Predicting the near-term behavior of a reactive agent is crucial in many robotic scenarios, yet remains challenging when observations of that agent are sparse or intermittent. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer a promising avenue by integrating textual domain knowledge with visual cues, but their one-shot predictions often miss important edge cases and unusual maneuvers. Our key insight is that iterative, counterfactual exploration--where a dedicated module probes each proposed behavior hypothesis, explicitly represented as a plausible trajectory, for overlooked possibilities--can significantly enhance VLM-based behavioral forecasting. We present TRACE (Tree-of-thought Reasoning And Counterfactual Exploration), an inference framework that couples tree-of-thought generation with domain-aware feedback to refine behavior hypotheses over multiple rounds. Concretely, a VLM first proposes candidate trajectories for the agent; a counterfactual critic then suggests edge-case variations consistent with partial observations, prompting the VLM to expand or adjust its hypotheses in the next iteration. This creates a self-improving cycle where the VLM progressively internalizes edge cases from previous rounds, systematically uncovering not only typical behaviors but also rare or borderline maneuvers, ultimately yielding more robust trajectory predictions from minimal sensor data. We validate TRACE on both ground-vehicle simulations and real-world marine autonomous surface vehicles. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms standard VLM-driven and purely model-based baselines, capturing a broader range of feasible agent behaviors despite sparse sensing. Evaluation videos and code are available at trace-robotics.github.io.

--This paper introduces the Emirates Multi-T ask (EMT) dataset - the first publicly available dataset for autonomous driving collected in the Arab Gulf region. It contains over 30,000 frames from a dash-camera perspective, along with 570,000 annotated bounding boxes, covering approximately 150 kilometers of driving routes. The EMT dataset supports three primary tasks: tracking, trajectory forecasting and intention prediction. Each benchmark dataset is complemented with corresponding evaluations: (1) multi-agent tracking experiments, focusing on multi-class scenarios and occlusion handling; (2) trajectory forecasting evaluation using deep sequential and interaction-aware models; and (3) intention benchmark experiments conducted for predicting agents' intentions from observed trajectories. The dataset is publicly available at avlab.io/emt-dataset, and pre-processing scripts along with evaluation models can be accessed at github.com/A S autonomous driving technology advances, the ability of data-driven models to generalize across diverse road environments and conditions is essential for safe operation, but remains a significant challenge. To achieve robust generalization, it is critical to train models on datasets that capture a wide range of traffic scenes and characteristics. Current autonomous driving datasets provide extensive coverage of regions like the USA [1-5], Europe [6, 7], and parts of Asia, including China and Singapore [1, 8]. However, the Arab Gulf region, with its unique driving conditions, remains underrepresented. To address this gap, we introduce the Emirates Multi-Task (EMT) dataset, collected in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to capture the region's distinct traffic conditions. This region offers diverse driving challenges due to its range of road layouts, including expansive highways, urban areas, and complex city junctions. Additionally, driving behavior in the UAE reflects a blend of modern regulations and traditional practices. This work was supported by Khalifa University of Science and Technology under A ward No. RIG-2023-117. The annotated dataset supports multiple benchmarks, including tracking, trajectory prediction, and intention prediction, aimed at advancing models robustness in complex driving environments. The tracking benchmark dataset is designed to evaluate the ability of algorithms to accurately identify and maintain consistent object tracking over time in a complex driving environment. Similar to current state-of-the-art (SOT A) tracking benchmarks [1, 9, 10], it focuses on the motion of vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, and motorbikes, captured from a frontal camera perspective. The benchmark is designed to test tracking models under varying levels of traffic congestion and frequent lane changes. The dataset contains 8,806 unique tracking IDs, including 8,076 vehicles, 568 pedestrians, 158 motorbikes and 14 cyclists, and with a mean tracking duration of 6.5 seconds.

Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) are a ubiquitous modeling framework that finds applications in physics, biology, engineering, social science, and finance. Due to the availability of large-scale data sets, there is growing interest in learning mechanistic models from observations with stochastic noise. In this work, we present a nonparametric framework to learn both the drift and diffusion terms in systems of SDEs where the stochastic noise is singular. Specifically, inspired by second-order equations from classical physics, we consider systems which possess structured noise, i.e. noise with a singular covariance matrix. We provide an algorithm for constructing estimators given trajectory data and demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods via a number of examples from physics and biology. As the developed framework is most naturally applicable to systems possessing a high degree of dimensionality reduction (i.e. symmetry), we also apply it to the high dimensional Cucker-Smale flocking model studied in collective dynamics and show that it is able to accurately infer the low dimensional interaction kernel from particle data.

The AAAI 2025 outstanding paper awards were announced during the opening ceremony of the 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence on Thursday 27 February. Papers are recommended for consideration during the review process by members of the Program Committee. This year, three papers have been selected as outstanding papers, with a further paper being recognised in the special track on AI for social impact. Abstract: A fundamental task in multi-agent systems is to match agents to alternatives (e.g., resources or tasks). Often, this is accomplished by eliciting agents' ordinal rankings over the alternatives instead of their exact numerical utilities.

Personalized opinion summarization is crucial as it considers individual user interests while generating product summaries. Recent studies show that although large language models demonstrate powerful text summarization and evaluation capabilities without the need for training data, they face difficulties in personalized tasks involving long texts. To address this, \textbf{Rehearsal}, a personalized opinion summarization framework via LLMs-based role-playing is proposed. Having the model act as the user, the model can better understand the user's personalized needs. Additionally, a role-playing supervisor and practice process are introduced to improve the role-playing ability of the LLMs, leading to a better expression of user needs. Furthermore, through suggestions from virtual users, the summary generation is intervened, ensuring that the generated summary includes information of interest to the user, thus achieving personalized summary generation. Experiment results demonstrate that our method can effectively improve the level of personalization in large model-generated summaries.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in the hierarchical decomposition of complex tasks through semantic reasoning. However, their application in embodied systems faces challenges in ensuring reliable execution of subtask sequences and achieving one-shot success in long-term task completion. To address these limitations in dynamic environments, we propose Closed-Loop Embodied Agent (CLEA) -- a novel architecture incorporating four specialized open-source LLMs with functional decoupling for closed-loop task management. The framework features two core innovations: (1) Interactive task planner that dynamically generates executable subtasks based on the environmental memory, and (2) Multimodal execution critic employing an evaluation framework to conduct a probabilistic assessment of action feasibility, triggering hierarchical re-planning mechanisms when environmental perturbations exceed preset thresholds. To validate CLEA's effectiveness, we conduct experiments in a real environment with manipulable objects, using two heterogeneous robots for object search, manipulation, and search-manipulation integration tasks. Across 12 task trials, CLEA outperforms the baseline model, achieving a 67.3% improvement in success rate and a 52.8% increase in task completion rate. These results demonstrate that CLEA significantly enhances the robustness of task planning and execution in dynamic environments.

Multi-Agent Pathfinding (MAPF) is a core challenge in multi-agent systems. Existing learning-based MAPF methods often struggle with scalability, particularly when addressing complex scenarios that are prone to deadlocks. To address these challenges, we introduce LLMDR (LLM-Driven Deadlock Detection and Resolution), an approach designed to resolve deadlocks and improve the performance of learnt MAPF models. LLMDR integrates the inference capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with learnt MAPF models and prioritized planning, enabling it to detect deadlocks and provide customized resolution strategies. We evaluate LLMDR on standard MAPF benchmark maps with varying agent numbers, measuring its performance when combined with several base models. The results demonstrate that LLMDR improves the performance of learnt MAPF models, particularly in deadlock-prone scenarios, with notable improvements in success rates. These findings show the potential of integrating LLMs to improve the scalability of learning-based MAPF methods. The source code for LLMDR is available at: https://github.com/ssbacc/llmdr-dhc

Mass casualty incidents (MCIs) are a growing concern, characterized by complexity and uncertainty that demand adaptive decision-making strategies. The victim tagging step in the emergency medical response must be completed quickly and is crucial for providing information to guide subsequent time-constrained response actions. In this paper, we present a mathematical formulation of multi-agent victim tagging to minimize the time it takes for responders to tag all victims. Five distributed heuristics are formulated and evaluated with simulation experiments. The heuristics considered are on-the go, practical solutions that represent varying levels of situational uncertainty in the form of global or local communication capabilities, showcasing practical constraints. We further investigate the performance of a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) strategy, factorized deep Q-network (FDQN), to minimize victim tagging time as compared to baseline heuristics. Extensive simulations demonstrate that between the heuristics, methods with local communication are more efficient for adaptive victim tagging, specifically choosing the nearest victim with the option to replan. Analyzing all experiments, we find that our FDQN approach outperforms heuristics in smaller-scale scenarios, while heuristics excel in more complex scenarios. Our experiments contain diverse complexities that explore the upper limits of MARL capabilities for real-world applications and reveal key insights.

Existing Existing automatic audio generation methods struggle to generate podcast-like audio programs effectively. The key challenges lie in in-depth content generation, appropriate and expressive voice production. This paper proposed PodAgent, a comprehensive framework for creating audio programs. PodAgent 1) generates informative topic-discussion content by designing a Host-Guest-Writer multi-agent collaboration system, 2) builds a voice pool for suitable voice-role matching and 3) utilizes LLM-enhanced speech synthesis method to generate expressive conversational speech. Given the absence of standardized evaluation criteria for podcast-like audio generation, we developed comprehensive assessment guidelines to effectively evaluate the model's performance. Experimental results demonstrate PodAgent's effectiveness, significantly surpassing direct GPT-4 generation in topic-discussion dialogue content, achieving an 87.4% voice-matching accuracy, and producing more expressive speech through LLM-guided synthesis. Demo page: https://podcast-agent.github.io/demo/. Source code: https://github.com/yujxx/PodAgent.

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), agents typically form a single grand coalition based on credit assignment to tackle a composite task, often resulting in suboptimal performance. This paper proposed a nucleolus-based credit assignment grounded in cooperative game theory, enabling the autonomous partitioning of agents into multiple small coalitions that can effectively identify and complete subtasks within a larger composite task. Specifically, our designed nucleolus Q-learning could assign fair credits to each agent, and the nucleolus Q-operator provides theoretical guarantees with interpretability for both learning convergence and the stability of the formed small coalitions. Through experiments on Predator-Prey and StarCraft scenarios across varying difficulty levels, our approach demonstrated the emergence of multiple effective coalitions during MARL training, leading to faster learning and superior performance in terms of win rate and cumulative rewards especially in hard and super-hard environments, compared to four baseline methods. Our nucleolus-based credit assignment showed the promise for complex composite tasks requiring effective subteams of agents.