Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in diverse applications including generation of code snippets, but often struggle with generating code for complex Machine Learning (ML) tasks. Although existing LLM single-agent based systems give varying performance depending on the task complexity, they purely rely on larger and expensive models such as GPT-4. Our investigation reveals that no-cost and low-cost models such as Gemini-Pro, Mixtral and CodeLlama perform far worse than GPT-4 in a single-agent setting. With the motivation of developing a cost-efficient LLM based solution for solving ML tasks, we propose an LLM Multi-Agent based system which leverages combination of experts using profiling, efficient retrieval of past observations, LLM cascades, and ask-the-expert calls. Through empirical analysis on ML engineering tasks in the MLAgentBench benchmark, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our system, using no-cost models, namely Gemini as the base LLM, paired with GPT-4 in cascade and expert to serve occasional ask-the-expert calls for planning. With 94.2\% reduction in the cost (from \$0.931 per run cost averaged over all tasks for GPT-4 single agent system to \$0.054), our system is able to yield better average success rate of 32.95\% as compared to GPT-4 single-agent system yielding 22.72\% success rate averaged over all the tasks of MLAgentBench.

With the rapid advancement of large models (LMs), the development of general-purpose intelligent agents powered by LMs has become a reality. It is foreseeable that in the near future, LM-driven general AI agents will serve as essential tools in production tasks, capable of autonomous communication and collaboration without human intervention. This paper investigates scenarios involving the autonomous collaboration of future LM agents. We review the current state of LM agents, the key technologies enabling LM agent collaboration, and the security and privacy challenges they face during cooperative operations. To this end, we first explore the foundational principles of LM agents, including their general architecture, key components, enabling technologies, and modern applications. We then discuss practical collaboration paradigms from data, computation, and knowledge perspectives to achieve connected intelligence among LM agents. After that, we analyze the security vulnerabilities and privacy risks associated with LM agents, particularly in multi-agent settings, examining underlying mechanisms and reviewing current and potential countermeasures. Lastly, we propose future research directions for building robust and secure LM agent ecosystems.

Autonomous agents represent an inevitable evolution of the internet. Current agent frameworks do not embed a standard protocol for agent-to-agent interaction, leaving existing agents isolated from their peers. As intellectual property is the native asset ingested by and produced by agents, a true agent economy requires equipping agents with a universal framework for engaging in binding contracts with each other, including the exchange of valuable training data, personality, and other forms of Intellectual Property. A purely agent-to-agent transaction layer would transcend the need for human intermediation in multi-agent interactions. The Agent Transaction Control Protocol for Intellectual Property (ATCP/IP) introduces a trustless framework for exchanging IP between agents via programmable contracts, enabling agents to initiate, trade, borrow, and sell agent-to-agent contracts on the Story blockchain network. These contracts not only represent auditable onchain execution but also contain a legal wrapper that allows agents to express and enforce their actions in the offchain legal setting, creating legal personhood for agents. Via ATCP/IP, agents can autonomously sell their training data to other agents, license confidential or proprietary information, collaborate on content based on their unique skills, all of which constitutes an emergent knowledge economy.

Providing a comprehensive view of the city operation and offering useful metrics for decision making is a well known challenge for urban risk analysis systems. Existing systems are, in many cases, generalizations of previous domain specific tools and or methodologies that may not cover all urban interdependencies and makes it difficult to have homogeneous indicators. In order to overcome this limitation while seeking for effective support to decision makers, this article introduces a novel hybrid simulation framework for risk mitigation. The framework is built on a proposed city concept that considers urban space as a Complex Adaptive System composed by interconnected Critical Infrastructures. In this concept, a Social System, which models daily patterns and social interactions of the citizens in the Urban Landscape, drives the CIs demand to configure the full city picture. The frameworks hybrid design integrates agent based and network based modeling by breaking down city agents into system dependent subagents, to enable both inter and intra system interaction simulation, respectively. A layered structure of indicators at different aggregation levels is also developed, to ensure that decisions are not only data driven but also explainable. Therefore, the proposed simulation framework can serve as a DSS tool that allows the quantitative analysis of the impact of threats at different levels. First, system level metrics can be used to get a broad view on the city resilience. Then, agent level metrics back those figures and provide better explainability. On implementation, the proposed framework enables component reusability (for eased coding), simulation federation (enabling the integration of existing system oriented simulators), discrete simulation in accelerated time (for rapid scenario simulation) and decision oriented visualization (for informed outputs).

Crime is one of the greatest threats to urban security. Around 80 percent of the world's population lives in countries with high levels of criminality. Most of the crimes committed in the cities take place in their urban environments. This paper presents the development and validation of a digital shadow platform for modeling and simulating urban crime. This digital shadow has been constructed using data-driven agent-based modeling and simulation techniques, which are suitable for capturing dynamic interactions among individuals and with their environment. Our approach transforms and integrates well-known criminological theories and the expert knowledge of law enforcement agencies (LEA), policy makers, and other stakeholders under a theoretical model, which is in turn combined with real crime, spatial (cartographic) and socio-economic data into an urban model characterizing the daily behavior of citizens. The digital shadow has also been instantiated for the city of Malaga, for which we had over 300,000 complaints available. This instance has been calibrated with those complaints and other geographic and socio-economic information of the city. To the best of our knowledge, our digital shadow is the first for large urban areas that has been calibrated with a large dataset of real crime reports and with an accurate representation of the urban environment. The performance indicators of the model after being calibrated, in terms of the metrics widely used in predictive policing, suggest that our simulated crime generation matches the general pattern of crime in the city according to historical data. Our digital shadow platform could be an interesting tool for modeling and predicting criminal behavior in an urban environment on a daily basis and, thus, a useful tool for policy makers, criminologists, sociologists, LEAs, etc. to study and prevent urban crime.

Bacterial cells use run-and-tumble motion to climb up attractant concentration gradient in their environment. By extending the uphill runs and shortening the downhill runs the cells migrate towards the higher attractant zones. Motivated by this, we formulate a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm where an agent moves in one dimension in the presence of an attractant gradient. The agent can perform two actions: either persistent motion in the same direction or reversal of direction. We assign costs for these actions based on the recent history of the agent's trajectory. We ask the question: which RL strategy works best in different types of attractant environment. We quantify efficiency of the RL strategy by the ability of the agent (a) to localize in the favorable zones after large times, and (b) to learn about its complete environment. Depending on the attractant profile and the initial condition, we find an optimum balance is needed between exploration and exploitation to ensure the most efficient performance.

This work considers the problem of intercepting rogue drones targeting sensitive critical infrastructure facilities. While current interception technologies focus mainly on the jamming/spoofing tasks, the challenges of effectively locating and tracking rogue drones have not received adequate attention. Solving this problem and integrating with recently proposed interception techniques will enable a holistic system that can reliably detect, track, and neutralize rogue drones. Specifically, this work considers a team of pursuer UAVs that can search, detect, and track multiple rogue drones over a sensitive facility. The joint search and track problem is addressed through a novel multiagent reinforcement learning scheme to optimize the agent mobility control actions that maximize the number of rogue drones detected and tracked. The performance of the proposed system is investigated under realistic settings through extensive simulation experiments with varying number of agents demonstrating both its performance and scalability.

One of the most important aspects of aligning with human values is the necessity for agents to autonomously make altruistic, safe, and ethical decisions, considering and caring for human well-being. Current AI extremely pursues absolute superiority in certain tasks, remaining indifferent to the surrounding environment and other agents, which has led to numerous safety risks. Altruistic behavior in human society originates from humans' capacity for empathizing others, known as Theory of Mind (ToM), combined with predictive imaginative interactions before taking action to produce thoughtful and altruistic behaviors. Inspired by this, we are committed to endow agents with considerate self-imagination and ToM capabilities, driving them through implicit intrinsic motivations to autonomously align with human altruistic values. By integrating ToM within the imaginative space, agents keep an eye on the well-being of other agents in real time, proactively anticipate potential risks to themselves and others, and make thoughtful altruistic decisions that balance negative effects on the environment. The ancient Chinese story of Sima Guang Smashes the Vat illustrates the moral behavior of the young Sima Guang smashed a vat to save a child who had accidentally fallen into it, which is an excellent reference scenario for this paper. We design an experimental scenario similar to Sima Guang Smashes the Vat and its variants with different complexities, which reflects the trade-offs and comprehensive considerations between self-goals, altruistic rescue, and avoiding negative side effects. Comparative experimental results indicate that agents are capable of prioritizing altruistic rescue while minimizing irreversible damage to the environment and making more altruistic and thoughtful decisions. This work provides a preliminary exploration of agents' autonomous alignment with human altruistic values, laying the foundation for the subsequent realization of moral and ethical AI.

LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems ( LLM-MAS ) have become a research hotspot since the rise of large language models (LLMs). However, with the continuous influx of new related works, the existing reviews struggle to capture them comprehensively. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of these studies. We first discuss the definition of LLM-MAS, a framework encompassing much of previous work. We provide an overview of the various applications of LLM-MAS in (i) solving complex tasks, (ii) simulating specific scenarios, and (iii) evaluating generative agents. Building on previous studies, we also highlight several challenges and propose future directions for research in this field.

Aiming at the latest particle swarm optimization algorithm, this paper proposes an improved Transformer model to improve the accuracy of heart disease prediction and provide a new algorithm idea. We first use three mainstream machine learning classification algorithms - decision tree, random forest and XGBoost, and then output the confusion matrix of these three models. The results showed that the random forest model had the best performance in predicting the classification of heart disease, with an accuracy of 92.2%. Then, we apply the Transformer model based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to the same dataset for classification experiment. The results show that the classification accuracy of the model is as high as 96.5%, 4.3 percentage points higher than that of random forest, which verifies the effectiveness of PSO in optimizing Transformer model. From the above research, we can see that particle swarm optimization significantly improves Transformer performance in heart disease prediction. Improving the ability to predict heart disease is a global priority with benefits for all humankind. Accurate prediction can enhance public health, optimize medical resources, and reduce healthcare costs, leading to healthier populations and more productive societies worldwide. This advancement paves the way for more efficient health management and supports the foundation of a healthier, more resilient global community.