Agents
Don't lie to your friends: Learning what you know from collaborative self-play
Eisenstein, Jacob, Aghajani, Reza, Fisch, Adam, Dua, Dheeru, Huot, Fantine, Lapata, Mirella, Zayats, Vicky, Berant, Jonathan
To be helpful assistants, AI agents must be aware of their own capabilities and limitations. This includes knowing when to answer from parametric knowledge versus using tools, when to trust tool outputs, and when to abstain or hedge. Such capabilities are hard to teach through supervised fine-tuning because they require constructing examples that reflect the agent's specific capabilities. We therefore propose a radically new approach to teaching agents what they know: \emph{collaborative self-play}. We construct multi-agent collaborations in which the group is rewarded for collectively arriving at correct answers. The desired meta-knowledge emerges from the incentives built into the structure of the interaction. We focus on small societies of agents that have access to heterogeneous tools (corpus-specific retrieval), and therefore must collaborate to maximize their success while minimizing their effort. Experiments show that group-level rewards for multi-agent communities can induce policies that \emph{transfer} to improve tool use and selective prediction in settings where individual agents are deployed in isolation.
From Autonomous Agents to Integrated Systems, A New Paradigm: Orchestrated Distributed Intelligence
The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has ushered in a new era of integrated systems that merge computational prowess with human decision-making. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Orchestrated Distributed Intelligence (ODI), a novel paradigm that reconceptualizes AI not as isolated autonomous agents, but as cohesive, orchestrated networks that work in tandem with human expertise. ODI leverages advanced orchestration layers, multi-loop feedback mechanisms, and a high cognitive density framework to transform static, record-keeping systems into dynamic, action-oriented environments. Through a comprehensive review of multi-agent system literature, recent technological advances, and practical insights from industry forums, we argue that the future of AI lies in integrating distributed intelligence within human-centric workflows. This approach not only enhances operational efficiency and strategic agility but also addresses challenges related to scalability, transparency, and ethical decision-making. Our work outlines key theoretical implications and presents a practical roadmap for future research and enterprise innovation, aiming to pave the way for responsible and adaptive AI systems that drive sustainable innovation in human organizations.
Retrieval-Augmented Simulacra: Generative Agents for Up-to-date and Knowledge-Adaptive Simulations
Shimadzu, Hikaru, Utsuro, Takehito, Kitayama, Daisuke
In the 2023 edition of the White Paper on Information and Communications, it is estimated that the population of social networking services in Japan will exceed 100 million by 2022, and the influence of social networking services in Japan is growing significantly. In addition, marketing using SNS and research on the propagation of emotions and information on SNS are being actively conducted, creating the need for a system for predicting trends in SNS interactions. We have already created a system that simulates the behavior of various communities on SNS by building a virtual SNS environment in which agents post and reply to each other in a chat community created by agents using a LLMs. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of the search extension generation mechanism used to create posts and replies in a virtual SNS environment using a simulation system on the ability to generate posts and replies. As a result of the evaluation, we confirmed that the proposed search extension generation mechanism, which mimics human search behavior, generates the most natural exchange.
MAP: Multi-user Personalization with Collaborative LLM-powered Agents
Lee, Christine, Choi, Jihye, Mutlu, Bilge
The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agents in multi-user settings underscores the need for reliable, usable methods to accommodate diverse preferences and resolve conflicting directives. Drawing on conflict resolution theory, we introduce a user-centered workflow for multi-user personalization comprising three stages: Reflection, Analysis, and Feedback. We then present MAP -- a \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{A}gent system for multi-user \textbf{P}ersonalization -- to operationalize this workflow. By delegating subtasks to specialized agents, MAP (1) retrieves and reflects on relevant user information, while enhancing reliability through agent-to-agent interactions, (2) provides detailed analysis for improved transparency and usability, and (3) integrates user feedback to iteratively refine results. Our user study findings (n=12) highlight MAP's effectiveness and usability for conflict resolution while emphasizing the importance of user involvement in resolution verification and failure management. This work highlights the potential of multi-agent systems to implement user-centered, multi-user personalization workflows and concludes by offering insights for personalization in multi-user contexts.
LIVEPOINT: Fully Decentralized, Safe, Deadlock-Free Multi-Robot Control in Cluttered Environments with High-Dimensional Inputs
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.
A Comprehensive Survey on Multi-Agent Cooperative Decision-Making: Scenarios, Approaches, Challenges and Perspectives
Jin, Weiqiang, Du, Hongyang, Zhao, Biao, Tian, Xingwu, Shi, Bohang, Yang, Guang
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.
Goal2Story: A Multi-Agent Fleet based on Privately Enabled sLLMs for Impacting Mapping on Requirements Elicitation
Zou, Xinkai, Liu, Yan, Shi, Xiongbo, Yang, Chen
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.
Generating Causal Explanations of Vehicular Agent Behavioural Interactions with Learnt Reward Profiles
Howard, Rhys, Hawes, Nick, Kunze, Lars
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.
Practical Abstractions for Model Checking Continuous-Time Multi-Agent Systems
Kim, Yan, Jamroga, Wojciech, Penczek, Wojciech, Petrucci, Laure
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.
A Survey on Knowledge-Oriented Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Cheng, Mingyue, Luo, Yucong, Ouyang, Jie, Liu, Qi, Liu, Huijie, Li, Li, Yu, Shuo, Zhang, Bohou, Cao, Jiawei, Ma, Jie, Wang, Daoyu, Chen, Enhong
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.