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Persona Dynamics: Unveiling the Impact of Personality Traits on Agents in Text-Based Games

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Artificial agents are increasingly central to complex interactions and decision-making tasks, yet aligning their behaviors with desired human values remains an open challenge. In this work, we investigate how human-like personality traits influence agent behavior and performance within text-based interactive environments. We introduce PANDA: Personality Adapted Neural Decision Agents, a novel method for projecting human personality traits onto agents to guide their behavior. To induce personality in a text-based game agent, (i) we train a personality classifier to identify what personality type the agent's actions exhibit, and (ii) we integrate the personality profiles directly into the agent's policy-learning pipeline. By deploying agents embodying 16 distinct personality types across 25 text-based games and analyzing their trajectories, we demonstrate that an agent's action decisions can be guided toward specific personality profiles. Moreover, certain personality types, such as those characterized by higher levels of Openness, display marked advantages in performance. These findings underscore the promise of personality-adapted agents for fostering more aligned, effective, and human-centric decision-making in interactive environments.


SynWorld: Virtual Scenario Synthesis for Agentic Action Knowledge Refinement

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In the interaction between agents and their environments, agents expand their capabilities by planning and executing actions. However, LLM-based agents face substantial challenges when deployed in novel environments or required to navigate unconventional action spaces. To empower agents to autonomously explore environments, optimize workflows, and enhance their understanding of actions, we propose SynWorld, a framework that allows agents to synthesize possible scenarios with multi-step action invocation within the action space and perform Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) exploration to effectively refine their action knowledge in the current environment. Our experiments demonstrate that SynWorld is an effective and general approach to learning action knowledge in new environments. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/SynWorld.


Should Decision-Makers Reveal Classifiers in Online Strategic Classification?

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Strategic classification addresses a learning problem where a decision-maker implements a classifier over agents who may manipulate their features in order to receive favorable predictions. In the standard model of online strategic classification, in each round, the decision-maker implements and publicly reveals a classifier, after which agents perfectly best respond based on this knowledge. However, in practice, whether to disclose the classifier is often debated -- some decision-makers believe that hiding the classifier can prevent misclassification errors caused by manipulation. In this paper, we formally examine how limiting the agents' access to the current classifier affects the decision-maker's performance. Specifically, we consider an extended online strategic classification setting where agents lack direct knowledge about the current classifier and instead manipulate based on a weighted average of historically implemented classifiers. Our main result shows that in this setting, the decision-maker incurs $(1-ฮณ)^{-1}$ or $k_{\text{in}}$ times more mistakes compared to the full-knowledge setting, where $k_{\text{in}}$ is the maximum in-degree of the manipulation graph (representing how many distinct feature vectors can be manipulated to appear as a single one), and $ฮณ$ is the discount factor indicating agents' memory of past classifiers. Our results demonstrate how withholding access to the classifier can backfire and degrade the decision-maker's performance in online strategic classification.


Online Competitive Information Gathering for Partially Observable Trajectory Games

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Game-theoretic agents must make plans that optimally gather information about their opponents. These problems are modeled by partially observable stochastic games (POSGs), but planning in fully continuous POSGs is intractable without heavy offline computation or assumptions on the order of belief maintained by each player. We formulate a finite history/horizon refinement of POSGs which admits competitive information gathering behavior in trajectory space, and through a series of approximations, we present an online method for computing rational trajectory plans in these games which leverages particle-based estimations of the joint state space and performs stochastic gradient play. We also provide the necessary adjustments required to deploy this method on individual agents. The method is tested in continuous pursuit-evasion and warehouse-pickup scenarios (alongside extensions to $N > 2$ players and to more complex environments with visual and physical obstacles), demonstrating evidence of active information gathering and outperforming passive competitors.


Self-Challenging Language Model Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models are quickly becoming the foundation for intelligent agents that are capable of using tools. However, training such agents is challenging because it requires human creation and annotation of a diverse set of tasks, tools, and evaluation criteria. In this paper, we propose the Self-Challenging framework for training an agent on high-quality tasks that are generated by itself. The agent first plays the role of challenger and generates a task after interacting with the given tools. The tasks take the form of a novel general class of problems termed Code-as-Task, which are defined by an instruction, a verification function and solution and failure cases which serve as tests, allowing to filter only for high-quality tasks. The agent then takes an executor role and trains on those tasks with reinforcement learning using the evaluation feedback as a reward. Evaluation on two existing multi-turn tool-use agent benchmarks, M3ToolEval and TauBench, shows the Self-Challenging framework achieves over a two-fold improvement in Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, despite using only self-generated training data.


Agentic AI and Multiagentic: Are We Reinventing the Wheel?

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The terms Agentic AI and Multiagentic AI have recently gained popularity in discussions on generative artificial intelligence, often used to describe autonomous software agents and systems composed of such agents. However, the use of these terms confuses these buzzwords with well-established concepts in AI literature: intelligent agents and multi-agent systems. This article offers a critical analysis of this conceptual misuse. We review the theoretical origins of "agentic" in the social sciences (Bandura, 1986) and philosophical notions of intentionality (Dennett, 1971), and then summarise foundational works on intelligent agents and multi-agent systems by Wooldridge, Jennings and others. We examine classic agent architectures, from simple reactive agents to Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) models, and highlight key properties (autonomy, reactivity, proactivity, social capability) that define agency in AI. We then discuss recent developments in large language models (LLMs) and agent platforms based on LLMs, including the emergence of LLM-powered AI agents and open-source multi-agent orchestration frameworks. We argue that the term AI Agentic is often used as a buzzword for what are essentially AI agents, and AI Multiagentic for what are multi-agent systems. This confusion overlooks decades of research in the field of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The article advocates for scientific and technological rigour and the use of established terminology from the state of the art in AI, incorporating the wealth of existing knowledge, including standards for multi-agent system platforms, communication languages and coordination and cooperation algorithms, agreement technologies (automated negotiation, argumentation, virtual organisations, trust, reputation, etc.), into the new and promising wave of LLM-based AI agents, so as not to end up reinventing the wheel.


FinRobot: Generative Business Process AI Agents for Enterprise Resource Planning in Finance

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems serve as the digital backbone of modern financial institutions, yet they continue to rely on static, rule-based workflows that limit adaptability, scalability, and intelligence. As business operations grow more complex and data-rich, conventional ERP platforms struggle to integrate structured and unstructured data in real time and to accommodate dynamic, cross-functional workflows. In this paper, we present the first AI-native, agent-based framework for ERP systems, introducing a novel architecture of Generative Business Process AI Agents (GBPAs) that bring autonomy, reasoning, and dynamic optimization to enterprise workflows. The proposed system integrates generative AI with business process modeling and multi-agent orchestration, enabling end-to-end automation of complex tasks such as budget planning, financial reporting, and wire transfer processing. Unlike traditional workflow engines, GBPAs interpret user intent, synthesize workflows in real time, and coordinate specialized sub-agents for modular task execution. We validate the framework through case studies in bank wire transfers and employee reimbursements, two representative financial workflows with distinct complexity and data modalities. Results show that GBPAs achieve up to 40% reduction in processing time, 94% drop in error rate, and improved regulatory compliance by enabling parallelism, risk control insertion, and semantic reasoning. These findings highlight the potential of GBPAs to bridge the gap between generative AI capabilities and enterprise-grade automation, laying the groundwork for the next generation of intelligent ERP systems.


An Empirical Study of Group Conformity in Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled multi-agent systems that simulate real-world interactions with near-human reasoning. While previous studies have extensively examined biases related to protected attributes such as race, the emergence and propagation of biases on socially contentious issues in multi-agent LLM interactions remain underexplored. This study explores how LLM agents shape public opinion through debates on five contentious topics. By simulating over 2,500 debates, we analyze how initially neutral agents, assigned a centrist disposition, adopt specific stances over time. Statistical analyses reveal significant group conformity mirroring human behavior; LLM agents tend to align with numerically dominant groups or more intelligent agents, exerting a greater influence. These findings underscore the crucial role of agent intelligence in shaping discourse and highlight the risks of bias amplification in online interactions. Our results emphasize the need for policy measures that promote diversity and transparency in LLM-generated discussions to mitigate the risks of bias propagation within anonymous online environments.


General search techniques without common knowledge for imperfect-information games, and application to superhuman Fog of War chess

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Since the advent of AI, games have served as progress benchmarks. Meanwhile, imperfect-information variants of chess have existed for over a century, present extreme challenges, and have been the focus of significant AI research. Beyond calculation needed in regular chess, they require reasoning about information gathering, the opponent's knowledge, signaling, etc. The most popular variant, Fog of War (FoW) chess (aka. dark chess) is a recognized challenge problem in AI after superhuman performance was reached in no-limit Texas hold'em poker. We present Obscuro, the first superhuman AI for FoW chess. It introduces advances to search in imperfect-information games, enabling strong, scalable reasoning. Experiments against the prior state-of-the-art AI and human players -- including the world's best -- show that Obscuro is significantly stronger. FoW chess is the largest (by amount of imperfect information) turn-based game in which superhuman performance has been achieved and the largest game in which imperfect-information search has been successfully applied.


GraphPad: Inference-Time 3D Scene Graph Updates for Embodied Question Answering

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Structured scene representations are a core component of embodied agents, helping to consolidate raw sensory streams into readable, modular, and searchable formats. Due to their high computational overhead, many approaches build such representations in advance of the task. However, when the task specifications change, such static approaches become inadequate as they may miss key objects, spatial relations, and details. We introduce GraphPad, a modifiable structured memory that an agent can tailor to the needs of the task through API calls. It comprises a mutable scene graph representing the environment, a navigation log indexing frame-by-frame content, and a scratchpad for task-specific notes. Together, GraphPad serves as a dynamic workspace that remains complete, current, and aligned with the agent's immediate understanding of the scene and its task. On the OpenEQA benchmark, GraphPad attains 55.3%, a +3.0% increase over an image-only baseline using the same vision-language model, while operating with five times fewer input frames. These results show that allowing online, language-driven refinement of 3-D memory yields more informative representations without extra training or data collection.