Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Agents


R2D2: Remembering, Reflecting and Dynamic Decision Making for Web Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The proliferation of web agents necessitates advanced navigation and interaction strategies within complex web environments. Current models often struggle with efficient navigation and action execution due to limited visibility and understanding of web structures. Our proposed R2D2 framework addresses these challenges by integrating two paradigms: Remember and Reflect. The Remember paradigm utilizes a replay buffer that aids agents in reconstructing the web environment dynamically, thus enabling the formulation of a detailed ``map'' of previously visited pages. This helps in reducing navigational errors and optimizing the decision-making process during web interactions. Conversely, the Reflect paradigm allows agents to learn from past mistakes by providing a mechanism for error analysis and strategy refinement, enhancing overall task performance. We evaluate R2D2 using the WEBARENA benchmark, demonstrating significant improvements over existing methods, including a 50% reduction in navigation errors and a threefold increase in task completion rates. Our findings suggest that a combination of memory-enhanced navigation and reflective learning promisingly advances the capabilities of web agents, potentially benefiting various applications such as automated customer service and personal digital assistants.


A Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Framework for Multi-UAV Combat Using Leader-Follower Strategy

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multi-UAV air combat is a complex task involving multiple autonomous UAVs, an evolving field in both aerospace and artificial intelligence. This paper aims to enhance adversarial performance through collaborative strategies. Previous approaches predominantly discretize the action space into predefined actions, limiting UAV maneuverability and complex strategy implementation. Others simplify the problem to 1v1 combat, neglecting the cooperative dynamics among multiple UAVs. To address the high-dimensional challenges inherent in six-degree-of-freedom space and improve cooperation, we propose a hierarchical framework utilizing the Leader-Follower Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (LFMAPPO) strategy. Specifically, the framework is structured into three levels. The top level conducts a macro-level assessment of the environment and guides execution policy. The middle level determines the angle of the desired action. The bottom level generates precise action commands for the high-dimensional action space. Moreover, we optimize the state-value functions by assigning distinct roles with the leader-follower strategy to train the top-level policy, followers estimate the leader's utility, promoting effective cooperation among agents. Additionally, the incorporation of a target selector, aligned with the UAVs' posture, assesses the threat level of targets. Finally, simulation experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.


Bridging Visualization and Optimization: Multimodal Large Language Models on Graph-Structured Combinatorial Optimization

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Graph-structured combinatorial challenges are inherently difficult due to their nonlinear and intricate nature, often rendering traditional computational methods ineffective or expensive. However, these challenges can be more naturally tackled by humans through visual representations that harness our innate ability for spatial reasoning. In this study, we propose transforming graphs into images to preserve their higher-order structural features accurately, revolutionizing the representation used in solving graph-structured combinatorial tasks. This approach allows machines to emulate human-like processing in addressing complex combinatorial challenges. By combining the innovative paradigm powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with simple search techniques, we aim to develop a novel and effective framework for tackling such problems. Our investigation into MLLMs spanned a variety of graph-based tasks, from combinatorial problems like influence maximization to sequential decision-making in network dismantling, as well as addressing six fundamental graph-related issues. Our findings demonstrate that MLLMs exhibit exceptional spatial intelligence and a distinctive capability for handling these problems, significantly advancing the potential for machines to comprehend and analyze graph-structured data with a depth and intuition akin to human cognition. These results also imply that integrating MLLMs with simple optimization strategies could form a novel and efficient approach for navigating graph-structured combinatorial challenges without complex derivations, computationally demanding training and fine-tuning.


Navigating Robot Swarm Through a Virtual Tube with Flow-Adaptive Distribution Control

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the rapid development of robot swarm technology and its diverse applications, navigating robot swarms through complex environments has emerged as a critical research direction. To ensure safe navigation and avoid potential collisions with obstacles, the concept of virtual tubes has been introduced to define safe and navigable regions. However, current control methods in virtual tubes face the congestion issues, particularly in narrow virtual tubes with low throughput. To address these challenges, we first originally introduce the concepts of virtual tube area and flow capacity, and develop an new evolution model for the spatial density function. Next, we propose a novel control method that combines a modified artificial potential field (APF) for swarm navigation and density feedback control for distribution regulation, under which a saturated velocity command is designed. Then, we generate a global velocity field that not only ensures collision-free navigation through the virtual tube, but also achieves locally input-to-state stability (LISS) for density tracking errors, both of which are rigorously proven. Finally, numerical simulations and realistic applications validate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method in managing robot swarms within narrow virtual tubes.


Reviews: Learning to Communicate with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Though the paper contains a very thorough experimental evaluation of the suggested DIAL technique for multi-agent settings and the reviewer understands that it would have taken a lot of time and effort to set up and evaluate the experiments, the paper does not make a very novel contribution. It is clear that idea of shared memory and passing message gradients between agents would speed up learning and help to find the optimal policy faster, but this might not be a very natural way to do it. For instance, humans working in teams do not have shared memories. Also, for humans, messages from other humans are a part of their observation at each time step, rather than separate signals which are treated specially as messages and optimized differently than the rest of the observation. The idea of passing message gradients is certainly useful to have trainable message protocols while training a set of agents to perform a repetitive task, but doesn't offer much insight or useful interpretation as to how humans perform tasks in teams.


Reviews: Long-term Causal Effects via Behavioral Game Theory

Neural Information Processing Systems

Typically (in the Rubin potential outcomes model, which is what you are building on), the causal effect is defined at the individual level, with a "treatment" outcome and "control" outcome for each experimental unit. The fundamental problem of causal inference is that only one of these two outcomes is actually observed for each experimental unit. You seem to be focusing on a slightly different issue, which is that the effect of treating the entire population cannot be determined correctly from just data when half the population is treated. It seems to me that this issue -- which can arise due to a variety of violations of the SUTVA assumption -- can exist independent of whether there is a multiagent interaction. Conversely, it seems multiagent considerations are relevant even when defining causal effects at the sub-population level.


Reviews: Learning Multiagent Communication with Backpropagation

Neural Information Processing Systems

The model is a deep network which consists of a stack of layers, with parameter sharing between modules of a same layer. This parameter sharing allows the number of agents to vary during the task. Also, it allows to drastically reduce the number of parameters to be learned. The key idea of the paper is to use the output of every module of a given layer to build the communication input for the next layer. While this appears to obtain interesting results in the reported experiments, I find this proposal very straightforward and poorly innovative, as it corresponds to a quiet classical neural network structure.


Reviews: Bi-Objective Online Matching and Submodular Allocations

Neural Information Processing Systems

The paper builds on the following problem. There is a set of agents. Each agent a is associated a submodular function f_a. Elements from the universe arrive over time. When an element arrives, it is to be assigned to an agent.


Multi-Agent Learning with Heterogeneous Linear Contextual Bandits

Neural Information Processing Systems

As trained intelligent systems become increasingly pervasive, multiagent learning has emerged as a popular framework for studying complex interactions between autonomous agents. Yet, a formal understanding of how and when learners in heterogeneous environments benefit from sharing their respective experiences is far from complete. In this paper, we seek answers to these questions in the context of linear contextual bandits. We present a novel distributed learning algorithm based on the upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithm, which we refer to as H-LINUCB, wherein agents cooperatively minimize the group regret under the coordination of a central server. In the setting where the level of heterogeneity or dissimilarity across the environments is known to the agents, we show that H-LINUCB is provably optimal in regimes where the tasks are highly similar or highly dissimilar.


Decompose a Task into Generalizable Subtasks in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

In recent years, Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) techniques have made significant strides in achieving high asymptotic performance in single task. However, there has been limited exploration of model transferability across tasks. Training a model from scratch for each task can be time-consuming and expensive, especially for large-scale Multi-Agent Systems. Therefore, it is crucial to develop methods for generalizing the model across tasks. Considering that there exist task-independent subtasks across MARL tasks, a model that can decompose such subtasks from the source task could generalize to target tasks.