Agents
World Models for Cognitive Agents: Transforming Edge Intelligence in Future Networks
Zhao, Changyuan, Zhang, Ruichen, Wang, Jiacheng, Zhao, Gaosheng, Niyato, Dusit, Sun, Geng, Mao, Shiwen, Kim, Dong In
World models are emerging as a transformative paradigm in artificial intelligence, enabling agents to construct internal representations of their environments for predictive reasoning, planning, and decision-making. By learning latent dynamics, world models provide a sample-efficient framework that is especially valuable in data-constrained or safety-critical scenarios. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of world models, highlighting their architecture, training paradigms, and applications across prediction, generation, planning, and causal reasoning. We compare and distinguish world models from related concepts such as digital twins, the metaverse, and foundation models, clarifying their unique role as embedded cognitive engines for autonomous agents. We further propose Wireless Dreamer, a novel world model-based reinforcement learning framework tailored for wireless edge intelligence optimization, particularly in low-altitude wireless networks (LAWNs). Through a weather-aware UAV trajectory planning case study, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in improving learning efficiency and decision quality.
Position: Olfaction Standardization is Essential for the Advancement of Embodied Artificial Intelligence
France, Kordel K., Peddi, Rohith, Dennler, Nik, Daescu, Ovidiu
Despite extraordinary progress in artificial intelligence (AI), modern systems remain incomplete representations of human cognition. Vision, audition, and language have received disproportionate attention due to well-defined benchmarks, standardized datasets, and consensus-driven scientific foundations. In contrast, olfaction - a high-bandwidth, evolutionarily critical sense - has been largely overlooked. This omission presents a foundational gap in the construction of truly embodied and ethically aligned super-human intelligence. We argue that the exclusion of olfactory perception from AI architectures is not due to irrelevance but to structural challenges: unresolved scientific theories of smell, heterogeneous sensor technologies, lack of standardized olfactory datasets, absence of AI-oriented benchmarks, and difficulty in evaluating sub-perceptual signal processing. These obstacles have hindered the development of machine olfaction despite its tight coupling with memory, emotion, and contextual reasoning in biological systems. In this position paper, we assert that meaningful progress toward general and embodied intelligence requires serious investment in olfactory research by the AI community. We call for cross-disciplinary collaboration - spanning neuroscience, robotics, machine learning, and ethics - to formalize olfactory benchmarks, develop multimodal datasets, and define the sensory capabilities necessary for machines to understand, navigate, and act within human environments. Recognizing olfaction as a core modality is essential not only for scientific completeness, but for building AI systems that are ethically grounded in the full scope of the human experience.
Whispers of Many Shores: Cultural Alignment through Collaborative Cultural Expertise
Feng, Shuai, Chan, Wei-Chuang, Chouhan, Srishti, Ayala, Junior Francisco Garcia, Medicherla, Srujananjali, Clark, Kyle, Shi, Mingwei
Current LLMs often lack the nuanced understanding required for diverse cultural contexts, and adapting them typically involves costly full fine-tuning. To address this, we introduce a novel soft prompt fine-tuning framework that enables efficient and modular cultural alignment. Our method utilizes vectorized prompt tuning to dynamically route queries to a committee of culturally specialized'expert' LLM configurations, created by optimizing soft prompt embeddings without altering the base model's parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances cultural sensitivity and adaptability, improving alignment scores from 0.208 to 0.820 (cf.Table 1), offering a robust solution for culturally-aware LLM deployment. This research paves the way for subsequent investigations into enhanced cultural coverage and dynamic expert adaptation, crucial for realizing autonomous AI with deeply nuanced understanding in a globally interconnected world.
MedOrch: Medical Diagnosis with Tool-Augmented Reasoning Agents for Flexible Extensibility
He, Yexiao, Li, Ang, Liu, Boyi, Yao, Zhewei, He, Yuxiong
Healthcare decision-making represents one of the most challenging domains for Artificial Intelligence (AI), requiring the integration of diverse knowledge sources, complex reasoning, and various external analytical tools. Current AI systems often rely on either task-specific models, which offer limited adaptability, or general language models without grounding with specialized external knowledge and tools. We introduce MedOrch, a novel framework that orchestrates multiple specialized tools and reasoning agents to provide comprehensive medical decision support. MedOrch employs a modular, agent-based architecture that facilitates the flexible integration of domain-specific tools without altering the core system. Furthermore, it ensures transparent and traceable reasoning processes, enabling clinicians to meticulously verify each intermediate step underlying the system's recommendations. We evaluate MedOrch across three distinct medical applications: Alzheimer's disease diagnosis, chest X-ray interpretation, and medical visual question answering, using authentic clinical datasets. The results demonstrate MedOrch's competitive performance across these diverse medical tasks. Notably, in Alzheimer's disease diagnosis, MedOrch achieves an accuracy of 93.26%, surpassing the state-of-the-art baseline by over four percentage points. For predicting Alzheimer's disease progression, it attains a 50.35% accuracy, marking a significant improvement. In chest X-ray analysis, MedOrch exhibits superior performance with a Macro AUC of 61.2% and a Macro F1-score of 25.5%. Moreover, in complex multimodal visual question answering (Image+Table), MedOrch achieves an accuracy of 54.47%. These findings underscore MedOrch's potential to advance healthcare AI by enabling reasoning-driven tool utilization for multimodal medical data processing and supporting intricate cognitive tasks in clinical decision-making.
Sorrel: A simple and flexible framework for multi-agent reinforcement learning
Gelpรญ, Rebekah A., Ju, Yibing, Jackson, Ethan C., Tang, Yikai, Verch, Shon, Voelcker, Claas, Cunningham, William A.
We introduce Sorrel (https://github.com/social-ai-uoft/sorrel), a simple Python interface for generating and testing new multi-agent reinforcement learning environments. This interface places a high degree of emphasis on simplicity and accessibility, and uses a more psychologically intuitive structure for the basic agent-environment loop, making it a useful tool for social scientists to investigate how learning and social interaction leads to the development and change of group dynamics. In this short paper, we outline the basic design philosophy and features of Sorrel.
Literature Review Of Multi-Agent Debate For Problem-Solving
Multi-agent large language models (MA-LLMs) are a rapidly growing research area that leverages multiple interacting language agents to tackle complex tasks, outperforming single-agent large language models. This literature review synthesizes the latest research on agent profiles, communication structures, and decision-making processes, drawing insights from both traditional multi-agent systems and state-of-the-art MA-LLM studies. In doing so, it aims to address the lack of direct comparisons in the field, illustrating how factors like scalability, communication structure, and decision-making processes influence MA-LLM performance. By examining frequent practices and outlining current challenges, the review reveals that multi-agent approaches can yield superior results but also face elevated computational costs and under-explored challenges unique to MA-LLM. Overall, these findings provide researchers and practitioners with a roadmap for developing robust and efficient multi-agent AI solutions.
Using LLMs to Advance the Cognitive Science of Collectives
Sucholutsky, Ilia, Collins, Katherine M., Jacoby, Nori, Thompson, Bill D., Hawkins, Robert D.
Cognitive science and artificial intelligence (AI) have grown up together as fields. The computational models of human minds developed in cognitive science have long served as benchmarks to articulate what it means for a system to be flexibly intelligent. Recent advances in AI, particularly around large language models (LLMs), are creating new opportunities to reciprocate this influence. Already, LLMs are being offered as scalable "cognitive models" of human behavior [Binz et al., 2024], automatic analysts of unstructured psychological text [Rathje et al., 2024], and components in neurosymbolic cognitive architectures (e.g., [W ong et al., 2023]). However, most applications of LLMs to cognitive science have so far focused on individual cognition.
From Motion to Behavior: Hierarchical Modeling of Humanoid Generative Behavior Control
Zhang, Jusheng, Tang, Jinzhou, Liu, Sidi, Li, Mingyan, Zhang, Sheng, Wang, Jian, Wang, Keze
Human motion generative modeling or synthesis aims to characterize complicated human motions of daily activities in diverse real-world environments. However, current research predominantly focuses on either low-level, short-period motions or high-level action planning, without taking into account the hierarchical goal-oriented nature of human activities. In this work, we take a step forward from human motion generation to human behavior modeling, which is inspired by cognitive science. We present a unified framework, dubbed Generative Behavior Control (GBC), to model diverse human motions driven by various high-level intentions by aligning motions with hierarchical behavior plans generated by large language models (LLMs). Our insight is that human motions can be jointly controlled by task and motion planning in robotics, but guided by LLMs to achieve improved motion diversity and physical fidelity. Meanwhile, to overcome the limitations of existing benchmarks, i.e., lack of behavioral plans, we propose GBC-100K dataset annotated with a hierarchical granularity of semantic and motion plans driven by target goals. Our experiments demonstrate that GBC can generate more diverse and purposeful high-quality human motions with 10* longer horizons compared with existing methods when trained on GBC-100K, laying a foundation for future research on behavioral modeling of human motions. Our dataset and source code will be made publicly available.
Reviews: Robust Multi-agent Counterfactual Prediction
Reviewers found this paper to be an original and useful addition to the field of multi-agent games. While some of the presentation could be clarified (see specific reviewer comments, e.g. about the revelation game), there was a consensus that the paper is generally well-written and clear enough for publication, with the proposed corrections.
Reviews: Multi-Agent Common Knowledge Reinforcement Learning
My two biggest complaints center on 1) the illustrative single-step matrix game of section 4.1 and figure 3 and 2) the practical applications of MACKRL. 1) Since the primary role of the single-step matrix game in section 4.1 is illustrative, it should be much clearer what is going on. How are all 3 policies parameterized? What information does each have access to? What is the training data? First, let's focus on the JAL policy. As presented up until this point in the paper, JAL means centralized training *and* execution.