Fully decentralized, safe, and deadlock-free multi-robot navigation in dynamic, cluttered environments is a critical challenge in robotics. Current methods require exact state measurements in order to enforce safety and liveness e.g. via control barrier functions (CBFs), which is challenging to achieve directly from onboard sensors like lidars and cameras. This work introduces LIVEPOINT, a decentralized control framework that synthesizes universal CBFs over point clouds to enable safe, deadlock-free real-time multi-robot navigation in dynamic, cluttered environments. Further, LIVEPOINT ensures minimally invasive deadlock avoidance behavior by dynamically adjusting agents' speeds based on a novel symmetric interaction metric. We validate our approach in simulation experiments across highly constrained multi-robot scenarios like doorways and intersections. Results demonstrate that LIVEPOINT achieves zero collisions or deadlocks and a 100% success rate in challenging settings compared to optimization-based baselines such as MPC and ORCA and neural methods such as MPNet, which fail in such environments. Despite prioritizing safety and liveness, LIVEPOINT is 35% smoother than baselines in the doorway environment, and maintains agility in constrained environments while still being safe and deadlock-free.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, intelligent decision-making techniques have gradually surpassed human levels in various human-machine competitions, especially in complex multi-agent cooperative task scenarios. Multi-agent cooperative decision-making involves multiple agents working together to complete established tasks and achieve specific objectives. These techniques are widely applicable in real-world scenarios such as autonomous driving, drone navigation, disaster rescue, and simulated military confrontations. This paper begins with a comprehensive survey of the leading simulation environments and platforms used for multi-agent cooperative decision-making. Specifically, we provide an in-depth analysis for these simulation environments from various perspectives, including task formats, reward allocation, and the underlying technologies employed. Subsequently, we provide a comprehensive overview of the mainstream intelligent decision-making approaches, algorithms and models for multi-agent systems (MAS). Theseapproaches can be broadly categorized into five types: rule-based (primarily fuzzy logic), game theory-based, evolutionary algorithms-based, deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL)-based, and large language models(LLMs)reasoning-based. Given the significant advantages of MARL andLLMs-baseddecision-making methods over the traditional rule, game theory, and evolutionary algorithms, this paper focuses on these multi-agent methods utilizing MARL and LLMs-based techniques. We provide an in-depth discussion of these approaches, highlighting their methodology taxonomies, advantages, and drawbacks. Further, several prominent research directions in the future and potential challenges of multi-agent cooperative decision-making are also detailed.

As requirements drift with rapid iterations, agile development becomes the dominant paradigm. Goal-driven Requirements Elicitation (RE) is a pivotal yet challenging task in agile project development due to its heavy tangling with adaptive planning and efficient collaboration. Recently, AI agents have shown promising ability in supporting requirements analysis by saving significant time and effort for stakeholders. However, current research mainly focuses on functional RE, and research works have not been reported bridging the long journey from goal to user stories. Moreover, considering the cost of LLM facilities and the need for data and idea protection, privately hosted small-sized LLM should be further utilized in RE. To address these challenges, we propose Goal2Story, a multi-agent fleet that adopts the Impact Mapping (IM) framework while merely using cost-effective sLLMs for goal-driven RE. Moreover, we introduce a StorySeek dataset that contains over 1,000 user stories (USs) with corresponding goals and project context information, as well as the semi-automatic dataset construction method. For evaluation, we proposed two metrics: Factuality Hit Rate (FHR) to measure consistency between the generated USs with the dataset and Quality And Consistency Evaluation (QuACE) to evaluate the quality of the generated USs. Experimental results demonstrate that Goal2Story outperforms the baseline performance of the Super-Agent adopting powerful LLMs, while also showcasing the performance improvements in key metrics brought by CoT and Agent Profile to Goal2Story, as well as its exploration in identifying latent needs.

Abstract-- Transparency and explainability are important features that responsible autonomous vehicles should possess, particularly when interacting with humans, and causal reasoning offers a strong basis to provide these qualities. However, even if one assumes agents act to maximise some concept of reward, it is difficult to make accurate causal inferences of agent planning without capturing what is of importance to the agent. Thus our work aims to learn a weighting of reward metrics for agents such that explanations for agent interactions can be causally inferred. From here it is trivial to generate a textual explanation such as: "Red overtaking Autonomous systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in our day-to-day lives. Hence we ought to understand cause and effect in relation to their behaviour and the behaviour of others.

Much work has been done to contain the state-space explosion by smart representation and/or reduction of input models. Symbolic Model checking of temporal logics in a well established technique model checking based on SATor BDD-based representations to verify and validate properties of multi-agent systems (MAS). of the state/transition space [36, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50] fall into the However, practical model checking requires input models of manageable former group. Model reduction methods include partial-order reduction size. In this paper, we extend the model reduction method [28, 41, 49], equivalence-based reductions [2, 6, 25], and by variable-based abstraction, proposed recently by Jamroga and state abstraction [21], see below for a detailed discussion.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has gained significant attention in recent years for its potential to enhance natural language understanding and generation by combining large-scale retrieval systems with generative models. RAG leverages external knowledge sources, such as documents, databases, or structured data, to improve model performance and generate more accurate and contextually relevant outputs. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of RAG by examining its fundamental components, including retrieval mechanisms, generation processes, and the integration between the two. We discuss the key characteristics of RAG, such as its ability to augment generative models with dynamic external knowledge, and the challenges associated with aligning retrieved information with generative objectives. We also present a taxonomy that categorizes RAG methods, ranging from basic retrieval-augmented approaches to more advanced models incorporating multi-modal data and reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we review the evaluation benchmarks and datasets commonly used to assess RAG systems, along with a detailed exploration of its applications in fields such as question answering, summarization, and information retrieval. Finally, we highlight emerging research directions and opportunities for improving RAG systems, such as enhanced retrieval efficiency, model interpretability, and domain-specific adaptations. This paper concludes by outlining the prospects for RAG in addressing real-world challenges and its potential to drive further advancements in natural language processing.

Motivated by the increasing interest in the explicit representation and handling of various "preference" structures arising in modern digital economy, this work introduces a new class of "one-to-many stable-matching" problems where a set of atomic tasks must be stably allocated to a set of agents. An important characteristic of these stable-matching problems is the very arbitrary specification of the task subsets constituting "feasible" allocations for each agent. It is shown that as long as the agents rank their feasible task allocations lexicographically with respect to their stated preferences for each atomic task, matching stability reduces to the absence of blocking agent-task pairs. This result, together with a pertinent graphical representation of feasible allocations, enable (i) the representation of the space of stable matchings as a set of linear constraints with binary variables, and (ii) the specification and handling of certain notions of optimality within this space of stable matchings. The last part of the paper also addresses the notion of "substitutability" in the considered problem context.

The ability of artificial intelligence agents to make optimal decisions and generalise them to different domains and tasks is compromised in complex scenarios. One way to address this issue has focused on learning efficient representations of the world and on how the actions of agents affect them, such as disentangled representations that exploit symmetries. Whereas such representations are procedurally efficient, they are based on the compression of low-level state-action transitions, which lack structural richness. To address this problem, we propose to enrich the agent's ontology and extend the traditional conceptualisation of trajectories to provide a more nuanced view of task execution. Structurally Enriched Trajectories (SETs) extend the encoding of sequences of states and their transitions by incorporating hierarchical relations between objects, interactions and affordances. SETs are built as multi-level graphs, providing a detailed representation of the agent dynamics and a transferable functional abstraction of the task. SETs are integrated into an architecture, Structurally Enriched Trajectory Learning and Encoding (SETLE), that employs a heterogeneous graph-based memory structure of multi-level relational dependencies essential for generalisation. Using reinforcement learning as a data generation tool, we demonstrate that SETLE can support downstream tasks, enabling agents to recognise task-relevant structural patterns across diverse environments.

Despite their groundbreaking performance, state-of-the-art autonomous agents can misbehave when training and environmental conditions become inconsistent, with minor mismatches leading to undesirable behaviors or even catastrophic failures. Robustness towards these training/environment ambiguities is a core requirement for intelligent agents and its fulfillment is a long-standing challenge when deploying agents in the real world. Here, departing from mainstream views seeking robustness through training, we introduce DR-FREE, a free energy model that installs this core property by design. It directly wires robustness into the agent decision-making mechanisms via free energy minimization. By combining a robust extension of the free energy principle with a novel resolution engine, DR-FREE returns a policy that is optimal-yet-robust against ambiguity. Moreover, for the first time, it reveals the mechanistic role of ambiguity on optimal decisions and requisite Bayesian belief updating. We evaluate DR-FREE on an experimental testbed involving real rovers navigating an ambiguous environment filled with obstacles. Across all the experiments, DR-FREE enables robots to successfully navigate towards their goal even when, in contrast, standard free energy minimizing agents that do not use DR-FREE fail. In short, DR-FREE can tackle scenarios that elude previous methods: this milestone may inspire both deployment in multi-agent settings and, at a perhaps deeper level, the quest for a biologically plausible explanation of how natural agents - with little or no training - survive in capricious environments.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning cooperative behaviors in team-based environments. However, such methods often demand extensive training time. For instance, the state-of-the-art method TiZero takes 40 days to train high-quality policies for a football environment. In this paper, we hypothesize that better exploration mechanisms can improve the sample efficiency of multi-agent methods. We propose two different approaches for better exploration in TiZero: a self-supervised intrinsic reward and a random network distillation bonus. Additionally, we introduce architectural modifications to the original algorithm to enhance TiZero's computational efficiency. We evaluate the sample efficiency of these approaches through extensive experiments. Our results show that random network distillation improves training sample efficiency by 18.8% compared to the original TiZero. Furthermore, we evaluate the qualitative behavior of the models produced by both variants against a heuristic AI, with the self-supervised reward encouraging possession and random network distillation leading to a more offensive performance. Our results highlights the applicability of our random network distillation variant in practical settings. Lastly, due to the nature of the proposed method, we acknowledge its use beyond football simulation, especially in environments with strong multi-agent and strategic aspects.