Traditional sociological research often relies on human participation, which, though effective, is expensive, challenging to scale, and with ethical concerns. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) highlight their potential to simulate human behavior, enabling the replication of individual responses and facilitating studies on many interdisciplinary studies. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of this field, illustrating the recent progress in simulation driven by LLM-empowered agents. We categorize the simulations into three types: (1) Individual Simulation, which mimics specific individuals or demographic groups; (2) Scenario Simulation, where multiple agents collaborate to achieve goals within specific contexts; and (3) Society Simulation, which models interactions within agent societies to reflect the complexity and variety of real-world dynamics. These simulations follow a progression, ranging from detailed individual modeling to large-scale societal phenomena. We provide a detailed discussion of each simulation type, including the architecture or key components of the simulation, the classification of objectives or scenarios and the evaluation method. Afterward, we summarize commonly used datasets and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the trends across these three types of simulation. A repository for the related sources is at {\url{https://github.com/FudanDISC/SocialAgent}}.

Multi-Access Point Coordination (MAPC) and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) are expected to be key features in future Wi-Fi, such as the forthcoming IEEE 802.11bn (Wi-Fi 8) and beyond. In this paper, we explore a coordinated solution based on online learning to drive the optimization of Spatial Reuse (SR), a method that allows multiple devices to perform simultaneous transmissions by controlling interference through Packet Detect (PD) adjustment and transmit power control. In particular, we focus on a Multi-Agent Multi-Armed Bandit (MA-MAB) setting, where multiple decision-making agents concurrently configure SR parameters from coexisting networks by leveraging the MAPC framework, and study various algorithms and reward-sharing mechanisms. We evaluate different MA-MAB implementations using Komondor, a well-adopted Wi-Fi simulator, and demonstrate that AI-native SR enabled by coordinated MABs can improve the network performance over current Wi-Fi operation: mean throughput increases by 15%, fairness is improved by increasing the minimum throughput across the network by 210%, while the maximum access delay is kept below 3 ms.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), as a theoretical framework for modeling agent behavior in complex game environments, has become a significant area of research [42, 37]. Unlike traditional game theory, MARL typically allows agents to learn strategies through repeated interactions to achieve equilibrium [34]. By relaxing the assumptions of agent rationality and independence, MARL can learn strategies efficiently with arbitrary environments and opponents [10, 20, 17]. Current applications of MARL in game environments are primarily focused on zero-sum games (fully competitive) [10, 41] and fully cooperative games [12, 38], since the behavioral preferences of opponent agents in these environments are relatively easy to predict. Nevertheless, the environments in practical applications, e.g., economic markets, robotics and distributed control, may have multiple equilibrium [16, 40], and opponent agents may not exhibit clear preferences for different strategies, thus agents need to learn strategies in general-sum games [8, 7]. The Prisoner's dilemma [3, 14] is a classic example of the tension between mutual cooperation leading to a win-win situation and focusing solely on self-interest leading to a lose-lose situation. Therefore, modeling and shaping the behavior of opponent agents is the main challenge for the application of MARL in these environments [11]. Recent advancements in MARL have introduced opponent modeling and shaping techniques that allow agents to learn not just their own strategies, but also to predict and influence the strategies of the opponent, such as [10, 20, 36]. These methods show promise in improving the efficiency of strategy learning by incorporating the behavior of other agents into the learning process.

Mean field type games (MFTGs) describe Nash equilibria between large coalitions: each coalition consists of a continuum of cooperative agents who maximize the average reward of their coalition while interacting non-cooperatively with a finite number of other coalitions. Although the theory has been extensively developed, we are still lacking efficient and scalable computational methods. Here, we develop reinforcement learning methods for such games in a finite space setting with general dynamics and reward functions. We start by proving that MFTG solution yields approximate Nash equilibria in finite-size coalition games. We then propose two algorithms. The first is based on quantization of mean-field spaces and Nash Q-learning. We provide convergence and stability analysis. We then propose a deep reinforcement learning algorithm, which can scale to larger spaces. Numerical experiments in 5 environments with mean-field distributions of dimension up to $200$ show the scalability and efficiency of the proposed method.

Prabhakar was a key player in passing the president's executive order on AI in 2023, which sets rules for tech companies to make AI safer and more transparent (though it relies on voluntary participation). Before serving in President Biden's cabinet, she held a number of government roles, from rallying for domestic production of semiconductors to heading up DARPA, the Pentagon's famed research department. I had a chance to sit down with Prabhakar earlier this month. We discussed AI risks, immigration policies, the CHIPS Act, the public's faith in science, and how it all may change under Trump. The change of administrations comes at a chaotic time for AI.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning has demonstrated significant potential in addressing complex cooperative tasks across various real-world applications. However, existing MARL approaches often rely on the restrictive assumption that the number of entities (e.g., agents, obstacles) remains constant between training and inference. This overlooks scenarios where entities are dynamically removed or added during the inference trajectory -- a common occurrence in real-world environments like search and rescue missions and dynamic combat situations. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of intra-trajectory dynamic entity composition under zero-shot out-of-domain (OOD) generalization, where such dynamic changes cannot be anticipated beforehand. Our empirical studies reveal that existing MARL methods suffer significant performance degradation and increased uncertainty in these scenarios. In response, we propose FlickerFusion, a novel OOD generalization method that acts as a universally applicable augmentation technique for MARL backbone methods. FlickerFusion stochastically drops out parts of the observation space, emulating being in-domain when inferenced OOD. The results show that FlickerFusion not only achieves superior inference rewards but also uniquely reduces uncertainty vis-\`a-vis the backbone, compared to existing methods. Benchmarks, implementations, and model weights are organized and open-sourced at flickerfusion305.github.io, accompanied by ample demo video renderings.

Autonomous agents for cyber applications take advantage of modern defense techniques by adopting intelligent agents with conventional and learning-enabled components. These intelligent agents are trained via reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, and can learn, adapt to, reason about and deploy security rules to defend networked computer systems while maintaining critical operational workflows. However, the knowledge available during training about the state of the operational network and its environment may be limited. The agents should be trustworthy so that they can reliably detect situations they cannot handle, and hand them over to cyber experts. In this work, we develop an out-of-distribution (OOD) Monitoring algorithm that uses a Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) to detect anomalous or OOD situations of RL-based agents with discrete states and discrete actions. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we integrate the OOD monitoring algorithm with a neurosymbolic autonomous cyber agent that uses behavior trees with learning-enabled components. We evaluate the proposed approach in a simulated cyber environment under different adversarial strategies. Experimental results over a large number of episodes illustrate the overall efficiency of our proposed approach.

Assistive embodied agents that can be instructed in natural language to perform tasks in open-world environments have the potential to significantly impact labor tasks like manufacturing or in-home care -- benefiting the lives of those who come to depend on them. In this work, we consider how this benefit might be hijacked by local modifications in the appearance of the agent's operating environment. Specifically, we take the popular Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task as a representative setting and develop a whitebox adversarial attack that optimizes a 3D attack object's appearance to induce desired behaviors in pretrained VLN agents that observe it in the environment. We demonstrate that the proposed attack can cause VLN agents to ignore their instructions and execute alternative actions after encountering the attack object -- even for instructions and agent paths not considered when optimizing the attack. For these novel settings, we find our attacks can induce early-termination behaviors or divert an agent along an attacker-defined multi-step trajectory. Under both conditions, environmental attacks significantly reduce agent capabilities to successfully follow user instructions.

Understanding video content is pivotal for advancing real-world applications like activity recognition, autonomous systems, and human-computer interaction. While scene graphs are adept at capturing spatial relationships between objects in individual frames, extending these representations to capture dynamic interactions across video sequences remains a significant challenge. To address this, we present TCDSG, Temporally Consistent Dynamic Scene Graphs, an innovative end-to-end framework that detects, tracks, and links subject-object relationships across time, generating action tracklets, temporally consistent sequences of entities and their interactions. Our approach leverages a novel bipartite matching mechanism, enhanced by adaptive decoder queries and feedback loops, ensuring temporal coherence and robust tracking over extended sequences. This method not only establishes a new benchmark by achieving over 60% improvement in temporal recall@k on the Action Genome, OpenPVSG, and MEVA datasets but also pioneers the augmentation of MEVA with persistent object ID annotations for comprehensive tracklet generation. By seamlessly integrating spatial and temporal dynamics, our work sets a new standard in multi-frame video analysis, opening new avenues for high-impact applications in surveillance, autonomous navigation, and beyond.

Adversarial attacks pose significant challenges in many machine learning applications, particularly in the setting of distributed training and federated learning, where malicious agents seek to corrupt the training process with the goal of jeopardizing and compromising the performance and reliability of the final models. In this paper, we address the problem of robust federated learning in the presence of such attacks by formulating the training task as a bi-level optimization problem. We conduct a theoretical analysis of the resilience of consensus-based bi-level optimization (CB$^2$O), an interacting multi-particle metaheuristic optimization method, in adversarial settings. Specifically, we provide a global convergence analysis of CB$^2$O in mean-field law in the presence of malicious agents, demonstrating the robustness of CB$^2$O against a diverse range of attacks. Thereby, we offer insights into how specific hyperparameter choices enable to mitigate adversarial effects. On the practical side, we extend CB$^2$O to the clustered federated learning setting by proposing FedCB$^2$O, a novel interacting multi-particle system, and design a practical algorithm that addresses the demands of real-world applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate the robustness of the FedCB$^2$O algorithm against label-flipping attacks in decentralized clustered federated learning scenarios, showcasing its effectiveness in practical contexts.