model parameters is a key aspect, and maximum likelihood estimation provides a principled way to tackle it. Here, our goal is to outline the properties of statistical estimators of the two key BCM parameters: the confidence bound and the convergence rate. We find that their maximum likelihood estimators present different characteristics: the one for the confidence bound presents a small-sample bias but is consistent, while the estimator of the convergence rate shows a persistent bias. Moreover, the joint parameter estimation is affected by identifiability issues for specific regions of the parameter space, as several local maxima are present in the likelihood function. Our results show how the analysis of the likelihood function is a fruitful approach for better understanding the pitfalls and possibilities of estimating the parameters of opinion dynamics models, and more in general, agent-based models, and for offering formal guarantees for their calibration.

The collaboration and interaction of multiple robots have become integral aspects of smart manufacturing. Effective planning and management play a crucial role in achieving energy savings and minimising overall costs. This paper addresses the real-time Dynamic Multiple Sources to Single Destination (DMS-SD) navigation problem, particularly with a material distribution case for multiple intelligent robots in smart manufacturing. Enumerated solutions, such as in \cite{xiao2022efficient}, tackle the problem by generating as many optimal or near-optimal solutions as possible but do not learn patterns from the previous experience, whereas the method in \cite{xiao2023collaborative} only uses limited information from the earlier trajectories. Consequently, these methods may take a considerable amount of time to compute results on large maps, rendering real-time operations impractical. To overcome this challenge, we propose a lightweight Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) method to address the DMS-SD problem. The proposed DRL method can be efficiently trained and rapidly converges to the optimal solution using the designed target-guided reward function. A well-trained DRL model significantly reduces the computation time for the next movement to a millisecond level, which improves the time up to 100 times in our experiments compared to the enumerated solutions. Moreover, the trained DRL model can be easily deployed on lightweight devices in smart manufacturing, such as Internet of Things devices and mobile phones, which only require limited computational resources.

We present a method for the unattended gray-box identification of sensor models commonly used by localization algorithms in the field of robotics. The objective is to determine the most likely sensor model for a time series of unknown measurement data, given an extendable catalog of predefined sensor models. Sensor model definitions may require states for rigid-body calibrations and dedicated reference frames to replicate a measurement based on the robot's localization state. A health metric is introduced, which verifies the outcome of the selection process in order to detect false positives and facilitate reliable decision-making. In a second stage, an initial guess for identified calibration states is generated, and the necessity of sensor world reference frames is evaluated. The identified sensor model with its parameter information is then used to parameterize and initialize a state estimation application, thus ensuring a more accurate and robust integration of new sensor elements. This method is helpful for inexperienced users who want to identify the source and type of a measurement, sensor calibrations, or sensor reference frames. It will also be important in the field of modular multi-agent scenarios and modularized robotic platforms that are augmented by sensor modalities during runtime. Overall, this work aims to provide a simplified integration of sensor modalities to downstream applications and circumvent common pitfalls in the usage and development of localization approaches.

The Robot Context Protocol (RCP) is a lightweight, middleware-agnostic communication protocol designed to simplify the complexity of robotic systems and enable seamless interaction between robots, users, and autonomous agents. RCP provides a unified and semantically meaningful interface that decouples client-facing operations from backend implementations, supporting a wide range of deployment environments including physical robots, cloud-based orchestrators, and simulated platforms. Built on HTTP and WebSocket transport layers, the protocol defines a schema-driven message format with structured operations such as read, write, execute, and subscribe. It integrates features such as runtime introspection, asynchronous feedback, multi-tenant namespace isolation, and strict type validation to ensure robustness, scalability, and security. The architecture, message structure, interface model, and adapter-based backend integration strategy of RCP are described, along with deployment practices and applicability across industries including manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare. RCP enables intelligent, resilient, and safe robotic operations in complex, multi-agent ecosystems.

This paper introduces a multimethod framework for studying spatial and social dynamics in real-world group-agent interactions with socially interactive agents. Drawing on proxemics and bonding theories, the method combines subjective self-reports and objective spatial tracking. Applied in two field studies in a museum ( N = 187) with a robot and a virtual agent, the paper addresses the challenges in aligning human perception and behavior. We focus on presenting an open source, scalable, and field-tested toolkit for future studies.

The advent of large language models (LLMs), such as GPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek, has significantly advanced natural language processing, giving rise to sophisticated chatbots capable of diverse language-related tasks. The transition from these traditional LLM chatbots to more advanced AI agents represents a pivotal evolutionary step. However, existing evaluation frameworks often blur the distinctions between LLM chatbots and AI agents, leading to confusion among researchers selecting appropriate benchmarks. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces a systematic analysis of current evaluation approaches, grounded in an evolutionary perspective. We provide a detailed analytical framework that clearly differentiates AI agents from LLM chatbots along five key aspects: complex environment, multi-source instructor, dynamic feedback, multi-modal perception, and advanced capability. Further, we categorize existing evaluation benchmarks based on external environments driving forces, and resulting advanced internal capabilities. For each category, we delineate relevant evaluation attributes, presented comprehensively in practical reference tables. Finally, we synthesize current trends and outline future evaluation methodologies through four critical lenses: environment, agent, evaluator, and metrics. Our findings offer actionable guidance for researchers, facilitating the informed selection and application of benchmarks in AI agent evaluation, thus fostering continued advancement in this rapidly evolving research domain.

Semantic Spacetime (SST) is a discrete, graph theoretic'agent' representation of configurations and process phenomena, used for modelling scenarios that include knowledge representations, in the form of labelled directed graphs [1-4]. It enables both qualitative and quantitative interpretations of processes by combining physical and virtual concepts (from physics and information science) into a Promise Theoretic agent model [5]. Promise Theory principles emphasize the autonomy or locality of causal behaviour, so there are clear motivations for modelling phenomena in this way. As a graph theoretical structure, a Semantic Spacetime is a collection of nodes (agents) joined by links (channels for process information), both of which may have annotations and numerical values associated with them. A key application for Semantic Spacetime in artificial systems is to represent'knowledge' (in its simplified sense) and process structures, such as those normally associated with indexing methods or Semantic Webs, like the triple store approaches of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) [6].

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) increasingly depend on advanced AI techniques to operate in critical applications. However, traditional verification and validation methods often struggle to handle the unpredictable and dynamic nature of AI components. In this paper, we introduce DURA-CPS, a novel framework that employs multi-role orchestration to automate the iterative assurance process for AI-powered CPS. By assigning specialized roles (e.g., safety monitoring, security assessment, fault injection, and recovery planning) to dedicated agents within a simulated environment, DURA-CPS continuously evaluates and refines AI behavior against a range of dependability requirements. We demonstrate the framework through a case study involving an autonomous vehicle navigating an intersection with an AI-based planner. Our results show that DURA-CPS effectively detects vulnerabilities, manages performance impacts, and supports adaptive recovery strategies, thereby offering a structured and extensible solution for rigorous V&V in safety- and security-critical systems.

Open-ended learning (OEL) -- which emphasizes training agents that achieve broad capability over narrow competency -- is emerging as a paradigm to develop artificial intelligence (AI) agents to achieve robustness and generalization. However, despite promising results that demonstrate the benefits of OEL, applying OEL to develop autonomous agents for real-world cybersecurity applications remains a challenge. We propose a training approach, inspired by OEL, to develop autonomous network defenders. Our results demonstrate that like in other domains, OEL principles can translate into more robust and generalizable agents for cyber defense. To apply OEL to network defense, it is necessary to address several technical challenges. Most importantly, it is critical to provide a task representation approach over a broad universe of tasks that maintains a consistent interface over goals, rewards and action spaces. This way, the learning agent can train with varying network conditions, attacker behaviors, and defender goals while being able to build on previously gained knowledge. With our tools and results, we aim to fundamentally impact research that applies AI to solve cybersecurity problems. Specifically, as researchers develop gyms and benchmarks for cyber defense, it is paramount that they consider diverse tasks with consistent representations, such as those we propose in our work.