Motor skill learning often requires experienced professionals who can provide personalized instruction. Unfortunately, the availability of high-quality training can be limited for specialized tasks, such as high performance racing. Several recent works have leveraged AI-assistance to improve instruction of tasks ranging from rehabilitation to surgical robot tele-operation. However, these works often make simplifying assumptions on the student learning process, and fail to model how a teacher's assistance interacts with different individuals' abilities when determining optimal teaching strategies. Inspired by the idea of scaffolding from educational psychology, we leverage shared autonomy, a framework for combining user inputs with robot autonomy, to aid with curriculum design. Our key insight is that the way a student's behavior improves in the presence of assistance from an autonomous agent can highlight which sub-skills might be most ``learnable'' for the student, or within their Zone of Proximal Development. We use this to design Z-COACH, a method for using shared autonomy to provide personalized instruction targeting interpretable task sub-skills. In a user study (n=50), where we teach high performance racing in a simulated environment of the Thunderhill Raceway Park with the CARLA Autonomous Driving simulator, we show that Z-COACH helps identify which skills each student should first practice, leading to an overall improvement in driving time, behavior, and smoothness. Our work shows that increasingly available semi-autonomous capabilities (e.g. in vehicles, robots) can not only assist human users, but also help *teach* them.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has demonstrated potential in addressing robotic local planning problems, yet its efficacy remains constrained in highly unstructured and dynamic environments. To address these challenges, this study proposes the ColorDynamic framework. First, an end-to-end DRL formulation is established, which maps raw sensor data directly to control commands, thereby ensuring compatibility with unstructured environments. Under this formulation, a novel network, Transqer, is introduced. The Transqer enables online DRL learning from temporal transitions, substantially enhancing decision-making in dynamic scenarios. To facilitate scalable training of Transqer with diverse data, an efficient simulation platform E-Sparrow, along with a data augmentation technique leveraging symmetric invariance, are developed. Comparative evaluations against state-of-the-art methods, alongside assessments of generalizability, scalability, and real-time performance, were conducted to validate the effectiveness of ColorDynamic. Results indicate that our approach achieves a success rate exceeding 90% while exhibiting real-time capacity (1.2-1.3 ms per planning). Additionally, ablation studies were performed to corroborate the contributions of individual components. Building on this, the OkayPlan-ColorDynamic (OPCD) navigation system is presented, with simulated and real-world experiments demonstrating its superiority and applicability in complex scenarios. The codebase and experimental demonstrations have been open-sourced on our website to facilitate reproducibility and further research.

Mental health issues are worsening in today's competitive society, such as depression and anxiety. Traditional healings like counseling and chatbots fail to engage effectively, they often provide generic responses lacking emotional depth. Although large language models (LLMs) have the potential to create more human-like interactions, they still struggle to capture subtle emotions. This requires LLMs to be equipped with human-like adaptability and warmth. To fill this gap, we propose the MIND (Multi-agent INner Dialogue), a novel paradigm that provides more immersive psychological healing environments. Considering the strong generative and role-playing ability of LLM agents, we predefine an interactive healing framework and assign LLM agents different roles within the framework to engage in interactive inner dialogues with users, thereby providing an immersive healing experience. We conduct extensive human experiments in various real-world healing dimensions, and find that MIND provides a more user-friendly experience than traditional paradigms. This demonstrates that MIND effectively leverages the significant potential of LLMs in psychological healing.

The convergence of the gossip process has been extensively studied; however, algorithms that generate a set of stochastic matrices, the infinite product of which converges to a rank-one matrix determined by a given weight vector, have been less explored. In this work, we propose an algorithm for constructing (local) stochastic matrices based on a given gossip network topology and a set of weights for averaging across different consensus clusters, ensuring that the gossip process converges to a finite limit set.

Simulation agents are essential for designing and testing systems that interact with humans, such as autonomous vehicles (AVs). These agents serve various purposes, from benchmarking AV performance to stress-testing system limits, but all applications share one key requirement: reliability. To enable systematic experimentation, a simulation agent must behave as intended. It should minimize actions that may lead to undesired outcomes, such as collisions, which can distort the signal-to-noise ratio in analyses. As a foundation for reliable sim agents, we propose scaling self-play to thousands of scenarios on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset under semi-realistic limits on human perception and control. Training from scratch on a single GPU, our agents nearly solve the full training set within a day. They generalize effectively to unseen test scenes, achieving a 99.8% goal completion rate with less than 0.8% combined collision and off-road incidents across 10,000 held-out scenarios. Beyond in-distribution generalization, our agents show partial robustness to out-of-distribution scenes and can be fine-tuned in minutes to reach near-perfect performance in those cases. We open-source the pre-trained agents and integrate them with a batched multi-agent simulator. Demonstrations of agent behaviors can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/reliable-sim-agents.

This paper addresses the problem of satellite inspection, where one or more satellites (inspectors) are tasked with imaging or inspecting a resident space object (RSO) due to potential malfunctions or anomalies. Inspection strategies are often reduced to a discretized action space with predefined waypoints, facilitating tractability in both classical optimization and machine learning based approaches. However, this discretization can lead to suboptimal guidance in certain scenarios. This study presents a comparative simulation to explore the tradeoffs of passive versus active strategies in multi-agent missions. Key factors considered include RSO dynamic mode, state uncertainty, unmodeled entrance criteria, and inspector motion types. The evaluation is conducted with a focus on fuel utilization and surface coverage. Building on a Monte-Carlo based evaluator of passive strategies and a reinforcement learning framework for training active inspection policies, this study investigates conditions under which passive strategies, such as Natural Motion Circumnavigation (NMC), may perform comparably to active strategies like Reinforcement Learning based waypoint transfers.

Much of the success of multi-agent debates depends on carefully choosing the right parameters. Among them, the decision-making protocol stands out. Systematic comparison of decision protocols is difficult because studies alter multiple discussion parameters beyond the protocol. So far, it has been largely unknown how decision-making addresses the challenges of different tasks. This work systematically evaluates the impact of seven decision protocols (e.g., majority voting, unanimity consensus). We change only one variable at a time (i.e., decision protocol) to analyze how different methods affect the collaboration between agents and test different protocols on knowledge (MMLU, MMLU-Pro, GPQA) and reasoning datasets (StrategyQA, MuSR, SQuAD 2.0). Our results show that voting protocols improve performance by 13.2% in reasoning tasks and consensus protocols by 2.8% in knowledge tasks over the other decision protocol. Increasing the number of agents improves performance, while more discussion rounds before voting reduces it. To improve decision-making by increasing answer diversity, we propose two new methods, All-Agents Drafting (AAD) and Collective Improvement (CI). Our methods improve task performance by up to 3.3% with AAD and up to 7.4% with CI. This work demonstrates the importance of decision-making in multi-agent debates beyond scaling.

Autonomous graphical user interface (GUI) agents powered by multimodal large language models have shown great promise. However, a critical yet underexplored issue persists: over-execution, where the agent executes tasks in a fully autonomous way, without adequate assessment of its action confidence to compromise an adaptive human-agent collaboration. This poses substantial risks in complex scenarios, such as those involving ambiguous user instructions, unexpected interruptions, and environmental hijacks. To address the issue, we introduce OS-Kairos, an adaptive GUI agent capable of predicting confidence levels at each interaction step and efficiently deciding whether to act autonomously or seek human intervention. OS-Kairos is developed through two key mechanisms: (i) collaborative probing that annotates confidence scores at each interaction step; (ii) confidence-driven interaction that leverages these confidence scores to elicit the ability of adaptive interaction. Experimental results show that OS-Kairos substantially outperforms existing models on our curated dataset featuring complex scenarios, as well as on established benchmarks such as AITZ and Meta-GUI, with 24.59\%$\sim$87.29\% improvements in task success rate. OS-Kairos facilitates an adaptive human-agent collaboration, prioritizing effectiveness, generality, scalability, and efficiency for real-world GUI interaction. The dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/Wuzheng02/OS-Kairos.

The design and deployment of autonomous systems for space missions require robust solutions to navigate strict reliability constraints, extended operational duration, and communication challenges. This study evaluates the stability and performance of a hierarchical deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework designed for multi-agent satellite inspection tasks. The proposed framework integrates a high-level guidance policy with a low-level motion controller, enabling scalable task allocation and efficient trajectory execution. Experiments conducted on the Local Intelligent Network of Collaborative Satellites (LINCS) testbed assess the framework's performance under varying levels of fidelity, from simulated environments to a cyber-physical testbed. Key metrics, including task completion rate, distance traveled, and fuel consumption, highlight the framework's robustness and adaptability despite real-world uncertainties such as sensor noise, dynamic perturbations, and runtime assurance (RTA) constraints. The results demonstrate that the hierarchical controller effectively bridges the sim-to-real gap, maintaining high task completion rates while adapting to the complexities of real-world environments. These findings validate the framework's potential for enabling autonomous satellite operations in future space missions.

We study the performance of the linear consensus algorithm on strongly connected graphs using the linear quadratic (LQ) cost as a performance measure. In particular, we derive bounds on the LQ cost by leveraging effective resistance. Our results extend previous analyses -- which were limited to reversible cases -- to the nonreversible setting. To facilitate this generalization, we introduce novel concepts, termed the back-and-forth path and the pivot node, which serve as effective alternatives to traditional techniques that require reversibility. Moreover, we apply our approach to geometric graphs to estimate the LQ cost without the reversibility assumption. The proposed approach provides a framework that can be adapted to other contexts where reversibility is typically assumed.