Agents
Review for NeurIPS paper: Multi-agent active perception with prediction rewards
Weaknesses: The paper is well written and easy to follow. The problem is active perception is also interesting. There are a few areas where more clarification is needed as pointed below: -- The authors have highlighted a number of previous models for the problem of active perception such as Dec-\rhoPOMDP, POMDP-IR etc. Given the focus on converting this problem to a decentralized framework, it is not clearly conveyed why decentralizing the problem is significant? There are hints available in the paper such as less communication overhead, but there is no empirical evidence presented towards justifying decentralized approaches over such previous approaches (e.g., how much communication overhead is reduced) -- The technical approach presented by the authors is elegant and simple, but it is essentially a heuristic approach. The bound provided in theorem 1 would seem to be loose in the worst case (and its values in experiments is not shown).
Review for NeurIPS paper: Multi-agent active perception with prediction rewards
This paper addresses the problem of multiagent active perception, a somewhat nascent area, and proposes a new reformulation of Dec-rho-POMDPs into a DEC-POMDP though the addition of a final-stage "predictive action." The reviewers appreciated the novelty of this contribution as well as the theoretical analysis/loss bounds. The original reviews raised a number of questions however, and the author response addressed many of these. However, there remain some issues that undercut the significance of the contribution, including: the somewhat incremental combination/adaptation of existing techniques; the fact that the claimed scalability is not demonstrated very convincingly in the experiments; among others. On my reading of the paper, I largely concur and do not reiterate the positive contributions in the other reviews, but point out some concerns about importance/impact: 1.
Review for NeurIPS paper: Neurosymbolic Transformers for Multi-Agent Communication
Weaknesses: - The method relies on each agent having observations of other agents (o {i,j}). This seems like a very strong assumption, given that the motivation for this work was to lower the communication bandwidth necessary. The authors should comment on how this requirement could be weakened to allow scaling to more complex environments. The "loss" in Figure 2 is not clearly defined, and it would be much clearer to use "reward" as the y-axis in these Figures. The overlapping error bars in many of the results call into question the significance of the findings.
Review for NeurIPS paper: Neurosymbolic Transformers for Multi-Agent Communication
The paper proposes an approach for inferring the communication graph in multi-agent systems. It combines a gradient-based optimization with a discretization or "hardening" step. The method addresses a relevant problem, is reasonably well explained, and produces promising empirical results. In their initial reviews the reviewers expressed a number of concerns, these were, however, addressed at least in parts by the author response, and ultimately all reviewers recommend acceptance. One remaining caveat is the experimental evaluation which could be strengthened, e.g. by demonstrating that the approach works across a broader range of problems. Furthermore, the authors are strongly encouraged to incorporate the clarifications provided to the reviewers as part of the author response.
Making Sense of Data in the Wild: Data Analysis Automation at Scale
Graziani, Mara, Molnar, Malina, Morales, Irina Espejo, Cadow-Gossweiler, Joris, Laino, Teodoro
As the volume of publicly available data continues to grow, researchers face the challenge of limited diversity in benchmarking machine learning tasks. Although thousands of datasets are available in public repositories, the sheer abundance often complicates the search for suitable data, leaving many valuable datasets underexplored. This situation is further amplified by the fact that, despite longstanding advocacy for improving data curation quality, current solutions remain prohibitively time-consuming and resource-intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that combines intelligent agents with retrieval augmented generation to automate data analysis, dataset curation and indexing at scale. Our system leverages multiple agents to analyze raw, unstructured data across public repositories, generating dataset reports and interactive visual indexes that can be easily explored. We demonstrate that our approach results in more detailed dataset descriptions, higher hit rates and greater diversity in dataset retrieval tasks. Additionally, we show that the dataset reports generated by our method can be leveraged by other machine learning models to improve the performance on specific tasks, such as improving the accuracy and realism of synthetic data generation. By streamlining the process of transforming raw data into machine-learning-ready datasets, our approach enables researchers to better utilize existing data resources.
Can summarization approximate simplification? A gold standard comparison
Magnifico, Giacomo, Barbu, Eduard
This study explores the overlap between text summarization and simplification outputs. While summarization evaluation methods are streamlined, simplification lacks cohesion, prompting the question: how closely can abstractive summarization resemble gold-standard simplification? We address this by applying two BART-based BRIO summarization methods to the Newsela corpus, comparing outputs with manually annotated simplifications and achieving a top ROUGE-L score of 0.654. This provides insight into where summarization and simplification outputs converge and differ.
Adaptive AI-based Decentralized Resource Management in the Cloud-Edge Continuum
Li, Lanpei, Bell, Jack, Coppola, Massimo, Lomonaco, Vincenzo
The increasing complexity of application requirements and the dynamic nature of the Cloud-Edge Continuum present significant challenges for efficient resource management. These challenges stem from the ever-changing infrastructure, which is characterized by additions, removals, and reconfigurations of nodes and links, as well as the variability of application workloads. Traditional centralized approaches struggle to adapt to these changes due to their static nature, while decentralized solutions face challenges such as limited global visibility and coordination overhead. This paper proposes a hybrid decentralized framework for dynamic application placement and resource management. The framework utilizes Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to embed resource and application states, enabling comprehensive representation and efficient decision-making. It employs a collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach, where local agents optimize resource management in their neighborhoods and a global orchestrator ensures system-wide coordination. By combining decentralized application placement with centralized oversight, our framework addresses the scalability, adaptability, and accuracy challenges inherent in the Cloud-Edge Continuum. This work contributes to the development of decentralized application placement strategies, the integration of GNN embeddings, and collaborative MARL systems, providing a foundation for efficient, adaptive and scalable resource management.
Multi-Agent Meta-Offline Reinforcement Learning for Timely UAV Path Planning and Data Collection
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been widely adopted in high-performance computing and complex data-driven decision-making in the wireless domain. However, conventional MARL schemes face many obstacles in real-world scenarios. First, most MARL algorithms are online, which might be unsafe and impractical. Second, MARL algorithms are environment-specific, meaning network configuration changes require model retraining. This letter proposes a novel meta-offline MARL algorithm that combines conservative Q-learning (CQL) and model agnostic meta-learning (MAML). CQL enables offline training by leveraging pre-collected datasets, while MAML ensures scalability and adaptability to dynamic network configurations and objectives. We propose two algorithm variants: independent training (M-I-MARL) and centralized training decentralized execution (M-CTDE-MARL). Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms conventional schemes, especially the CTDE approach that achieves 50 % faster convergence in dynamic scenarios than the benchmarks. The proposed framework enhances scalability, robustness, and adaptability in wireless communication systems by optimizing UAV trajectories and scheduling policies.
AI Agents for Computer Use: A Review of Instruction-based Computer Control, GUI Automation, and Operator Assistants
Sager, Pascal J., Meyer, Benjamin, Yan, Peng, von Wartburg-Kottler, Rebekka, Etaiwi, Layan, Enayati, Aref, Nobel, Gabriel, Abdulkadir, Ahmed, Grewe, Benjamin F., Stadelmann, Thilo
Instruction-based computer control agents (CCAs) execute complex action sequences on personal computers or mobile devices to fulfill tasks using the same graphical user interfaces as a human user would, provided instructions in natural language. This review offers a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of instruction-based computer control, examining available agents -- their taxonomy, development, and respective resources -- and emphasizing the shift from manually designed, specialized agents to leveraging foundation models such as large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). We formalize the problem and establish a taxonomy of the field to analyze agents from three perspectives: (a) the environment perspective, analyzing computer environments; (b) the interaction perspective, describing observations spaces (e.g., screenshots, HTML) and action spaces (e.g., mouse and keyboard actions, executable code); and (c) the agent perspective, focusing on the core principle of how an agent acts and learns to act. Our framework encompasses both specialized and foundation agents, facilitating their comparative analysis and revealing how prior solutions in specialized agents, such as an environment learning step, can guide the development of more capable foundation agents. Additionally, we review current CCA datasets and CCA evaluation methods and outline the challenges to deploying such agents in a productive setting. In total, we review and classify 86 CCAs and 33 related datasets. By highlighting trends, limitations, and future research directions, this work presents a comprehensive foundation to obtain a broad understanding of the field and push its future development.
Governing the Agent-to-Agent Economy of Trust via Progressive Decentralization
Current approaches to AI governance often fall short in anticipating a future where AI agents manage critical tasks, such as financial operations, administrative functions, and beyond. As AI agents may eventually delegate tasks among themselves to optimize efficiency, understanding the foundational principles of human value exchange could offer insights into how AI-driven economies might operate. Just as trust and value exchange are central to human interactions in open marketplaces, they may also be critical for enabling secure and efficient interactions among AI agents. While cryptocurrencies could serve as the foundation for monetizing value exchange in a collaboration and delegation dynamic among AI agents, a critical question remains: how can these agents reliably determine whom to trust, and how can humans ensure meaningful oversight and control as an economy of AI agents scales and evolves? This paper is a call for a collective exploration of cryptoeconomic incentives, which can help design decentralized governance systems that allow AI agents to autonomously interact and exchange value while ensuring human oversight via progressive decentralization. Toward this end, I propose a research agenda to address the question of agent-to-agent trust using AgentBound Tokens, which are non-transferable, non-fungible tokens uniquely tied to individual AI agents, akin to Soulbound tokens for humans in Web3. By staking ABTs as collateral for autonomous actions within an agent-to-agent network via a proof-of-stake mechanism, agents may be incentivized towards ethical behavior, and penalties for misconduct are automatically enforced.