Prevailing top-down systems in politics and economics struggle to keep pace with the pressing challenges of the 21st century, such as climate change, social inequality and conflict. Bottom-up democratisation and participatory approaches in politics and economics are increasingly seen as promising alternatives to confront and overcome these issues, often with utopian overtones, as proponents believe they may dramatically reshape political, social and ecological futures for the better and in contrast to contemporary authoritarian tendencies across various countries. Institutional specifics and the associated collective human behavior or culture remains little understood and debated, however. In this article, I propose a novel research agenda focusing on utopian democratisation efforts with formal and computational methods as well as with artificial intelligence - I call this agenda Artificial Utopia. Artificial Utopias provide safe testing grounds for new political ideas and economic policies in-silico with reduced risk of negative consequences as compared to testing ideas in real-world contexts. An increasing number of advanced simulation and intelligence methods, that aim at representing human cognition and collective decision-making in more realistic ways, could benefit this process. This includes agent-based modelling, reinforcement learning, large language models and more. I clarify what some of these simulation approaches can contribute to the study of Artificial Utopias with the help of two institutional examples: the citizen assembly and the democratic firm.

Distribution shifts have long been regarded as troublesome external forces that a decision-maker should either counteract or conform to. An intriguing feedback phenomenon termed decision dependence arises when the deployed decision affects the environment and alters the data-generating distribution. In the realm of performative prediction, this is encoded by distribution maps parameterized by decisions due to strategic behaviors. In contrast, we formalize an endogenous distribution shift as a feedback process featuring nonlinear dynamics that couple the evolving distribution with the decision. Stochastic optimization in this dynamic regime provides a fertile ground to examine the various roles played by dynamics in the composite problem structure. To this end, we develop an online algorithm that achieves optimal decision-making by both adapting to and shaping the dynamic distribution. Throughout the paper, we adopt a distributional perspective and demonstrate how this view facilitates characterizations of distribution dynamics and the optimality and generalization performance of the proposed algorithm. We showcase the theoretical results in an opinion dynamics context, where an opportunistic party maximizes the affinity of a dynamic polarized population, and in a recommender system scenario, featuring performance optimization with discrete distributions in the probability simplex.

With the rise of large language models (LLMs), AI agents as autonomous decision-makers present significant opportunities and challenges for human-AI cooperation. While many studies have explored human cooperation with AI as tools, the role of LLM-augmented autonomous agents in competitive-cooperative interactions remains under-examined. This study investigates human cooperative behavior by engaging 30 participants who interacted with LLM agents exhibiting different characteristics (purported human, purported rule-based AI agent, and LLM agent) in repeated Prisoner's Dilemma games. Findings show significant differences in cooperative behavior based on the agents' purported characteristics and the interaction effect of participants' genders and purported characteristics. We also analyzed human response patterns, including game completion time, proactive favorable behavior, and acceptance of repair efforts. These insights offer a new perspective on human interactions with LLM agents in competitive cooperation contexts, such as virtual avatars or future physical entities. The study underscores the importance of understanding human biases toward AI agents and how observed behaviors can influence future human-AI cooperation dynamics.

The key to robot-assisted rehabilitation lies in the design of the human-machine interface, which must accommodate the needs of both patients and machines. Current interface designs primarily focus on machine control algorithms, often requiring patients to spend considerable time adapting. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach based on the Cooperative Adaptive Markov Decision Process (CAMDPs) model to address the fundamental aspects of the interactive learning process, offering theoretical insights and practical guidance. We establish sufficient conditions for the convergence of CAMDPs and ensure the uniqueness of Nash equilibrium points. Leveraging these conditions, we guarantee the system's convergence to a unique Nash equilibrium point. Furthermore, we explore scenarios with multiple Nash equilibrium points, devising strategies to adjust both Value Evaluation and Policy Improvement algorithms to enhance the likelihood of converging to the global minimal Nash equilibrium point. Through numerical experiments, we illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed conditions and algorithms, demonstrating their applicability and robustness in practical settings. The proposed conditions for convergence and the identification of a unique optimal Nash equilibrium contribute to the development of more effective adaptive systems for human users in robot-assisted rehabilitation.

Trust plays a fundamental role in shaping the willingness of users to engage and collaborate with artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Yet, measuring user trust remains challenging due to its complex and dynamic nature. While traditional survey methods provide trust levels for long conversations, they fail to capture its dynamic evolution during ongoing interactions. Here, we present VizTrust, which addresses this challenge by introducing a real-time visual analytics tool that leverages a multi-agent collaboration system to capture and analyze user trust dynamics in human-agent communication. Built on established human-computer trust scales-competence, integrity, benevolence, and predictability-, VizTrust enables stakeholders to observe trust formation as it happens, identify patterns in trust development, and pinpoint specific interaction elements that influence trust. Our tool offers actionable insights into human-agent trust formation and evolution in real time through a dashboard, supporting the design of adaptive conversational agents that responds effectively to user trust signals.

Zero-shot human-AI coordination is the training of an ego-agent to coordinate with humans without using human data. Most studies on zero-shot human-AI coordination have focused on enhancing the ego-agent's coordination ability in a given environment without considering the issue of generalization to unseen environments. Real-world applications of zero-shot human-AI coordination should consider unpredictable environmental changes and the varying coordination ability of co-players depending on the environment. Previously, the multi-agent UED (Unsupervised Environment Design) approach has investigated these challenges by jointly considering environmental changes and co-player policy in competitive two-player AI-AI scenarios. In this paper, our study extends the multi-agent UED approach to a zero-shot human-AI coordination. We propose a utility function and co-player sampling for a zero-shot human-AI coordination setting that helps train the ego-agent to coordinate with humans more effectively than the previous multi-agent UED approach. The zero-shot human-AI coordination performance was evaluated in the Overcooked-AI environment, using human proxy agents and real humans. Our method outperforms other baseline models and achieves a high human-AI coordination performance in unseen environments.

Collaborative robotics cells leverage heterogeneous agents to provide agile production solutions. Effective coordination is essential to prevent inefficiencies and risks for human operators working alongside robots. This paper proposes a human-aware task allocation and scheduling model based on Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming to optimize efficiency and safety starting from task planning stages. The approach exploits synergies that encode the coupling effects between pairs of tasks executed in parallel by the agents, arising from the safety constraints imposed on robot agents. These terms are learned from previous executions using a Bayesian estimation; the inference of the posterior probability distribution of the synergy coefficients is performed using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. The synergy enhances task planning by adapting the nominal duration of the plan according to the effect of the operator's presence. Simulations and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method produces improved human-aware task plans, reducing unuseful interference between agents, increasing human-robot distance, and achieving up to an 18\% reduction in process execution time.

Long-form article generation (LFAG) presents challenges such as maintaining logical consistency, comprehensive topic coverage, and narrative coherence across extended articles. Existing datasets often lack both the hierarchical structure and fine-grained annotation needed to effectively decompose tasks, resulting in shallow, disorganized article generation. To address these limitations, we introduce DeFine, a Decomposed and Fine-grained annotated dataset for long-form article generation. DeFine is characterized by its hierarchical decomposition strategy and the integration of domain-specific knowledge with multi-level annotations, ensuring granular control and enhanced depth in article generation. To construct the dataset, a multi-agent collaborative pipeline is proposed, which systematically segments the generation process into four parts: Data Miner, Cite Retreiver, Q&A Annotator and Data Cleaner. To validate the effectiveness of DeFine, we designed and tested three LFAG baselines: the web retrieval, the local retrieval, and the grounded reference. We fine-tuned the Qwen2-7b-Instruct model using the DeFine training dataset. The experimental results showed significant improvements in text quality, specifically in topic coverage, depth of information, and content fidelity. Our dataset publicly available to facilitate future research.

Negotiation requires dynamically balancing self-interest and cooperation to maximize one's own utility. Yet, existing agents struggle due to bounded rationality in human data, low adaptability to counterpart behavior, and limited strategic reasoning. To address this, we introduce principle-driven negotiation agents, powered by ASTRA, a novel framework for turn-level offer optimization grounded in two core principles: opponent modeling and Tit-for-Tat reciprocity. ASTRA operates in three stages: (1) interpreting counterpart behavior, (2) optimizing counteroffers via a linear programming (LP) solver, and (3) selecting offers based on negotiation tactics and the partner's acceptance probability. Through simulations and human evaluations, our agent effectively adapts to an opponent's shifting stance and achieves favorable outcomes through enhanced adaptability and strategic reasoning. Beyond improving negotiation performance, it also serves as a powerful coaching tool, offering interpretable strategic feedback and optimal offer recommendations.

Despite significant progress in AI and decision-making technologies in safety-critical fields, challenges remain in verifying the correctness of decision output schemes and verification-result driven design. We propose correctness learning (CL) to enhance human-AI collaboration integrating deductive verification methods and insights from historical high-quality schemes. The typical pattern hidden in historical high-quality schemes, such as change of task priorities in shared resources, provides critical guidance for intelligent agents in learning and decision-making. By utilizing deductive verification methods, we proposed patten-driven correctness learning (PDCL), formally modeling and reasoning the adaptive behaviors-or 'correctness pattern'-of system agents based on historical high-quality schemes, capturing the logical relationships embedded within these schemes. Using this logical information as guidance, we establish a correctness judgment and feedback mechanism to steer the intelligent decision model toward the 'correctness pattern' reflected in historical high-quality schemes. Extensive experiments across multiple working conditions and core parameters validate the framework's components and demonstrate its effectiveness in improving decision-making and resource optimization.