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MSI-Agent: Incorporating Multi-Scale Insight into Embodied Agents for Superior Planning and Decision-Making

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Long-term memory is significant for agents, in which insights play a crucial role. However, the emergence of irrelevant insight and the lack of general insight can greatly undermine the effectiveness of insight. To solve this problem, in this paper, we introduce Multi-Scale Insight Agent (MSI-Agent), an embodied agent designed to improve LLMs' planning and decision-making ability by summarizing and utilizing insight effectively across different scales. MSI achieves this through the experience selector, insight generator, and insight selector. Leveraging a three-part pipeline, MSI can generate task-specific and high-level insight, store it in a database, and then use relevant insight from it to aid in decision-making. Our experiments show that MSI outperforms another insight strategy when planning by GPT3.5. Moreover, We delve into the strategies for selecting seed experience and insight, aiming to provide LLM with more useful and relevant insight for better decision-making. Our observations also indicate that MSI exhibits better robustness when facing domain-shifting scenarios.


VISTA: Visual Integrated System for Tailored Automation in Math Problem Generation Using LLM

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Generating accurate and consistent visual aids is a critical challenge in mathematics education, where visual representations like geometric shapes and functions play a pivotal role in enhancing student comprehension. This paper introduces a novel multi-agent framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the creation of complex mathematical visualizations alongside coherent problem text. Our approach not only simplifies the generation of precise visual aids but also aligns these aids with the problem's core mathematical concepts, improving both problem creation and assessment. By integrating multiple agents, each responsible for distinct tasks such as numeric calculation, geometry validation, and visualization, our system delivers mathematically accurate and contextually relevant problems with visual aids. Evaluation across Geometry and Function problem types shows that our method significantly outperforms basic LLMs in terms of text coherence, consistency, relevance and similarity, while maintaining the essential geometrical and functional integrity of the original problems. Although some challenges remain in ensuring consistent visual outputs, our framework demonstrates the immense potential of LLMs in transforming the way educators generate and utilize visual aids in math education.


Relative Pose Estimation for Nonholonomic Robot Formation with UWB-IO Measurements

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This article studies the problem of distributed formation control for multiple robots by using onboard ultra wide band (UWB) ranging and inertial odometer (IO) measurements. Although this problem has been widely studied, a fundamental limitation of most works is that they require each robot's pose and sensor measurements are expressed in a common reference frame. However, it is inapplicable for nonholonomic robot formations due to the practical difficulty of aligning IO measurements of individual robot in a common frame. To address this problem, firstly, a concurrent-learning based estimator is firstly proposed to achieve relative localization between neighboring robots in a local frame. Different from most relative localization methods in a global frame, both relative position and orientation in a local frame are estimated with only UWB ranging and IO measurements. Secondly, to deal with information loss caused by directed communication topology, a cooperative localization algorithm is introduced to estimate the relative pose to the leader robot. Thirdly, based on the theoretical results on relative pose estimation, a distributed formation tracking controller is proposed for nonholonomic robots. Both gazebo physical simulation and real-world experiments conducted on networked TurtleBot3 nonholonomic robots are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.


Data-Driven Distributed Common Operational Picture from Heterogeneous Platforms using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The integration of unmanned platforms equipped with advanced sensors promises to enhance situational awareness and mitigate the "fog of war" in military operations. However, managing the vast influx of data from these platforms poses a significant challenge for Command and Control (C2) systems. This study presents a novel multi-agent learning framework to address this challenge. Our method enables autonomous and secure communication between agents and humans, which in turn enables real-time formation of an interpretable Common Operational Picture (COP). Each agent encodes its perceptions and actions into compact vectors, which are then transmitted, received and decoded to form a COP encompassing the current state of all agents (friendly and enemy) on the battlefield. Using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), we jointly train COP models and agent's action selection policies. We demonstrate resilience to degraded conditions such as denied GPS and disrupted communications. Experimental validation is performed in the Starcraft-2 simulation environment to evaluate the precision of the COPs and robustness of policies. We report less than 5% error in COPs and policies resilient to various adversarial conditions. In summary, our contributions include a method for autonomous COP formation, increased resilience through distributed prediction, and joint training of COP models and multi-agent RL policies. This research advances adaptive and resilient C2, facilitating effective control of heterogeneous unmanned platforms.


Autonomous Industrial Control using an Agentic Framework with Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As chemical plants evolve towards full autonomy, the need for effective fault handling and control in dynamic, unpredictable environments becomes increasingly critical. This paper proposes an innovative approach to industrial automation, introducing validation and reprompting architectures utilizing large language model (LLM)-based autonomous control agents. The proposed agentic system, comprising of operator, validator, and reprompter agents, enables autonomous management of control tasks, adapting to unforeseen disturbances without human intervention. By utilizing validation and reprompting architectures, the framework allows agents to recover from errors and continuously improve decision-making in real-time industrial scenarios. We hypothesize that this mechanism will enhance performance and reliability across a variety of LLMs, offering a path toward fully autonomous systems capable of handling unexpected challenges, paving the way for robust, adaptive control in complex industrial environments. To demonstrate the concept's effectiveness, we created a simple case study involving a temperature control experiment embedded on a microcontroller device, validating the proposed approach.


Topology-aware Reinforcement Feature Space Reconstruction for Graph Data

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Feature space is an environment where data points are vectorized to represent the original dataset. Reconstructing a good feature space is essential to augment the AI power of data, improve model generalization, and increase the availability of downstream ML models. Existing literature, such as feature transformation and feature selection, is labor-intensive (e.g., heavy reliance on empirical experience) and mostly designed for tabular data. Moreover, these methods regard data samples as independent, which ignores the unique topological structure when applied to graph data, thus resulting in a suboptimal reconstruction feature space. Can we consider the topological information to automatically reconstruct feature space for graph data without heavy experiential knowledge? To fill this gap, we leverage topology-aware reinforcement learning to automate and optimize feature space reconstruction for graph data. Our approach combines the extraction of core subgraphs to capture essential structural information with a graph neural network (GNN) to encode topological features and reduce computing complexity. Then we introduce three reinforcement agents within a hierarchical structure to systematically generate meaningful features through an iterative process, effectively reconstructing the feature space. This framework provides a principled solution for attributed graph feature space reconstruction. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of including topological awareness.


Responsibility in a Multi-Value Strategic Setting

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Responsibility is a key notion in multi-agent systems and in creating safe, reliable and ethical AI. In particular, the evaluation of choices based on responsibility is useful for making robustly good decisions in unpredictable domains. However, most previous work on responsibility has only considered responsibility for single outcomes, limiting its application. In this paper we present a model for responsibility attribution in a multi-agent, multi-value setting. We also expand our model to cover responsibility anticipation, demonstrating how considerations of responsibility can help an agent to select strategies that are in line with its values. In particular we show that non-dominated regret-minimising strategies reliably minimise an agent's expected degree of responsibility.


A Retrospective on the Robot Air Hockey Challenge: Benchmarking Robust, Reliable, and Safe Learning Techniques for Real-world Robotics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning methods have a groundbreaking impact in many application domains, but their application on real robotic platforms is still limited. Despite the many challenges associated with combining machine learning technology with robotics, robot learning remains one of the most promising directions for enhancing the capabilities of robots. When deploying learning-based approaches on real robots, extra effort is required to address the challenges posed by various real-world factors. To investigate the key factors influencing real-world deployment and to encourage original solutions from different researchers, we organized the Robot Air Hockey Challenge at the NeurIPS 2023 conference. We selected the air hockey task as a benchmark, encompassing low-level robotics problems and high-level tactics. Different from other machine learning-centric benchmarks, participants need to tackle practical challenges in robotics, such as the sim-to-real gap, low-level control issues, safety problems, real-time requirements, and the limited availability of real-world data. Furthermore, we focus on a dynamic environment, removing the typical assumption of quasi-static motions of other real-world benchmarks. The competition's results show that solutions combining learning-based approaches with prior knowledge outperform those relying solely on data when real-world deployment is challenging. Our ablation study reveals which real-world factors may be overlooked when building a learning-based solution. The successful real-world air hockey deployment of best-performing agents sets the foundation for future competitions and follow-up research directions.


Expectation vs. Reality: Towards Verification of Psychological Games

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Game theory provides an effective way to model strategic interactions among rational agents. In the context of formal verification, these ideas can be used to produce guarantees on the correctness of multi-agent systems, with a diverse range of applications from computer security to autonomous driving. Psychological games (PGs) were developed as a way to model and analyse agents with belief-dependent motivations, opening up the possibility to model how human emotions can influence behaviour. In PGs, players' utilities depend not only on what actually happens (which strategies players choose to adopt), but also on what the players had expected to happen (their belief as to the strategies that would be played). Despite receiving much attention in fields such as economics and psychology, very little consideration has been given to their applicability to problems in computer science, nor to practical algorithms and tool support. In this paper, we start to bridge that gap, proposing methods to solve PGs and implementing them within PRISM-games, a formal verification tool for stochastic games. We discuss how to model these games, highlight specific challenges for their analysis and illustrate the usefulness of our approach on several case studies, including human behaviour in traffic scenarios.


The influence of persona and conversational task on social interactions with a LLM-controlled embodied conversational agent

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in conversational tasks. Embodying an LLM as a virtual human allows users to engage in face-to-face social interactions in Virtual Reality. However, the influence of person- and task-related factors in social interactions with LLM-controlled agents remains unclear. In this study, forty-six participants interacted with a virtual agent whose persona was manipulated as extravert or introvert in three different conversational tasks (small talk, knowledge test, convincing). Social-evaluation, emotional experience, and realism were assessed using ratings. Interactive engagement was measured by quantifying participants' words and conversational turns. Finally, we measured participants' willingness to ask the agent for help during the knowledge test. Our findings show that the extraverted agent was more positively evaluated, elicited a more pleasant experience and greater engagement, and was assessed as more realistic compared to the introverted agent. Whereas persona did not affect the tendency to ask for help, participants were generally more confident in the answer when they had help of the LLM. Variation of personality traits of LLM-controlled embodied virtual agents, therefore, affects social-emotional processing and behavior in virtual interactions. Embodied virtual agents allow the presentation of naturalistic social encounters in a virtual environment.