In this survey, we introduce Meta-Black-Box-Optimization~(MetaBBO) as an emerging avenue within the Evolutionary Computation~(EC) community, which incorporates Meta-learning approaches to assist automated algorithm design. Despite the success of MetaBBO, the current literature provides insufficient summaries of its key aspects and lacks practical guidance for implementation. To bridge this gap, we offer a comprehensive review of recent advances in MetaBBO, providing an in-depth examination of its key developments. We begin with a unified definition of the MetaBBO paradigm, followed by a systematic taxonomy of various algorithm design tasks, including algorithm selection, algorithm configuration, solution manipulation, and algorithm generation. Further, we conceptually summarize different learning methodologies behind current MetaBBO works, including reinforcement learning, supervised learning, neuroevolution, and in-context learning with Large Language Models. A comprehensive evaluation of the latest representative MetaBBO methods is then carried out, alongside an experimental analysis of their optimization performance, computational efficiency, and generalization ability. Based on the evaluation results, we meticulously identify a set of core designs that enhance the generalization and learning effectiveness of MetaBBO. Finally, we outline the vision for the field by providing insight into the latest trends and potential future directions. Relevant literature will be continuously collected and updated at \url{https://github.com/GMC-DRL/Awesome-MetaBBO}.

In this paper, we introduce the Generalist Virtual Agent (GVA), an autonomous entity engineered to function across diverse digital platforms and environments, assisting users by executing a variety of tasks. This survey delves into the evolution of GVAs, tracing their progress from early intelligent assistants to contemporary implementations that incorporate large-scale models. We explore both the philosophical underpinnings and practical foundations of GVAs, addressing their developmental challenges and the methodologies currently employed in their design and operation. By presenting a detailed taxonomy of GVA environments, tasks, and capabilities, this paper aims to bridge the theoretical and practical aspects of GVAs, concluding those that operate in environments closely mirroring the real world are more likely to demonstrate human-like intelligence. We discuss potential future directions for GVA research, highlighting the necessity for realistic evaluation metrics and the enhancement of long-sequence decision-making capabilities to advance the field toward more systematic or embodied applications. This work not only synthesizes the existing body of literature but also proposes frameworks for future investigations, contributing significantly to the ongoing development of intelligent systems.

Artificial Intelligence is rapidly embedding itself within militaries, economies, and societies, reshaping their very foundations. Given the depth and breadth of its consequences, it has never been more pressing to understand how to ensure that AI systems are safe, ethical, and have a positive societal impact. This book aims to provide a comprehensive approach to understanding AI risk. Our primary goals include consolidating fragmented knowledge on AI risk, increasing the precision of core ideas, and reducing barriers to entry by making content simpler and more comprehensible. The book has been designed to be accessible to readers from diverse backgrounds. You do not need to have studied AI, philosophy, or other such topics. The content is skimmable and somewhat modular, so that you can choose which chapters to read. We introduce mathematical formulas in a few places to specify claims more precisely, but readers should be able to understand the main points without these.

When artificial agents are jointly trained to perform collaborative tasks using a communication channel, they develop opaque goal-oriented communication protocols. Good task performance is often considered sufficient evidence that meaningful communication is taking place, but existing empirical results show that communication strategies induced by common objectives can be counterintuitive whilst solving the task nearly perfectly. In this work, we identify a goal-agnostic prerequisite to meaningful communication, which we term semantic consistency, based on the idea that messages should have similar meanings across instances. We provide a formal definition for this idea, and use it to compare the two most common objectives in the field of emergent communication: discrimination and reconstruction. We prove, under mild assumptions, that semantically inconsistent communication protocols can be optimal solutions to the discrimination task, but not to reconstruction. We further show that the reconstruction objective encourages a stricter property, spatial meaningfulness, which also accounts for the distance between messages. Experiments with emergent communication games validate our theoretical results. These findings demonstrate an inherent advantage of distance-based communication goals, and contextualize previous empirical discoveries.

There is an urgent need to identify both short and long-term risks from newly emerging types of Artificial Intelligence (AI), as well as available risk management measures. In response, and to support global efforts in regulating AI and writing safety standards, we compile an extensive catalog of risk sources and risk management measures for general-purpose AI (GPAI) systems, complete with descriptions and supporting examples where relevant. This work involves identifying technical, operational, and societal risks across model development, training, and deployment stages, as well as surveying established and experimental methods for managing these risks. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first of its kind to provide extensive documentation of both GPAI risk sources and risk management measures that are descriptive, self-contained and neutral with respect to any existing regulatory framework. This work intends to help AI providers, standards experts, researchers, policymakers, and regulators in identifying and mitigating systemic risks from GPAI systems. For this reason, the catalog is released under a public domain license for ease of direct use by stakeholders in AI governance and standards.

We study resilient leader-follower consensus of multi-agent systems (MASs) in the presence of adversarial agents, where agents' communication is modeled by time-varying topologies. The objective is to develop distributed algorithms for the nonfaulty/normal followers to track an arbitrary reference value propagated by a set of leaders while they are in interaction with the unknown adversarial agents. Our approaches are based on the weighted mean subsequence reduced (W-MSR) algorithms with agents being capable to communicate with multi-hop neighbors. Our algorithms can handle agents possessing first-order and second-order dynamics. Moreover, we characterize necessary and sufficient graph conditions for our algorithms to succeed by the novel notion of jointly robust following graphs. Our graph condition is tighter than the sufficient conditions in the literature when agents use only one-hop communication (without relays). Using multi-hop relays, we can enhance robustness of leader-follower networks without increasing communication links and obtain further relaxed graph requirements for our algorithms to succeed. Numerical examples are given to verify the efficacy of our algorithms.

The promise of human behavioral simulation--general-purpose computational agents that replicate human behavior across domains--could enable broad applications in policymaking and social science. We present a novel agent architecture that simulates the attitudes and behaviors of 1,052 real individuals--applying large language models to qualitative interviews about their lives, then measuring how well these agents replicate the attitudes and behaviors of the individuals that they represent. The generative agents replicate participants' responses on the General Social Survey 85% as accurately as participants replicate their own answers two weeks later, and perform comparably in predicting personality traits and outcomes in experimental replications. Our architecture reduces accuracy biases across racial and ideological groups compared to agents given demographic descriptions. This work provides a foundation for new tools that can help investigate individual and collective behavior.

The application of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Multi-UAV) in Wilderness Search and Rescue (WiSAR) significantly enhances mission success due to their rapid coverage of search areas from high altitudes and their adaptability to complex terrains. This capability is particularly crucial because time is a critical factor in searching for a lost person in the wilderness; as time passes, survival rates decrease and the search area expands. The probability of success in such searches can be further improved if UAVs leverage terrain features to predict the lost person's position. In this paper, we aim to enhance search missions by proposing a smart agent-based probability model that combines Monte Carlo simulations with an agent strategy list, mimicking the behavior of a lost person in the wildness areas. Furthermore, we develop a distributed Multi-UAV receding horizon search strategy with dynamic partitioning, utilizing the generated probability density model as prior information to prioritize locations where the lost person is most likely to be found. Simulated search experiments across different terrains have been conducted to validate the search efficiency of the proposed methods compared to other benchmark methods.

Collaborative decision-making with artificial intelligence (AI) agents presents opportunities and challenges. While human-AI performance often surpasses that of individuals, the impact of such technology on human behavior remains insufficiently understood, primarily when AI agents can provide justifiable explanations for their suggestions. This study compares the effects of classic vs. partner-aware explanations on human behavior and performance during a learning-by-doing task. Three participant groups were involved: one interacting with a computer, another with a humanoid robot, and a third one without assistance. Results indicated that partner-aware explanations influenced participants differently based on the type of artificial agents involved. With the computer, participants enhanced their task completion times. At the same time, those interacting with the humanoid robot were more inclined to follow its suggestions, although they did not reduce their timing. Interestingly, participants autonomously performing the learning-by-doing task demonstrated superior knowledge acquisition than those assisted by explainable AI (XAI). These findings raise profound questions and have significant implications for automated tutoring and human-AI collaboration.

Autonomous multi-agent systems such as hospital robots and package delivery drones often operate in highly uncertain environments and are expected to achieve complex temporal task objectives while ensuring safety. While learning-based methods such as reinforcement learning are popular methods to train single and multi-agent autonomous systems under user-specified and state-based reward functions, applying these methods to satisfy trajectory-level task objectives is a challenging problem. Our first contribution is the use of weighted automata to specify trajectory-level objectives, such that, maximal paths induced in the weighted automaton correspond to desired trajectory-level behaviors. We show how weighted automata-based specifications go beyond timeliness properties focused on deadlines to performance properties such as expeditiousness. Our second contribution is the use of evolutionary game theory (EGT) principles to train homogeneous multi-agent teams targeting homogeneous task objectives. We show how shared experiences of agents and EGT-based policy updates allow us to outperform state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) methods in minimizing path length by nearly 30\% in large spaces. We also show that our algorithm is computationally faster than deep RL methods by at least an order of magnitude. Additionally our results indicate that it scales better with an increase in the number of agents as compared to other methods.