Agents
AI-Driven Human-Autonomy Teaming in Tactical Operations: Proposed Framework, Challenges, and Future Directions
Hagos, Desta Haileselassie, Alami, Hassan El, Rawat, Danda B.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, particularly machine learning techniques, are rapidly transforming tactical operations by augmenting human decision-making capabilities. This paper explores AI-driven Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT) as a transformative approach, focusing on how it empowers human decision-making in complex environments. While trust and explainability continue to pose significant challenges, our exploration focuses on the potential of AI-driven HAT to transform tactical operations. By improving situational awareness and supporting more informed decision-making, AI-driven HAT can enhance the effectiveness and safety of such operations. To this end, we propose a comprehensive framework that addresses the key components of AI-driven HAT, including trust and transparency, optimal function allocation between humans and AI, situational awareness, and ethical considerations. The proposed framework can serve as a foundation for future research and development in the field. By identifying and discussing critical research challenges and knowledge gaps in this framework, our work aims to guide the advancement of AI-driven HAT for optimizing tactical operations. We emphasize the importance of developing scalable and ethical AI-driven HAT systems that ensure seamless human-machine collaboration, prioritize ethical considerations, enhance model transparency through Explainable AI (XAI) techniques, and effectively manage the cognitive load of human operators.
Deploying Ten Thousand Robots: Scalable Imitation Learning for Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding
Jiang, He, Wang, Yutong, Veerapaneni, Rishi, Duhan, Tanishq, Sartoretti, Guillaume, Li, Jiaoyang
Abstract-- Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding (LMAPF) is a variant of MAPF where agents are continually assigned new goals, necessitating frequent re-planning to accommodate these dynamic changes. Recently, this field has embraced learning-based methods, which reactively generate single-step actions based on individual local observations. However, it is still challenging for them to match the performance of the best search-based algorithms, especially in large-scale settings. This work proposes an imitation-learning-based LMAPF solver that introduces a novel communication module and systematic single-step collision resolution and global guidance techniques. Details are given in Table III. However, most learning-based solvers have only been tested on small-scale instances involving tens I. Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) [1] is the problem of Additionally, most learning papers emphasize the scalability finding collision-free paths on a given graph for a set of of their solvers compared to optimal or boundedsuboptimal agents, each assigned a start and goal location. This is largely because these search-based new goals to agents that reach their current ones. The main solvers struggle with computational complexity, as solving target of LMAPF is to maximize the throughput, which MAPF optimally is NP-hard.
Evolution with Opponent-Learning Awareness
Bouteiller, Yann, Soma, Karthik, Beltrame, Giovanni
The universe involves many independent co-learning agents as an ever-evolving part of our observed environment. Yet, in practice, Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) applications are usually constrained to small, homogeneous populations and remain computationally intensive. In this paper, we study how large heterogeneous populations of learning agents evolve in normal-form games. We show how, under assumptions commonly made in the multi-armed bandit literature, Multi-Agent Policy Gradient closely resembles the Replicator Dynamic, and we further derive a fast, parallelizable implementation of Opponent-Learning Awareness tailored for evolutionary simulations. This enables us to simulate the evolution of very large populations made of heterogeneous co-learning agents, under both naive and advanced learning strategies. We demonstrate our approach in simulations of 200,000 agents, evolving in the classic games of Hawk-Dove, Stag-Hunt, and Rock-Paper-Scissors. Each game highlights distinct ways in which Opponent-Learning Awareness affects evolution.
FairStream: Fair Multimedia Streaming Benchmark for Reinforcement Learning Agents
Weil, Jannis, Ringsdorf, Jonas, Barthel, Julian, Chen, Yi-Ping Phoebe, Meuser, Tobias
Multimedia streaming accounts for the majority of traffic in today's internet. Mechanisms like adaptive bitrate streaming control the bitrate of a stream based on the estimated bandwidth, ideally resulting in smooth playback and a good Quality of Experience (QoE). However, selecting the optimal bitrate is challenging under volatile network conditions. This motivated researchers to train Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents for multimedia streaming. The considered training environments are often simplified, leading to promising results with limited applicability. Additionally, the QoE fairness across multiple streams is seldom considered by recent RL approaches. With this work, we propose a novel multi-agent environment that comprises multiple challenges of fair multimedia streaming: partial observability, multiple objectives, agent heterogeneity and asynchronicity. We provide and analyze baseline approaches across five different traffic classes to gain detailed insights into the behavior of the considered agents, and show that the commonly used Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm is outperformed by a simple greedy heuristic. Future work includes the adaptation of multi-agent RL algorithms and further expansions of the environment.
You Can't Always Get What You Want : Games of Ordered Preference
Lee, Dong Ho, Peters, Lasse, Fridovich-Keil, David
We study noncooperative games, in which each agent's objective is composed of a sequence of ordered-and potentially conflicting-preferences. Problems of this type naturally model a wide variety of scenarios: for example, drivers at a busy intersection must balance the desire to make forward progress with the risk of collision. Mathematically, these problems possess a nested structure, and to behave properly agents must prioritize their most important preference, and only consider less important preferences to the extent that they do not compromise performance on more important ones. We consider multi-agent, noncooperative variants of these problems, and seek generalized Nash equilibria in which each agent's decision reflects both its hierarchy of preferences and other agents' actions. We make two key contributions. First, we develop a recursive approach for deriving the first-order optimality conditions of each agent's nested problem. Second, we propose a sequence of increasingly tight relaxations, each of which can be transcribed as a mixed complementarity problem and solved via existing methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach reliably converges to equilibrium solutions that strictly reflect agents' individual ordered preferences.
Does Worst-Performing Agent Lead the Pack? Analyzing Agent Dynamics in Unified Distributed SGD
Hu, Jie, Ma, Yi-Ting, Eun, Do Young
Distributed learning is essential to train machine learning algorithms across heterogeneous agents while maintaining data privacy. We conduct an asymptotic analysis of Unified Distributed SGD (UD-SGD), exploring a variety of communication patterns, including decentralized SGD and local SGD within Federated Learning (FL), as well as the increasing communication interval in the FL setting. In this study, we assess how different sampling strategies, such as i.i.d. sampling, shuffling, and Markovian sampling, affect the convergence speed of UD-SGD by considering the impact of agent dynamics on the limiting covariance matrix as described in the Central Limit Theorem (CLT). Our findings not only support existing theories on linear speedup and asymptotic network independence, but also theoretically and empirically show how efficient sampling strategies employed by individual agents contribute to overall convergence in UD-SGD. Simulations reveal that a few agents using highly efficient sampling can achieve or surpass the performance of the majority employing moderately improved strategies, providing new insights beyond traditional analyses focusing on the worst-performing agent.
AutoPenBench: Benchmarking Generative Agents for Penetration Testing
Gioacchini, Luca, Mellia, Marco, Drago, Idilio, Delsanto, Alexander, Siracusano, Giuseppe, Bifulco, Roberto
Generative AI agents, software systems powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), are emerging as a promising approach to automate cybersecurity tasks. Among the others, penetration testing is a challenging field due to the task complexity and the diverse strategies to simulate cyber-attacks. Despite growing interest and initial studies in automating penetration testing with generative agents, there remains a significant gap in the form of a comprehensive and standard framework for their evaluation and development. This paper introduces AutoPenBench, an open benchmark for evaluating generative agents in automated penetration testing. We present a comprehensive framework that includes 33 tasks, each representing a vulnerable system that the agent has to attack. Tasks are of increasing difficulty levels, including in-vitro and real-world scenarios. We assess the agent performance with generic and specific milestones that allow us to compare results in a standardised manner and understand the limits of the agent under test. We show the benefits of AutoPenBench by testing two agent architectures: a fully autonomous and a semi-autonomous supporting human interaction. We compare their performance and limitations. For example, the fully autonomous agent performs unsatisfactorily achieving a 21% Success Rate (SR) across the benchmark, solving 27% of the simple tasks and only one real-world task. In contrast, the assisted agent demonstrates substantial improvements, with 64% of SR. AutoPenBench allows us also to observe how different LLMs like GPT-4o or OpenAI o1 impact the ability of the agents to complete the tasks. We believe that our benchmark fills the gap with a standard and flexible framework to compare penetration testing agents on a common ground. We hope to extend AutoPenBench along with the research community by making it available under https://github.com/lucagioacchini/auto-pen-bench.
Heterogeneous Interaction Modeling With Reduced Accumulated Error for Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction
Dynamical complex systems composed of interactive heterogeneous agents are prevalent in the world, including urban traffic systems and social networks. Modeling the interactions among agents is the key to understanding and predicting the dynamics of the complex system, e.g., predicting the trajectories of traffic participants in the city. Compared with interaction modeling in homogeneous systems such as pedestrians in a crowded scene, heterogeneous interaction modeling is less explored. Worse still, the error accumulation problem becomes more severe since the interactions are more complex. To tackle the two problems, this paper proposes heterogeneous interaction modeling with reduced accumulated error for multi-agent trajectory prediction. Based on the historical trajectories, our method infers the dynamic interaction graphs among agents, featured by directed interacting relations and interacting effects. A heterogeneous attention mechanism is defined on the interaction graphs for aggregating the influence from heterogeneous neighbors to the target agent. To alleviate the error accumulation problem, this paper analyzes the error sources from the spatial and temporal perspectives, and proposes to introduce the graph entropy and the mixup training strategy for reducing the two types of errors respectively. Our method is examined on three real-world datasets containing heterogeneous agents, and the experimental results validate the superiority of our method.
Asynchronous Tool Usage for Real-Time Agents
Ginart, Antonio A., Kodali, Naveen, Lee, Jason, Xiong, Caiming, Savarese, Silvio, Emmons, John
While frontier large language models (LLMs) are capable tool-using agents, current AI systems still operate in a strict turn-based fashion, oblivious to passage of time. This synchronous design forces user queries and tool-use to occur sequentially, preventing the systems from multitasking and reducing interactivity. To address this limitation, we introduce asynchronous AI agents capable of parallel processing and real-time tool-use. Our key contribution is an event-driven finite-state machine architecture for agent execution and prompting, integrated with automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech. Drawing inspiration from the concepts originally developed for real-time operating systems, this work presents both a conceptual framework and practical tools for creating AI agents capable of fluid, multitasking interactions.
AutoGLM: Autonomous Foundation Agents for GUIs
Liu, Xiao, Qin, Bo, Liang, Dongzhu, Dong, Guang, Lai, Hanyu, Zhang, Hanchen, Zhao, Hanlin, Iong, Iat Long, Sun, Jiadai, Wang, Jiaqi, Gao, Junjie, Shan, Junjun, Liu, Kangning, Zhang, Shudan, Yao, Shuntian, Cheng, Siyi, Yao, Wentao, Zhao, Wenyi, Liu, Xinghan, Liu, Xinyi, Chen, Xinying, Yang, Xinyue, Yang, Yang, Xu, Yifan, Yang, Yu, Wang, Yujia, Xu, Yulin, Qi, Zehan, Dong, Yuxiao, Tang, Jie
We present AutoGLM, a new series in the ChatGLM family, designed to serve as foundation agents for autonomous control of digital devices through Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). While foundation models excel at acquiring human knowledge, they often struggle with decision-making in dynamic real-world environments, limiting their progress toward artificial general intelligence. This limitation underscores the importance of developing foundation agents capable of learning through autonomous environmental interactions by reinforcing existing models. Focusing on Web Browser and Phone as representative GUI scenarios, we have developed AutoGLM as a practical foundation agent system for real-world GUI interactions. Our approach integrates a comprehensive suite of techniques and infrastructures to create deployable agent systems suitable for user delivery. Through this development, we have derived two key insights: First, the design of an appropriate "intermediate interface" for GUI control is crucial, enabling the separation of planning and grounding behaviors, which require distinct optimization for flexibility and accuracy respectively. Second, we have developed a novel progressive training framework that enables self-evolving online curriculum reinforcement learning for AutoGLM. Our evaluations demonstrate AutoGLM's effectiveness across multiple domains. For web browsing, AutoGLM achieves a 55.2% success rate on VAB-WebArena-Lite (improving to 59.1% with a second attempt) and 96.2% on OpenTable evaluation tasks. In Android device control, AutoGLM attains a 36.2% success rate on AndroidLab (VAB-Mobile) and 89.7% on common tasks in popular Chinese APPs.