In open-world environments like Minecraft, existing agents face challenges in continuously learning structured knowledge, particularly causality. These challenges stem from the opacity inherent in black-box models and an excessive reliance on prior knowledge during training, which impair their interpretability and generalization capability. To this end, we introduce ADAM, An emboDied causal Agent in Minecraft, that can autonomously navigate the open world, perceive multimodal contexts, learn causal world knowledge, and tackle complex tasks through lifelong learning. ADAM is empowered by four key components: 1) an interaction module, enabling the agent to execute actions while documenting the interaction processes; 2) a causal model module, tasked with constructing an ever-growing causal graph from scratch, which enhances interpretability and diminishes reliance on prior knowledge; 3) a controller module, comprising a planner, an actor, and a memory pool, which uses the learned causal graph to accomplish tasks; 4) a perception module, powered by multimodal large language models, which enables ADAM to perceive like a human player. Extensive experiments show that ADAM constructs an almost perfect causal graph from scratch, enabling efficient task decomposition and execution with strong interpretability. Notably, in our modified Minecraft games where no prior knowledge is available, ADAM maintains its performance and shows remarkable robustness and generalization capability. ADAM pioneers a novel paradigm that integrates causal methods and embodied agents in a synergistic manner. Our project page is at https://opencausalab.github.io/ADAM.

Large language model advancements have enabled the development of multi-agent frameworks to tackle complex, real-world problems such as to automate tasks that require interactions with diverse tools, reasoning, and human collaboration. We present MARCO, a Multi-Agent Real-time Chat Orchestration framework for automating tasks using LLMs. MARCO addresses key challenges in utilizing LLMs for complex, multi-step task execution. It incorporates robust guardrails to steer LLM behavior, validate outputs, and recover from errors that stem from inconsistent output formatting, function and parameter hallucination, and lack of domain knowledge. Through extensive experiments we demonstrate MARCO's superior performance with 94.48% and 92.74% accuracy on task execution for Digital Restaurant Service Platform conversations and Retail conversations datasets respectively along with 44.91% improved latency and 33.71% cost reduction. We also report effects of guardrails in performance gain along with comparisons of various LLM models, both open-source and proprietary. The modular and generic design of MARCO allows it to be adapted for automating tasks across domains and to execute complex usecases through multi-turn interactions.

Advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing the development of autonomous agentic systems by enabling dynamic, context-aware task decomposition and automated tool selection. These sophisticated systems possess significant automation potential across various industries, managing complex tasks, interacting with external systems to enhance knowledge, and executing actions independently. This paper presents three primary contributions to advance this field: - Advanced Agentic Framework: A system that handles multi-hop queries, generates and executes task graphs, selects appropriate tools, and adapts to real-time changes. - Novel Evaluation Metrics: Introduction of Node F1 Score, Structural Similarity Index (SSI), and Tool F1 Score to comprehensively assess agentic systems. - Specialized Dataset: Development of an AsyncHow-based dataset for analyzing agent behavior across different task complexities. Our findings reveal that asynchronous and dynamic task graph decomposition significantly enhances system responsiveness and scalability, particularly for complex, multi-step tasks. Detailed analysis shows that structural and node-level metrics are crucial for sequential tasks, while tool-related metrics are more important for parallel tasks. Specifically, the Structural Similarity Index (SSI) is the most significant predictor of performance in sequential tasks, and the Tool F1 Score is essential for parallel tasks. These insights highlight the need for balanced evaluation methods that capture both structural and operational dimensions of agentic systems. Additionally, our evaluation framework, validated through empirical analysis and statistical testing, provides valuable insights for improving the adaptability and reliability of agentic systems in dynamic environments.

Aligning AI agents with human values is challenging due to diverse and subjective notions of values. Standard alignment methods often aggregate crowd feedback, which can result in the suppression of unique or minority preferences. We introduce Interactive-Reflective Dialogue Alignment, a method that iteratively engages users in reflecting on and specifying their subjective value definitions. This system learns individual value definitions through language-model-based preference elicitation and constructs personalized reward models that can be used to align AI behaviour. We evaluated our system through two studies with 30 participants, one focusing on "respect" and the other on ethical decision-making in autonomous vehicles. Our findings demonstrate diverse definitions of value-aligned behaviour and show that our system can accurately capture each person's unique understanding. This approach enables personalized alignment and can inform more representative and interpretable collective alignment strategies.

As AI closely interacts with human society, it is crucial to ensure that its decision-making is safe, altruistic, and aligned with human ethical and moral values. However, existing research on embedding ethical and moral considerations into AI remains insufficient, and previous external constraints based on principles and rules are inadequate to provide AI with long-term stability and generalization capabilities. In contrast, the intrinsic altruistic motivation based on empathy is more willing, spontaneous, and robust. Therefore, this paper is dedicated to autonomously driving intelligent agents to acquire morally behaviors through human-like affective empathy mechanisms. We draw inspiration from the neural mechanism of human brain's moral intuitive decision-making, and simulate the mirror neuron system to construct a brain-inspired affective empathy-driven altruistic decision-making model. Here, empathy directly impacts dopamine release to form intrinsic altruistic motivation. Based on the principle of moral utilitarianism, we design the moral reward function that integrates intrinsic empathy and extrinsic self-task goals. A comprehensive experimental scenario incorporating empathetic processes, personal objectives, and altruistic goals is developed. The proposed model enables the agent to make consistent moral decisions (prioritizing altruism) by balancing self-interest with the well-being of others. We further introduce inhibitory neurons to regulate different levels of empathy and verify the positive correlation between empathy levels and altruistic preferences, yielding conclusions consistent with findings from psychological behavioral experiments. This work provides a feasible solution for the development of ethical AI by leveraging the intrinsic human-like empathy mechanisms, and contributes to the harmonious coexistence between humans and AI.

Emergent communication, driven by generative models, enables agents to develop a shared language for describing their individual views of the same objects through interactions. Meanwhile, self-supervised learning (SSL), particularly SimSiam, uses discriminative representation learning to make representations of augmented views of the same data point closer in the representation space. Building on the prior work of VI-SimSiam, which incorporates a generative and Bayesian perspective into the SimSiam framework via variational inference (VI) interpretation, we propose SimSiam+VAE, a unified approach for both representation learning and emergent communication. SimSiam+VAE integrates a variational autoencoder (VAE) into the predictor of the SimSiam network to enhance representation learning and capture uncertainty. Experimental results show that SimSiam+VAE outperforms both SimSiam and VI-SimSiam. We further extend this model into a communication framework called the SimSiam Naming Game (SSNG), which applies the generative and Bayesian approach based on VI to develop internal representations and emergent language, while utilizing the discriminative process of SimSiam to facilitate mutual understanding between agents. In experiments with established models, despite the dynamic alternation of agent roles during interactions, SSNG demonstrates comparable performance to the referential game and slightly outperforms the Metropolis-Hastings naming game.

A major challenge for Multi-Agent Systems is enabling agents to adapt dynamically to diverse environments in which opponents and teammates may continually change. Agents trained using conventional methods tend to excel only within the confines of their training cohorts; their performance drops significantly when confronting unfamiliar agents. To address this shortcoming, we introduce Inverse Attention Agents that adopt concepts from the Theory of Mind, implemented algorithmically using an attention mechanism and trained in an end-to-end manner. Crucial to determining the final actions of these agents, the weights in their attention model explicitly represent attention to different goals. We furthermore propose an inverse attention network that deduces the ToM of agents based on observations and prior actions. The network infers the attentional states of other agents, thereby refining the attention weights to adjust the agent's final action. We conduct experiments in a continuous environment, tackling demanding tasks encompassing cooperation, competition, and a blend of both. They demonstrate that the inverse attention network successfully infers the attention of other agents, and that this information improves agent performance. Additional human experiments show that, compared to baseline agent models, our inverse attention agents exhibit superior cooperation with humans and better emulate human behaviors.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in numerous Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, they still struggle with financial question answering (QA), particularly when numerical reasoning is required. Recently, LLM-based multi-agent frameworks have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in multi-step reasoning, which is crucial for financial QA tasks as it involves extracting relevant information from tables and text and then performing numerical reasoning on the extracted data to infer answers. In this study, we propose a multi-agent framework incorporating a critic agent that reflects on the reasoning steps and final answers for each question. Additionally, we enhance our system by adding multiple critic agents, each focusing on a specific aspect of the answer. Our results indicate that this framework significantly improves performance compared to single-agent reasoning, with an average performance increase of 15% for the LLaMA3-8B model and 5% for the LLaMA3-70B model. Furthermore, our framework performs on par with, and in some cases surpasses, larger single-agent LLMs such as LLaMA3.1-405B and GPT-4o-mini, though it falls slightly short compared to Claude-3.5 Sonnet. Overall, our framework presents an effective solution to enhance open-source LLMs for financial QA tasks, offering a cost-effective alternative to larger models like Claude-3.5 Sonnet.

Collective perception is a fundamental problem in swarm robotics, often cast as best-of-$n$ decision-making. Past studies involve robots with perfect sensing or with small numbers of faulty robots. We previously addressed these limitations by proposing an algorithm, here referred to as Minimalistic Collective Perception (MCP) [arxiv:2209.12858], to reach correct decisions despite the entire swarm having severely damaged sensors. However, this algorithm assumes that sensor accuracy is known, which may be infeasible in reality. In this paper, we eliminate this assumption to (i) investigate the decline of estimation performance and (ii) introduce an Adaptive Sensor Degradation Filter (ASDF) to mitigate the decline. We combine the MCP algorithm and a hypothesis test to enable adaptive self-calibration of robots' assumed sensor accuracy. We validate our approach across several parameters of interest. Our findings show that estimation performance by a swarm with correctly known accuracy is superior to that by a swarm unaware of its accuracy. However, the ASDF drastically mitigates the damage, even reaching the performance levels of robots aware a priori of their correct accuracy.

The Transformer model has demonstrated success across a wide range of domains, including in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) where the Multi-Agent Transformer (MAT) has emerged as a leading algorithm in the field. However, a significant drawback of Transformer models is their quadratic computational complexity relative to input size, making them computationally expensive when scaling to larger inputs. This limitation restricts MAT's scalability in environments with many agents. Recently, State-Space Models (SSMs) have gained attention due to their computational efficiency, but their application in MARL remains unexplored. In this work, we investigate the use of Mamba, a recent SSM, in MARL and assess whether it can match the performance of MAT while providing significant improvements in efficiency. We introduce a modified version of MAT that incorporates standard and bi-directional Mamba blocks, as well as a novel "cross-attention" Mamba block. Extensive testing shows that our Multi-Agent Mamba (MAM) matches the performance of MAT across multiple standard multi-agent environments, while offering superior scalability to larger agent scenarios. This is significant for the MARL community, because it indicates that SSMs could replace Transformers without compromising performance, whilst also supporting more effective scaling to higher numbers of agents. Our project page is available at https://sites.google.com/view/multi-agent-mamba .