The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities in Multi-Robot Systems (MRS), enabling enhanced communication, task planning, and human-robot interaction. Unlike traditional single-robot and multi-agent systems, MRS poses unique challenges, including coordination, scalability, and real-world adaptability. This survey provides the first comprehensive exploration of LLM integration into MRS. It systematically categorizes their applications across high-level task allocation, mid-level motion planning, low-level action generation, and human intervention. We highlight key applications in diverse domains, such as household robotics, construction, formation control, target tracking, and robot games, showcasing the versatility and transformative potential of LLMs in MRS. Furthermore, we examine the challenges that limit adapting LLMs in MRS, including mathematical reasoning limitations, hallucination, latency issues, and the need for robust benchmarking systems. Finally, we outline opportunities for future research, emphasizing advancements in fine-tuning, reasoning techniques, and task-specific models. This survey aims to guide researchers in the intelligence and real-world deployment of MRS powered by LLMs. Based on the fast-evolving nature of research in the field, we keep updating the papers in the open-source Github repository.

Humans learn from observations and experiences to adjust their behaviours towards better performance. Interacting with such dynamic humans is challenging, as the robot needs to predict the humans accurately for safe and efficient operations. Long-term interactions with dynamic humans have not been extensively studied by prior works. We propose an adaptive human prediction model based on the Theory-of-Mind (ToM), a fundamental social-cognitive ability that enables humans to infer others' behaviours and intentions. We formulate the human internal belief about others using a game-theoretic model, which predicts the future motions of all agents in a navigation scenario. To estimate an evolving belief, we use an Unscented Kalman Filter to update the behavioural parameters in the human internal model. Our formulation provides unique interpretability to dynamic human behaviours by inferring how the human predicts the robot. We demonstrate through long-term experiments in both simulations and real-world settings that our prediction effectively promotes safety and efficiency in downstream robot planning. Code will be available at https://github.com/centiLinda/AToM-human-prediction.git.

Vision systems in nature show remarkable diversity, from simple light-sensitive patches to complex camera eyes with lenses. While natural selection has produced these eyes through countless mutations over millions of years, they represent just one set of realized evolutionary paths. Testing hypotheses about how environmental pressures shaped eye evolution remains challenging since we cannot experimentally isolate individual factors. Computational evolution offers a way to systematically explore alternative trajectories. Here we show how environmental demands drive three fundamental aspects of visual evolution through an artificial evolution framework that co-evolves both physical eye structure and neural processing in embodied agents. First, we demonstrate computational evidence that task specific selection drives bifurcation in eye evolution - orientation tasks like navigation in a maze leads to distributed compound-type eyes while an object discrimination task leads to the emergence of high-acuity camera-type eyes. Second, we reveal how optical innovations like lenses naturally emerge to resolve fundamental tradeoffs between light collection and spatial precision. Third, we uncover systematic scaling laws between visual acuity and neural processing, showing how task complexity drives coordinated evolution of sensory and computational capabilities. Our work introduces a novel paradigm that illuminates evolutionary principles shaping vision by creating targeted single-player games where embodied agents must simultaneously evolve visual systems and learn complex behaviors. Through our unified genetic encoding framework, these embodied agents serve as next-generation hypothesis testing machines while providing a foundation for designing manufacturable bio-inspired vision systems. Website: http://eyes.mit.edu/

The rapid advancement of large models, driven by their exceptional abilities in learning and generalization through large-scale pre-training, has reshaped the landscape of Artificial Intelligence (AI). These models are now foundational to a wide range of applications, including conversational AI, recommendation systems, autonomous driving, content generation, medical diagnostics, and scientific discovery. However, their widespread deployment also exposes them to significant safety risks, raising concerns about robustness, reliability, and ethical implications. This survey provides a systematic review of current safety research on large models, covering Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Diffusion Models (DMs), and large-model-based Agents. Our contributions are summarized as follows: (1) We present a comprehensive taxonomy of safety threats to these models, including adversarial attacks, data poisoning, backdoor attacks, jailbreak and prompt injection attacks, energy-latency attacks, data and model extraction attacks, and emerging agent-specific threats. (2) We review defense strategies proposed for each type of attacks if available and summarize the commonly used datasets and benchmarks for safety research. (3) Building on this, we identify and discuss the open challenges in large model safety, emphasizing the need for comprehensive safety evaluations, scalable and effective defense mechanisms, and sustainable data practices. More importantly, we highlight the necessity of collective efforts from the research community and international collaboration. Our work can serve as a useful reference for researchers and practitioners, fostering the ongoing development of comprehensive defense systems and platforms to safeguard AI models.

Routers in networking use simple learning algorithms to find the best way to deliver packets to their desired destination. This simple, myopic and distributed decision system makes large queuing systems simple to operate, but at the same time, the system needs more capacity than would be required if all traffic were centrally coordinated. In a recent paper, Gaitonde and Tardos (EC 2020 and JACM 2023) initiate the study of such systems, modeling them as an infinitely repeated game in which routers compete for servers and the system maintains a state (number of packets held by each queue) resulting from outcomes of previous rounds. Queues get to send a packet at each step to one of the servers, and servers attempt to process only one of the arriving packets, modeling routers. However, their model assumes that servers have no buffers at all, so queues have to resend all packets that were not served successfully. They show that, even with hugely increased server capacity relative to what is needed in the centrally-coordinated case, ensuring that the system is stable requires using timestamps and priority for older packets. We consider a system with two important changes, which make the model more realistic: first we add a very small buffer to each server, allowing it to hold on to a single packet to be served later (even if it fails to serve it); and second, we do not require timestamps or priority for older packets. Our main result is to show that when queues are learning, a small constant factor increase in server capacity, compared to what would be needed if centrally coordinating, suffices to keep the system stable, even if servers select randomly among packets arriving simultaneously. This work contributes to the growing literature on the impact of selfish learning in systems with carryover effects between rounds: when outcomes in the present round affect the game in the future.

The authors propose a Fair-Efficient Network to better to train decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning systems in tasks that involve resource allocation. In particular they introduce a shaping reward and a hierarchical model which they train with PPO on three new reinforcement learning environments (the code of which is made available). Their model outperforms several baselines, and ablation studies demonstrate the usefulness of the hierarchical nature of the model. The aims of the work are clear and well-stated. However, there are significant omissions in the review of related literature.

Multi-robot systems are essential for environmental monitoring, particularly for tracking spatial phenomena like pollution, soil minerals, and water salinity, and more. This study addresses the challenge of deploying a multi-robot team for optimal coverage in environments where the density distribution, describing areas of interest, is unknown and changes over time. We propose a fully distributed control strategy that uses Gaussian Processes (GPs) to model the spatial field and balance the trade-off between learning the field and optimally covering it. Unlike existing approaches, we address a more realistic scenario by handling time-varying spatial fields, where the exploration-exploitation trade-off is dynamically adjusted over time. Each robot operates locally, using only its own collected data and the information shared by the neighboring robots. To address the computational limits of GPs, the algorithm efficiently manages the volume of data by selecting only the most relevant samples for the process estimation. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated through several simulations and experiments, incorporating real-world data phenomena to validate its effectiveness.

We study a fundamental challenge in the economics of innovation: an inventor must reveal details of a new idea to secure compensation or funding, yet such disclosure risks expropriation. We present a model in which a seller (inventor) and buyer (investor) bargain over an information good under the threat of hold-up. In the classical setting, the seller withholds disclosure to avoid misappropriation, leading to inefficiency. We show that trusted execution environments (TEEs) combined with AI agents can mitigate and even fully eliminate this hold-up problem. By delegating the disclosure and payment decisions to tamper-proof programs, the seller can safely reveal the invention without risking expropriation, achieving full disclosure and an efficient ex post transfer. Moreover, even if the invention's value exceeds a threshold that TEEs can fully secure, partial disclosure still improves outcomes compared to no disclosure. Recognizing that real AI agents are imperfect, we model "agent errors" in payments or disclosures and demonstrate that budget caps and acceptance thresholds suffice to preserve most of the efficiency gains. Our results imply that cryptographic or hardware-based solutions can function as an "ironclad NDA," substantially mitigating the fundamental disclosure-appropriation paradox first identified by Arrow (1962) and Nelson (1959). This has far-reaching policy implications for fostering R&D, technology transfer, and collaboration.

We study a novel heterogeneous multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem with a cluster structure induced by stochastic block models, influencing not only graph topology, but also reward heterogeneity. Specifically, agents are distributed on random graphs based on stochastic block models - a generalized Erdos-Renyi model with heterogeneous edge probabilities: agents are grouped into clusters (known or unknown); edge probabilities for agents within the same cluster differ from those across clusters. In addition, the cluster structure in stochastic block model also determines our heterogeneous rewards. Rewards distributions of the same arm vary across agents in different clusters but remain consistent within a cluster, unifying homogeneous and heterogeneous settings and varying degree of heterogeneity, and rewards are independent samples from these distributions. The objective is to minimize system-wide regret across all agents. To address this, we propose a novel algorithm applicable to both known and unknown cluster settings. The algorithm combines an averaging-based consensus approach with a newly introduced information aggregation and weighting technique, resulting in a UCB-type strategy. It accounts for graph randomness, leverages both intra-cluster (homogeneous) and inter-cluster (heterogeneous) information from rewards and graphs, and incorporates cluster detection for unknown cluster settings. We derive optimal instance-dependent regret upper bounds of order $\log{T}$ under sub-Gaussian rewards. Importantly, our regret bounds capture the degree of heterogeneity in the system (an additional layer of complexity), exhibit smaller constants, scale better for large systems, and impose significantly relaxed assumptions on edge probabilities. In contrast, prior works have not accounted for this refined problem complexity, rely on more stringent assumptions, and exhibit limited scalability.

Emergent Communication (EC) provides a unique window into the language systems that emerge autonomously when agents are trained to jointly achieve shared goals. However, it is difficult to interpret EC and evaluate its relationship with natural languages (NL). This study employs unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) techniques to decipher ECs formed during referential games with varying task complexities, influenced by the semantic diversity of the environment. Our findings demonstrate UNMT's potential to translate EC, illustrating that task complexity characterized by semantic diversity enhances EC translatability, while higher task complexity with constrained semantic variability exhibits pragmatic EC, which, although challenging to interpret, remains suitable for translation. This research marks the first attempt, to our knowledge, to translate EC without the aid of parallel data.