Agents
The Application of MATEC (Multi-AI Agent Team Care) Framework in Sepsis Care
Cho, Andrew, Woo, Jason M., Shi, Brian, Udeshi, Aishwaryaa, Woo, Jonathan S. H.
Under-resourced or rural hospitals have limited access to medical specialists and healthcare professionals, which can negatively impact patient outcomes in sepsis. To address this gap, we developed the MATEC (Multi-AI Agent Team Care) framework, which integrates a team of specialized AI agents for sepsis care. The sepsis AI agent team includes five doctor agents, four health professional agents, and a risk prediction model agent, with an additional 33 doctor agents available for consultations. Ten attending physicians at a teaching hospital evaluated this framework, spending approximately 40 minutes on the web-based MATEC application and participating in the 5-point Likert scale survey (rated from 1-unfavorable to 5-favorable). The physicians found the MATEC framework very useful (Median=4, P=0.01), and very accurate (Median=4, P<0.01). This pilot study demonstrates that a Multi-AI Agent Team Care framework (MATEC) can potentially be useful in assisting medical professionals, particularly in under-resourced hospital settings.
Review for NeurIPS paper: Multi-agent Trajectory Prediction with Fuzzy Query Attention
Weaknesses: The experiments have been extensive, however I have following three crucial questions to better understand the performance boost arising from the overall architecture: 1. Improvement arising from interaction module or motion module? Taking Social LSTM [1] to be an interaction-based baseline, the proposed architecture has two different components: the interaction and motion modules. Is the boost coming from the interaction module which is FQA in comparison to Social Pooling [1]? Or is it the new motion module? An ablation study showing the performance while keeping the motion module the same as the baseline will help answer this question. The authors use the term Fuzzy to describe continuous-valued decisions over their discrete-valued boolean counterparts.
Review for NeurIPS paper: Learning Individually Inferred Communication for Multi-Agent Cooperation
Summary and Contributions: This paper introduces I2C, a multi-agent communication architecture for cooperative tasks wherein each agent decides who to receive messages from. This is unlike prior work in multi-agent communication that has primarily focused on broadcast-style communication -- one/all agents sending messages to all other agents. The motivation is to reduce redundant communication (which might ease learning) and make the overall setup more practically realizable. I2C consists of a "prior network", which takes as input agent i's observation and predicts a probability distribution of which other agents to receive messages from. This prior network is trained with supervised learning to minimize the KL divergence between probability of the agent's action given the actions of agents other than i and probability of the agent's action given actions of agents other than i and j; the idea being that the prior network should enable communication only from those agents who might have a strong influence on agent i's action.
Review for NeurIPS paper: Learning Individually Inferred Communication for Multi-Agent Cooperation
All reviewers support acceptance of this paper, and I would also like to recommend acceptance. All reviewers point that this is an interesting a novel approach to learning who to communicate to in a multi-agent setup, which is both interesting from a research perspective but also useful in practical applications of multi-agent communication. Moreover, this paper is well executed, with clear statements supported by sufficient experiments and baselines. Finally, R1 and R2 have expressed concerns regarding the low performance of IC3Net and TarMAC. Authors have provided an explanation in the author response with some more experiments with regards to team vs individual rewards.
Review for NeurIPS paper: Contextual Games: Multi-Agent Learning with Side Information
Weaknesses: From a technical point of view, the result is an incremental enhancement of [32], and follows by connecting known results. As such, the significance of the paper relies on the originality and usefulness of the novel framework of contextual games. This is by itself of course fine, since impact and usefulness are possibly the most important aspects anyway. The main weakness of this paper is that the usefulness and motivation of the results are a bit vague. The reason is that it's not clear why would selfish players follow the proposed algorithm.
Using agent-based models and EXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) to simulate social behaviors and policy intervention scenarios: A case study of private well users in Ireland
Asghar, Rabia, Mooney, Simon, Neill, Eoin O, Hynds, Paul
Around 50 percent of Irelands rural population relies on unregulated private wells vulnerable to agricultural runoff and untreated wastewater. High national rates of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) and other waterborne illnesses have been linked to well water exposure. Periodic well testing is essential for public health, yet the lack of government incentives places the financial burden on households. Understanding environmental, cognitive, and material factors influencing well-testing behavior is critical. This study employs Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) to simulate policy interventions based on national survey data. The ABM framework, designed for private well-testing behavior, integrates a Deep Q-network reinforcement learning model and Explainable AI (XAI) for decision-making insights. Key features were selected using Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) with 10-fold cross-validation, while SHAP (Shapley Additive Explanations) provided further interpretability for policy recommendations. Fourteen policy scenarios were tested. The most effective, Free Well Testing plus Communication Campaign, increased participation to 435 out of 561 agents, from a baseline of approximately 5 percent, with rapid behavioral adaptation. Free Well Testing plus Regulation also performed well, with 433 out of 561 agents initiating well testing. Free testing alone raised participation to over 75 percent, with some agents testing multiple times annually. Scenarios with free well testing achieved faster learning efficiency, converging in 1000 episodes, while others took 2000 episodes, indicating slower adaptation. This research demonstrates the value of ABM and XAI in public health policy, providing a framework for evaluating behavioral interventions in environmental health.
Multi-Agent Simulator Drives Language Models for Legal Intensive Interaction
Yue, Shengbin, Huang, Ting, Jia, Zheng, Wang, Siyuan, Liu, Shujun, Song, Yun, Huang, Xuanjing, Wei, Zhongyu
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced legal intelligence, but the scarcity of scenario data impedes the progress toward interactive legal scenarios. This paper introduces a Multi-agent Legal Simulation Driver (MASER) to scalably generate synthetic data by simulating interactive legal scenarios. Leveraging real-legal case sources, MASER ensures the consistency of legal attributes between participants and introduces a supervisory mechanism to align participants' characters and behaviors as well as addressing distractions. A Multi-stage Interactive Legal Evaluation (MILE) benchmark is further constructed to evaluate LLMs' performance in dynamic legal scenarios. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of our framework.
Improving Environment Novelty Quantification for Effective Unsupervised Environment Design
Teoh, Jayden, Li, Wenjun, Varakantham, Pradeep
Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) formalizes the problem of autocurricula through interactive training between a teacher agent and a student agent. The teacher generates new training environments with high learning potential, curating an adaptive curriculum that strengthens the student's ability to handle unseen scenarios. Existing UED methods mainly rely on regret, a metric that measures the difference between the agent's optimal and actual performance, to guide curriculum design. Regret-driven methods generate curricula that progressively increase environment complexity for the student but overlook environment novelty -- a critical element for enhancing an agent's generalizability. Measuring environment novelty is especially challenging due to the underspecified nature of environment parameters in UED, and existing approaches face significant limitations. To address this, this paper introduces the Coverage-based Evaluation of Novelty In Environment (CENIE) framework. CENIE proposes a scalable, domain-agnostic, and curriculum-aware approach to quantifying environment novelty by leveraging the student's state-action space coverage from previous curriculum experiences. We then propose an implementation of CENIE that models this coverage and measures environment novelty using Gaussian Mixture Models. By integrating both regret and novelty as complementary objectives for curriculum design, CENIE facilitates effective exploration across the state-action space while progressively increasing curriculum complexity. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that augmenting existing regret-based UED algorithms with CENIE achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, underscoring the effectiveness of novelty-driven autocurricula for robust generalization.