Understanding species dynamics in heterogeneous environments is essential for ecosystem studies. Traditional models assumed homogeneous habitats, but recent approaches include spatial and temporal variability, highlighting species migration. We adopt starvation-driven diffusion (SDD) models as nonlinear diffusion to describe species dispersal based on local resource conditions, showing advantages for species survival. However, accurate prediction remains challenging due to model simplifications. This study uses multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) with deep Q-networks (DQN) to simulate single species and predator-prey interactions, incorporating SDD-type rewards. Our simulations reveal evolutionary dispersal strategies, providing insights into species dispersal mechanisms and validating traditional mathematical models.

Videos are often used to learn or extract the necessary information to complete tasks in ways different than what text and static imagery alone can provide. However, many existing agent benchmarks neglect long-context video understanding, instead focusing on text or static image inputs. To bridge this gap, we introduce VideoWebArena (VideoWA), a benchmark for evaluating the capabilities of long-context multimodal agents for video understanding. VideoWA consists of 2,021 web agent tasks based on manually crafted video tutorials, which total almost four hours of content. For our benchmark, we define a taxonomy of long-context video-based agent tasks with two main areas of focus: skill retention and factual retention. While skill retention tasks evaluate whether an agent can use a given human demonstration to complete a task efficiently, the factual retention task evaluates whether an agent can retrieve instruction-relevant information from a video to complete a task. We find that the best model achieves 13.3% success on factual retention tasks and 45.8% on factual retention QA pairs, far below human performance at 73.9% and 79.3%, respectively. On skill retention tasks, long-context models perform worse with tutorials than without, exhibiting a 5% performance decrease in WebArena tasks and a 10.3% decrease in VisualWebArena tasks. Our work highlights the need to improve the agentic abilities of long-context multimodal models and provides a testbed for future development with long-context video agents.

A World Model is a compressed spatial and temporal representation of a real world environment that allows one to train an agent or execute planning methods. However, world models are typically trained on observations from the real world environment, and they usually do not enable learning policies for other real environments. We propose One-Shot World Model (OSWM), a transformer world model that is learned in an in-context learning fashion from purely synthetic data sampled from a prior distribution. Our prior is composed of multiple randomly initialized neural networks, where each network models the dynamics of each state and reward dimension of a desired target environment. We adopt the supervised learning procedure of Prior-Fitted Networks by masking next-state and reward at random context positions and query OSWM to make probabilistic predictions based on the remaining transition context. During inference time, OSWM is able to quickly adapt to the dynamics of a simple grid world, as well as the CartPole gym and a custom control environment by providing 1k transition steps as context and is then able to successfully train environment-solving agent policies. However, transferring to more complex environments remains a challenge, currently. Despite these limitations, we see this work as an important stepping-stone in the pursuit of learning world models purely from synthetic data.

In the field of automated programming, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated foundational generative capabilities when given detailed task descriptions. However, their current functionalities are primarily limited to function-level development, restricting their effectiveness in complex project environments and specific application scenarios, such as complicated image-processing tasks. This paper presents a multi-agent framework that utilises a hybrid set of LLMs, including GPT-4o and locally deployed open-source models, which collaboratively complete auto-programming tasks. Each agent plays a distinct role in the software development cycle, collectively forming a virtual organisation that works together to produce software products. By establishing a tree-structured thought distribution and development mechanism across project, module, and function levels, this framework offers a cost-effective and efficient solution for code generation. We evaluated our approach using benchmark datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that VisionCoder significantly outperforms existing methods in image processing auto-programming tasks.

The Internet has significantly expanded the potential for global collaboration, allowing millions of users to contribute to collective projects like Wikipedia. While prior work has assessed the success of online collaborations, most approaches are time-agnostic, evaluating success without considering its longevity. Research on the factors that ensure the long-term preservation of high-quality standards in online collaboration is scarce. In this study, we address this gap. We propose a novel metric, `Sustainable Success,' which measures the ability of collaborative efforts to maintain their quality over time. Using Wikipedia as a case study, we introduce the SustainPedia dataset, which compiles data from over 40K Wikipedia articles, including each article's sustainable success label and more than 300 explanatory features such as edit history, user experience, and team composition. Using this dataset, we develop machine learning models to predict the sustainable success of Wikipedia articles. Our best-performing model achieves a high AU-ROC score of 0.88 on average. Our analysis reveals important insights. For example, we find that the longer an article takes to be recognized as high-quality, the more likely it is to maintain that status over time (i.e., be sustainable). Additionally, user experience emerged as the most critical predictor of sustainability. Our analysis provides insights into broader collective actions beyond Wikipedia (e.g., online activism, crowdsourced open-source software), where the same social dynamics that drive success on Wikipedia might play a role. We make all data and code used for this study publicly available for further research.

Digital agents capable of automating complex computer tasks have attracted considerable attention due to their immense potential to enhance human-computer interaction. However, existing agent methods exhibit deficiencies in their generalization and specialization capabilities, especially in handling open-ended computer tasks in real-world environments. Inspired by the rich functionality of the App store, we present AgentStore, a scalable platform designed to dynamically integrate heterogeneous agents for automating computer tasks. AgentStore empowers users to integrate third-party agents, allowing the system to continuously enrich its capabilities and adapt to rapidly evolving operating systems. Additionally, we propose a novel core \textbf{MetaAgent} with the \textbf{AgentToken} strategy to efficiently manage diverse agents and utilize their specialized and generalist abilities for both domain-specific and system-wide tasks. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks demonstrate that AgentStore surpasses the limitations of previous systems with narrow capabilities, particularly achieving a significant improvement from 11.21\% to 23.85\% on the OSWorld benchmark, more than doubling the previous results. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative results further demonstrate AgentStore's ability to enhance agent systems in both generalization and specialization, underscoring its potential for developing the specialized generalist computer assistant. All our codes will be made publicly available in https://chengyou-jia.github.io/AgentStore-Home.

Pricing algorithms have demonstrated the capability to learn tacit collusion that is largely unaddressed by current regulations. Their increasing use in markets, including oligopolistic industries with a history of collusion, calls for closer examination by competition authorities. In this paper, we extend the study of tacit collusion in learning algorithms from basic pricing games to more complex markets characterized by perishable goods with fixed supply and sell-by dates, such as airline tickets, perishables, and hotel rooms. We formalize collusion within this framework and introduce a metric based on price levels under both the competitive (Nash) equilibrium and collusive (monopolistic) optimum. Since no analytical expressions for these price levels exist, we propose an efficient computational approach to derive them. Through experiments, we demonstrate that deep reinforcement learning agents can learn to collude in this more complex domain. Additionally, we analyze the underlying mechanisms and structures of the collusive strategies these agents adopt.

An artificial intelligence startup backed by Amazon and Google says it has created an AI agent that can carry out tasks on the computer such as moving a mouse cursor and typing text. US company Anthropic said its AI model, called Claude, could now perform computing tasks including filling out forms, planning an outing and building a website. Autonomous AI agents are viewed by tech firms and investors as a potentially lucrative avenue of development for a technology whose capabilities have stunned users but can cost billions of dollars to build and operate. Anthropic, a competitor to ChatGPT owner OpenAI, is making the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model available to developers but admitted it can be prone to errors. "At this stage, it is still experimental – at times cumbersome and error-prone," the company said.

Effective Traffic Signal Control (TSC) is fundamental to urban traffic management, responsible for guiding the movement of vehicles through intersections by controlling traffic lights. The primary goals of TSC are to minimize traffic congestion, enhance traffic flow, and improve safety for both vehicles and pedestrians. Poor TSC optimization leads to increased congestion, fuel consumption, and pollution. Longer wait times at signals lead to increased fuel consumption, which not only exacerbates environmental issues through higher emissions but also results in economic losses due to delays. Moreover, inefficient TSC negatively impacts the quality of life in urban areas, contributing to increased noise and air pollution.

Strategic coordination between autonomous agents and human partners under incomplete information can be modeled as turn-based cooperative games. We extend a turn-based game under incomplete information, the shared-control game, to allow players to take multiple actions per turn rather than a single action. The extension enables the use of multi-step intent, which we hypothesize will improve performance in long-horizon tasks. To synthesize cooperative policies for the agent in this extended game, we propose an approach featuring a memory module for a running probabilistic belief of the environment dynamics and an online planning algorithm called IntentMCTS. This algorithm strategically selects the next action by leveraging any communicated multi-step intent via reward augmentation while considering the current belief. Agent-to-agent simulations in the Gnomes at Night testbed demonstrate that IntentMCTS requires fewer steps and control switches than baseline methods. A human-agent user study corroborates these findings, showing an 18.52% higher success rate compared to the heuristic baseline and a 5.56% improvement over the single-step prior work. Participants also report lower cognitive load, frustration, and higher satisfaction with the IntentMCTS agent partner.