Robot decision-making in partially observable, real-time, dynamic, and multi-agent environments remains a difficult and unsolved challenge. Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach to learning decision-making in such domains, however, end-to-end RL in complex environments is often intractable. To address this challenge in the RoboCup Standard Platform League (SPL) domain, we developed a novel architecture integrating RL within a classical robotics stack, while employing a multi-fidelity sim2real approach and decomposing behavior into learned sub-behaviors with heuristic selection. Our architecture led to victory in the 2024 RoboCup SPL Challenge Shield Division. In this work, we fully describe our system's architecture and empirically analyze key design decisions that contributed to its success. Our approach demonstrates how RL-based behaviors can be integrated into complete robot behavior architectures.

The growing interest in autonomous driving calls for realistic simulation platforms capable of accurately simulating cooperative perception process in realistic traffic scenarios. Existing studies for cooperative perception often have not accounted for transmission latency and errors in real-world environments. To address this gap, we introduce EI-Drive, an edge-AI based autonomous driving simulation platform that integrates advanced cooperative perception with more realistic communication models. Built on the CARLA framework, EI-Drive features new modules for cooperative perception while taking into account transmission latency and errors, providing a more realistic platform for evaluating cooperative perception algorithms. In particular, the platform enables vehicles to fuse data from multiple sources, improving situational awareness and safety in complex environments. With its modular design, EI-Drive allows for detailed exploration of sensing, perception, planning, and control in various cooperative driving scenarios. Experiments using EI-Drive demonstrate significant improvements in vehicle safety and performance, particularly in scenarios with complex traffic flow and network conditions. All code and documents are accessible on our GitHub page: \url{https://ucd-dare.github.io/eidrive.github.io/}.

AI for social impact (AI4SI) offers significant potential for addressing complex societal challenges in areas such as public health, agriculture, education, conservation, and public safety. However, existing AI4SI research is often labor-intensive and resource-demanding, limiting its accessibility and scalability; the standard approach is to design a (base-level) system tailored to a specific AI4SI problem. We propose the development of a novel meta-level multi-agent system designed to accelerate the development of such base-level systems, thereby reducing the computational cost and the burden on social impact domain experts and AI researchers. Leveraging advancements in foundation models and large language models, our proposed approach focuses on resource allocation problems providing help across the full AI4SI pipeline from problem formulation over solution design to impact evaluation. We highlight the ethical considerations and challenges inherent in deploying such systems and emphasize the importance of a human-in-the-loop approach to ensure the responsible and effective application of AI systems.

As the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance, the field of patent processing has garnered increased attention within the natural language processing community. However, the majority of research has been concentrated on classification tasks, such as patent categorization and examination, or on short text generation tasks like patent summarization and patent quizzes. In this paper, we introduce a novel and practical task known as Draft2Patent, along with its corresponding D2P benchmark, which challenges LLMs to generate full-length patents averaging 17K tokens based on initial drafts. Patents present a significant challenge to LLMs due to their specialized nature, standardized terminology, and extensive length. We propose a multi-agent framework called AutoPatent which leverages the LLM-based planner agent, writer agents, and examiner agent with PGTree and RRAG to generate lengthy, intricate, and high-quality complete patent documents. The experimental results demonstrate that our AutoPatent framework significantly enhances the ability to generate comprehensive patents across various LLMs. Furthermore, we have discovered that patents generated solely with the AutoPatent framework based on the Qwen2.5-7B model outperform those produced by larger and more powerful LLMs, such as GPT-4o, Qwen2.5-72B, and LLAMA3.1-70B, in both objective metrics and human evaluations. We will make the data and code available upon acceptance at \url{https://github.com/QiYao-Wang/AutoPatent}.

For safety, autonomous systems must be able to consider sudden changes and enact contingency plans appropriately. State-of-the-art methods currently find trajectories that balance between nominal and contingency behavior, or plan for a singular contingency plan; however, this does not guarantee that the resulting plan is safe for all time. To address this research gap, this paper presents Contingency-MPPI, a data-driven optimization-based strategy that embeds contingency planning inside a nominal planner. By learning to approximate the optimal contingency-constrained control sequence with adaptive importance sampling, the proposed method's sampling efficiency is further improved with initializations from a lightweight path planner and trajectory optimizer.

A crucial challenge in decentralized systems is state estimation in the presence of unknown inputs, particularly within heterogeneous sensor networks with dynamic topologies. While numerous consensus algorithms have been introduced, they often require extensive information exchange or multiple communication iterations to ensure estimation accuracy. This paper proposes an efficient algorithm that achieves an unbiased and optimal solution comparable to filters with full information about other agents. This is accomplished through the use of information filter decomposition and the fusion of inputs via covariance intersection. Our method requires only a single communication iteration for exchanging individual estimates between agents, instead of multiple rounds of information exchange, thus preserving agents' privacy by avoiding the sharing of explicit observations and system equations. Furthermore, to address the challenges posed by dynamic communication topologies, we propose two practical strategies to handle issues arising from intermittent observations and incomplete state estimation, thereby enhancing the robustness and accuracy of the estimation process. Experiments and ablation studies conducted in both stationary and dynamic environments demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm over other baselines. Notably, it performs as well as, or even better than, algorithms that have a global view of all neighbors.

We study decentralized multiagent optimization over networks, modeled as undirected graphs. The optimization problem consists of minimizing a nonconvex smooth function plus a convex extended-value function, which enforces constraints or extra structure on the solution (e.g., sparsity, low-rank). We further assume that the objective function satisfies the Kurdyka-{\L}ojasiewicz (KL) property, with given exponent $\theta\in [0,1)$. The KL property is satisfied by several (nonconvex) functions of practical interest, e.g., arising from machine learning applications; in the centralized setting, it permits to achieve strong convergence guarantees. Here we establish convergence of the same type for the notorious decentralized gradient-tracking-based algorithm SONATA. Specifically, $\textbf{(i)}$ when $\theta\in (0,1/2]$, the sequence generated by SONATA converges to a stationary solution of the problem at R-linear rate;$ \textbf{(ii)} $when $\theta\in (1/2,1)$, sublinear rate is certified; and finally $\textbf{(iii)}$ when $\theta=0$, the iterates will either converge in a finite number of steps or converges at R-linear rate. This matches the convergence behavior of centralized proximal-gradient algorithms except when $\theta=0$. Numerical results validate our theoretical findings.

Common knowledge/belief in rationality is the traditional standard assumption in analysing interaction among agents. This paper proposes a graph-based language for capturing significantly more complicated structures of higher-order beliefs that agents might have about the rationality of the other agents. The two main contributions are a solution concept that captures the reasoning process based on a given belief structure and an efficient algorithm for compressing any belief structure into a unique minimal form.

Imagine if all of our cars could drive themselves – autonomous driving is becoming possible, but to what extent? To get a vehicle somewhere by itself may not seem so tricky if the route is clear and well defined, but what if there are more cars, each trying to get to a different place? And what if we add pedestrians, animals and other unaccounted for elements? This problem has recently been increasingly studied, and already used in scenarios such as warehouse logistics, where a group of robots move boxes in a warehouse, each with its own goal, but all moving while making sure not to collide and making their routes – paths – as short as possible. Multi-agent path finding describes a problem where we have a group of agents – robots, vehicles or even people – who are each trying to get from their starting positions to their goal positions all at once without ever colliding (being in the same position at the same time).

We examine the capability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to tackle diverse domains that extend beyond the traditional language and vision tasks these models are typically trained on. Specifically, our focus lies in areas such as Embodied AI, Games, UI Control, and Planning. To this end, we introduce a process of adapting an MLLM to a Generalist Embodied Agent (GEA). GEA is a single unified model capable of grounding itself across these varied domains through a multi-embodiment action tokenizer. GEA is trained with supervised learning on a large dataset of embodied experiences and with online RL in interactive simulators. We explore the data and algorithmic choices necessary to develop such a model. Our findings reveal the importance of training with cross-domain data and online RL for building generalist agents. The final GEA model achieves strong generalization performance to unseen tasks across diverse benchmarks compared to other generalist models and benchmark-specific approaches.