Agents
Creative Agents: Simulating the Systems Model of Creativity with Generative Agents
Imasato, Naomi, Miyazawa, Kazuki, Nagai, Takayuki, Horii, Takato
With the growing popularity of generative AI for images, video, and music, we witnessed models rapidly improve in quality and performance. However, not much attention is paid towards enabling AI's ability to "be creative". In this study, we implemented and simulated the systems model of creativity (proposed by Csikszentmihalyi) using virtual agents utilizing large language models (LLMs) and text prompts. For comparison, the simulations were conducted with the "virtual artists" being: 1)isolated and 2)placed in a multi-agent system. Both scenarios were compared by analyzing the variations and overall "creativity" in the generated artifacts (measured via a user study and LLM). Our results suggest that the generative agents may perform better in the framework of the systems model of creativity.
Asynchronous Fractional Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Age-Minimal Mobile Edge Computing
Jin, Lyudong, Tang, Ming, Pan, Jiayu, Zhang, Meng, Wang, Hao
In the realm of emerging real-time networked applications like cyber-physical systems (CPS), the Age of Information (AoI) has merged as a pivotal metric for evaluating the timeliness. To meet the high computational demands, such as those in intelligent manufacturing within CPS, mobile edge computing (MEC) presents a promising solution for optimizing computing and reducing AoI. In this work, we study the timeliness of computational-intensive updates and explores jointly optimize the task updating and offloading policies to minimize AoI. Specifically, we consider edge load dynamics and formulate a task scheduling problem to minimize the expected time-average AoI. The fractional objective introduced by AoI and the semi-Markov game nature of the problem render this challenge particularly difficult, with existing approaches not directly applicable. To this end, we present a comprehensive framework to fractional reinforcement learning (RL). We first introduce a fractional single-agent RL framework and prove its linear convergence. We then extend this to a fractional multi-agent RL framework with a convergence analysis. To tackle the challenge of asynchronous control in semi-Markov game, we further design an asynchronous model-free fractional multi-agent RL algorithm, where each device makes scheduling decisions with the hybrid action space without knowing the system dynamics and decisions of other devices. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithms reduce the average AoI by up to 52.6% compared with the best baseline algorithm in our experiments.
Enhancing Multi-Agent Consensus through Third-Party LLM Integration: Analyzing Uncertainty and Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models
Abstract--Large Language Models (LLMs) still face challenges when dealing with complex reasoning tasks, often resulting in hallucinations, which limit the practical application of LLMs. To alleviate this issue, this paper proposes a new method that integrates different LLMs to expand the knowledge boundary, reduce dependence on a single model, and promote in-depth debate among agents. The main contributions include: 1) Introducing third-party LLMs to adjust the attention weights of agents through uncertainty estimation and confidence analysis, optimizing consensus formation in multi-agent systems; 2) Experiments on arithmetic datasets have validated the effectiveness of the method, surpassing traditional multi-agent baselines. This research provides a new perspective for large models to alleviate hallucination phenomena when dealing with complex tasks. In these systems, multiple agents articulate their arguments, while a neutral moderator oversees the debate process to facilitate the attainment of a final resolution Therefore, this paper raises a question: Can a third-party [2].By employing multiple instances of language models and model be introduced to complete tasks through the collaboration engaging in several rounds of proposal and debate regarding of multiple Large Language Models?
Multi-Robot Reliable Navigation in Uncertain Topological Environments with Graph Attention Networks
Yu, Zhuoyuan, Guo, Hongliang, Adiwahono, Albertus Hendrawan, Chan, Jianle, Tynn, Brina Shong Wey, Chew, Chee-Meng, Yau, Wei-Yun
This paper studies the multi-robot reliable navigation problem in uncertain topological networks, which aims at maximizing the robot team's on-time arrival probabilities in the face of road network uncertainties. The uncertainty in these networks stems from the unknown edge traversability, which is only revealed to the robot upon its arrival at the edge's starting node. Existing approaches often struggle to adapt to real-time network topology changes, making them unsuitable for varying topological environments. To address the challenge, we reformulate the problem into a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) framework and introduce the Dynamic Adaptive Graph Embedding method to capture the evolving nature of the navigation task. We further enhance each robot's policy learning process by integrating deep reinforcement learning with Graph Attention Networks (GATs), leveraging self-attention to focus on critical graph features. The proposed approach, namely Multi-Agent Routing in Variable Environments with Learning (MARVEL) employs the generalized policy gradient algorithm to optimize the robots' real-time decision-making process iteratively. We compare the performance of MARVEL with state-of-the-art reliable navigation algorithms as well as Canadian traveller problem solutions in a range of canonical transportation networks, demonstrating improved adaptability and performance in uncertain topological networks. Additionally, real-world experiments with two robots navigating within a self-constructed indoor environment with uncertain topological structures demonstrate MARVEL's practicality.
MindForge: Empowering Embodied Agents with Theory of Mind for Lifelong Collaborative Learning
Licฤ, Mircea, Shirekar, Ojas, Colle, Baptiste, Raman, Chirag
Contemporary embodied agents, such as Voyager in Minecraft, have demonstrated promising capabilities in open-ended individual learning. However, when powered with open large language models (LLMs), these agents often struggle with rudimentary tasks, even when fine-tuned on domain-specific knowledge. These advancements enable agents to reason about their and others' mental states, empirically addressing two prevalent failure modes: false beliefs and faulty task executions. The development of generally capable agents marks a significant shift in advancing artificial intelligence, transitioning from assimilating data to generating novel knowledge through embodied interactions with open-ended environments (Kolve et al., 2017; Savva et al., 2019; Puig et al., 2018; Shridhar et al., 2020). Classical approaches leveraging reinforcement learning (Schulman et al., 2017; Hafner et al., 2023) and imitation learning (Zare et al., 2024) often struggle with generalization and exploration, as agents tend to converge on repetitive behaviors in static environments (Cobbe et al., 2019). To address these limitations, researchers have sought to emulate human-like lifelong learning capabilities, developing systems that can continuously acquire, update, and transfer knowledge over extended periods (Parisi et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2023b).The advent of large language models (LLMs) has accelerated this pursuit, enabling the development of agents such as Voyager (Wang et al., 2023a) that can apply internet-scale knowledge to continuously explore, plan, and acquire new skills in partially observable, open-ended environments such as Minecraft. Despite their promise, we argue that state-of-the-art lifelong learning agents like Voyager face a crucial limitation: they learn in isolation, neglecting a fundamental aspect of human intelligence--the social context. So central is the social context to our existence, that the Social Intelligence Hypothesis posits that our cognitive capabilities evolved primarily to navigate the complexities of social life (Humphrey, 1976; Dunbar, 1998). This isolated learning becomes particularly problematic when coupled with these agents' reliance on closed LLM) like GPT-4. Wang et al. (2023a) note that "VOYAGER requires Hey! I need help with Sure!
OffLight: An Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Framework for Traffic Signal Control
Efficient traffic control (TSC) is essential for urban mobility, but traditional systems struggle to handle the complexity of real-world traffic. Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) offers adaptive solutions, but online MARL requires extensive interactions with the environment, making it costly and impractical. Offline MARL mitigates these challenges by using historical traffic data for training but faces significant difficulties with heterogeneous behavior policies in real-world datasets, where mixed-quality data complicates learning. We introduce OffLight, a novel offline MARL framework designed to handle heterogeneous behavior policies in TSC datasets. To improve learning efficiency, OffLight incorporates Importance Sampling (IS) to correct for distributional shifts and Return-Based Prioritized Sampling (RBPS) to focus on high-quality experiences. OffLight utilizes a Gaussian Mixture Variational Graph Autoencoder (GMM-VGAE) to capture the diverse distribution of behavior policies from local observations. Extensive experiments across real-world urban traffic scenarios show that OffLight outperforms existing offline RL methods, achieving up to a 7.8% reduction in average travel time and 11.2% decrease in queue length. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of OffLight's components in handling heterogeneous data and improving policy performance. These results highlight OffLight's scalability and potential to improve urban traffic management without the risks of online learning.
Language Grounded Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning with Human-interpretable Communication
Li, Huao, Mahjoub, Hossein Nourkhiz, Chalaki, Behdad, Tadiparthi, Vaishnav, Lee, Kwonjoon, Moradi-Pari, Ehsan, Lewis, Charles Michael, Sycara, Katia P
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) methods have shown promise in enabling agents to learn a shared communication protocol from scratch and accomplish challenging team tasks. However, the learned language is usually not interpretable to humans or other agents not co-trained together, limiting its applicability in ad-hoc teamwork scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel computational pipeline that aligns the communication space between MARL agents with an embedding space of human natural language by grounding agent communications on synthetic data generated by embodied Large Language Models (LLMs) in interactive teamwork scenarios. Our results demonstrate that introducing language grounding not only maintains task performance but also accelerates the emergence of communication. Furthermore, the learned communication protocols exhibit zero-shot generalization capabilities in ad-hoc teamwork scenarios with unseen teammates and novel task states. This work presents a significant step toward enabling effective communication and collaboration between artificial agents and humans in real-world teamwork settings.
Concurrent-Learning Based Relative Localization in Shape Formation of Robot Swarms (Extended version)
Lรผ, Jinhu, Ze, Kunrui, Yue, Shuoyu, Liu, Kexin, Wang, Wei, Sun, Guibin
In this paper, we address the shape formation problem for massive robot swarms in environments where external localization systems are unavailable. Achieving this task effectively with solely onboard measurements is still scarcely explored and faces some practical challenges. To solve this challenging problem, we propose the following novel results. Firstly, to estimate the relative positions among neighboring robots, a concurrent-learning based estimator is proposed. It relaxes the persistent excitation condition required in the classical ones such as least-square estimator. Secondly, we introduce a finite-time agreement protocol to determine the shape location. This is achieved by estimating the relative position between each robot and a randomly assigned seed robot. The initial position of the seed one marks the shape location. Thirdly, based on the theoretical results of the relative localization, a novel behavior-based control strategy is devised. This strategy not only enables adaptive shape formation of large group of robots but also enhances the observability of inter-robot relative localization. Numerical simulation results are provided to verify the performance of our proposed strategy compared to the state-of-the-art ones. Additionally, outdoor experiments on real robots further demonstrate the practical effectiveness and robustness of our methods.
Understanding Machine Learning Paradigms through the Lens of Statistical Thermodynamics: A tutorial
This tutorial investigates the convergence of statistical mechanics and learning theory, elucidating the potential enhancements in machine learning methodologies through the integration of foundational principles from physics. The tutorial delves into advanced techniques like entropy, free energy, and variational inference which are utilized in machine learning, illustrating their significant contributions to model efficiency and robustness. By bridging these scientific disciplines, we aspire to inspire newer methodologies in researches, demonstrating how an in-depth comprehension of physical systems' behavior can yield more effective and dependable machine learning models, particularly in contexts characterized by uncertainty.
AIGS: Generating Science from AI-Powered Automated Falsification
Liu, Zijun, Liu, Kaiming, Zhu, Yiqi, Lei, Xuanyu, Yang, Zonghan, Zhang, Zhenhe, Li, Peng, Liu, Yang
Rapid development of artificial intelligence has drastically accelerated the development of scientific discovery. Trained with large-scale observation data, deep neural networks extract the underlying patterns in an end-to-end manner and assist human researchers with highly-precised predictions in unseen scenarios. The recent rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the empowered autonomous agents enable scientists to gain help through interaction in different stages of their research, including but not limited to literature review, research ideation, idea implementation, and academic writing. However, AI researchers instantiated by foundation model empowered agents with full-process autonomy are still in their infancy. In this paper, we study $\textbf{AI-Generated Science}$ (AIGS), where agents independently and autonomously complete the entire research process and discover scientific laws. By revisiting the definition of scientific research, we argue that $\textit{falsification}$ is the essence of both human research process and the design of an AIGS system. Through the lens of falsification, prior systems attempting towards AI-Generated Science either lack the part in their design, or rely heavily on existing verification engines that narrow the use in specialized domains. In this work, we propose Baby-AIGS as a baby-step demonstration of a full-process AIGS system, which is a multi-agent system with agents in roles representing key research process. By introducing FalsificationAgent, which identify and then verify possible scientific discoveries, we empower the system with explicit falsification. Experiments on three tasks preliminarily show that Baby-AIGS could produce meaningful scientific discoveries, though not on par with experienced human researchers. Finally, we discuss on the limitations of current Baby-AIGS, actionable insights, and related ethical issues in detail.