Agents
LASER: Script Execution by Autonomous Agents for On-demand Traffic Simulation
Gao, Hao, Wang, Jingyue, Fang, Wenyang, Xu, Jingwei, Huang, Yunpeng, Chen, Taolue, Ma, Xiaoxing
Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) require diverse and safety-critical traffic scenarios for effective training and testing, but the existing data generation methods struggle to provide flexibility and scalability. We propose LASER, a novel framework that leverage large language models (LLMs) to conduct traffic simulations based on natural language inputs. The framework operates in two stages: it first generates scripts from user-provided descriptions and then executes them using autonomous agents in real time. Validated in the CARLA simulator, LASER successfully generates complex, on-demand driving scenarios, significantly improving ADS training and testing data generation. To make a great film, you need three things-the script, the script and the script.
Multi-agent cooperation through learning-aware policy gradients
Meulemans, Alexander, Kobayashi, Seijin, von Oswald, Johannes, Scherrer, Nino, Elmoznino, Eric, Richards, Blake, Lajoie, Guillaume, Arcas, Blaise Agรผera y, Sacramento, Joรฃo
Self-interested individuals often fail to cooperate, posing a fundamental challenge for multi-agent learning. How can we achieve cooperation among self-interested, independent learning agents? Promising recent work has shown that in certain tasks cooperation can be established between learning-aware agents who model the learning dynamics of each other. Here, we present the first unbiased, higher-derivative-free policy gradient algorithm for learning-aware reinforcement learning, which takes into account that other agents are themselves learning through trial and error based on multiple noisy trials. We then leverage efficient sequence models to condition behavior on long observation histories that contain traces of the learning dynamics of other agents. Training long-context policies with our algorithm leads to cooperative behavior and high returns on standard social dilemmas, including a challenging environment where temporally-extended action coordination is required. Finally, we derive from the iterated prisoner's dilemma a novel explanation for how and when cooperation arises among self-interested learning-aware agents.
Applying Neural Monte Carlo Tree Search to Unsignalized Multi-intersection Scheduling for Autonomous Vehicles
Shi, Yucheng, Wang, Wenlong, Tao, Xiaowen, Dusparic, Ivana, Cahill, Vinny
Dynamic scheduling of access to shared resources by autonomous systems is a challenging problem, characterized as being NP-hard. The complexity of this task leads to a combinatorial explosion of possibilities in highly dynamic systems where arriving requests must be continuously scheduled subject to strong safety and time constraints. An example of such a system is an unsignalized intersection, where automated vehicles' access to potential conflict zones must be dynamically scheduled. In this paper, we apply Neural Monte Carlo Tree Search (NMCTS) to the challenging task of scheduling platoons of vehicles crossing unsignalized intersections. Crucially, we introduce a transformation model that maps successive sequences of potentially conflicting road-space reservation requests from platoons of vehicles into a series of board-game-like problems and use NMCTS to search for solutions representing optimal road-space allocation schedules in the context of past allocations. To optimize search, we incorporate a prioritized re-sampling method with parallel NMCTS (PNMCTS) to improve the quality of training data. To optimize training, a curriculum learning strategy is used to train the agent to schedule progressively more complex boards culminating in overlapping boards that represent busy intersections. In a busy single four-way unsignalized intersection simulation, PNMCTS solved 95\% of unseen scenarios, reducing crossing time by 43\% in light and 52\% in heavy traffic versus first-in, first-out control. In a 3x3 multi-intersection network, the proposed method maintained free-flow in light traffic when all intersections are under control of PNMCTS and outperformed state-of-the-art RL-based traffic-light controllers in average travel time by 74.5\% and total throughput by 16\% in heavy traffic.
LLM as a code generator in Agile Model Driven Development
Sadik, Ahmed R., Brulin, Sebastian, Olhofer, Markus, Ceravola, Antonello, Joublin, Frank
Leveraging Large Language Models (LLM) like GPT4 in the auto generation of code represents a significant advancement, yet it is not without its challenges. The ambiguity inherent in natural language descriptions of software poses substantial obstacles to generating deployable, structured artifacts. This research champions Model Driven Development (MDD) as a viable strategy to overcome these challenges, proposing an Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD) approach that employs GPT4 as a code generator. This approach enhances the flexibility and scalability of the code auto generation process and offers agility that allows seamless adaptation to changes in models or deployment environments. We illustrate this by modeling a multi agent Unmanned Vehicle Fleet (UVF) system using the Unified Modeling Language (UML), significantly reducing model ambiguity by integrating the Object Constraint Language (OCL) for code structure meta modeling, and the FIPA ontology language for communication semantics meta modeling. Applying GPT4 auto generation capabilities yields Java and Python code that is compatible with the JADE and PADE frameworks, respectively. Our thorough evaluation of the auto generated code verifies its alignment with expected behaviors and identifies enhancements in agent interactions. Structurally, we assessed the complexity of code derived from a model constrained solely by OCL meta models, against that influenced by both OCL and FIPA ontology meta models. The results indicate that the ontology constrained meta model produces inherently more complex code, yet its cyclomatic complexity remains within manageable levels, suggesting that additional meta model constraints can be incorporated without exceeding the high risk threshold for complexity.
Infogent: An Agent-Based Framework for Web Information Aggregation
Reddy, Revanth Gangi, Mukherjee, Sagnik, Kim, Jeonghwan, Wang, Zhenhailong, Hakkani-Tur, Dilek, Ji, Heng
Despite seemingly performant web agents on the task-completion benchmarks, most existing methods evaluate the agents based on a presupposition: the web navigation task consists of linear sequence of actions with an end state that marks task completion. In contrast, our work focuses on web navigation for information aggregation, wherein the agent must explore different websites to gather information for a complex query. We consider web information aggregation from two different perspectives: (i) Direct API-driven Access relies on a text-only view of the Web, leveraging external tools such as Google Search API to navigate the web and a scraper to extract website contents. (ii) Interactive Visual Access uses screenshots of the webpages and requires interaction with the browser to navigate and access information. Motivated by these diverse information access settings, we introduce Infogent, a novel modular framework for web information aggregation involving three distinct components: Navigator, Extractor and Aggregator. Experiments on different information access settings demonstrate Infogent beats an existing SOTA multi-agent search framework by 7% under Direct API-Driven Access on FRAMES, and improves over an existing information-seeking web agent by 4.3% under Interactive Visual Access on AssistantBench.
Hierarchical Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Cyber Network Defense
Singh, Aditya Vikram, Rathbun, Ethan, Graham, Emma, Oakley, Lisa, Boboila, Simona, Oprea, Alina, Chin, Peter
Recent advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) have created opportunities to solve complex real-world tasks. Cybersecurity is a notable application area, where defending networks against sophisticated adversaries remains a challenging task typically performed by teams of security operators. In this work, we explore novel MARL strategies for building autonomous cyber network defenses that address challenges such as large policy spaces, partial observability, and stealthy, deceptive adversarial strategies. To facilitate efficient and generalized learning, we propose a hierarchical Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) architecture that decomposes the cyber defense task into specific sub-tasks like network investigation and host recovery. Our approach involves training sub-policies for each sub-task using PPO enhanced with domain expertise. These sub-policies are then leveraged by a master defense policy that coordinates their selection to solve complex network defense tasks. Furthermore, the sub-policies can be fine-tuned and transferred with minimal cost to defend against shifts in adversarial behavior or changes in network settings. We conduct extensive experiments using CybORG Cage 4, the state-of-the-art MARL environment for cyber defense. Comparisons with multiple baselines across different adversaries show that our hierarchical learning approach achieves top performance in terms of convergence speed, episodic return, and several interpretable metrics relevant to cybersecurity, including the fraction of clean machines on the network, precision, and false positives on recoveries.
Adversarial Multi-Agent Evaluation of Large Language Models through Iterative Debates
Bandi, Chaithanya, Harrasse, Abir
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field of natural language processing, enabling the development of increasingly sophisticated AI systems capable of generating human-like text, engaging in dialogue, and performing complex language tasks [5]. As these models grow in size and capability, the challenge of accurately evaluating their performance and aligning their outputs with human preferences has become increasingly critical [3, 15, 49]. Traditional evaluation methods, such as human assessments and automated metrics, often struggle to capture the nuances and complexities of LLM outputs, leading to a gap between model performance and user expectations [7, 17, 24]. Human evaluations are time-consuming, expensive, and prone to inconsistency and bias [12, 27], while automated metrics frequently fail to align with human judgments, particularly in open-ended generation tasks [29, 13, 22]. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework for evaluating LLM outputs using LLMs themselves as interacting agents in a courtroom-inspired, multi-agent system. Our approach draws inspiration from various fields, including decision theory, economics, psychology, legal theory, and voting theory, to develop a more dynamic, contextual, and comprehensive assessment process.
Leveraging Graph Neural Networks and Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Inventory Control in Supply Chains
Kotecha, Niki, Chanona, Antonio del Rio
Inventory control in modern supply chains has attracted significant attention due to the increasing number of disruptive shocks and the challenges posed by complex dynamics, uncertainties, and limited collaboration. Traditional methods, which often rely on static parameters, struggle to adapt to changing environments. This paper proposes a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) framework with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for state representation to address these limitations. Our approach redefines the action space by parameterizing heuristic inventory control policies, making it adaptive as the parameters dynamically adjust based on system conditions. By leveraging the inherent graph structure of supply chains, our framework enables agents to learn the system's topology, and we employ a centralized learning, decentralized execution scheme that allows agents to learn collaboratively while overcoming information-sharing constraints. Additionally, we incorporate global mean pooling and regularization techniques to enhance performance. We test the capabilities of our proposed approach on four different supply chain configurations and conduct a sensitivity analysis. This work paves the way for utilizing MARL-GNN frameworks to improve inventory management in complex, decentralized supply chain environments.
Schema-Guided Culture-Aware Complex Event Simulation with Multi-Agent Role-Play
Li, Sha, Reddy, Revanth Gangi, Nguyen, Khanh Duy, Wang, Qingyun, Fung, May, Han, Chi, Han, Jiawei, Natarajan, Kartik, Voss, Clare R., Ji, Heng
Complex news events, such as natural disasters and socio-political conflicts, require swift responses from the government and society. Relying on historical events to project the future is insufficient as such events are sparse and do not cover all possible conditions and nuanced situations. Simulation of these complex events can help better prepare and reduce the negative impact. We develop a controllable complex news event simulator guided by both the event schema representing domain knowledge about the scenario and user-provided assumptions representing case-specific conditions. As event dynamics depend on the fine-grained social and cultural context, we further introduce a geo-diverse commonsense and cultural norm-aware knowledge enhancement component. To enhance the coherence of the simulation, apart from the global timeline of events, we take an agent-based approach to simulate the individual character states, plans, and actions. By incorporating the schema and cultural norms, our generated simulations achieve much higher coherence and appropriateness and are received favorably by participants from a humanitarian assistance organization.
OSCAR: Operating System Control via State-Aware Reasoning and Re-Planning
Large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown great potential in automating complex tasks like web browsing and gaming. However, their ability to generalize across diverse applications remains limited, hindering broader utility. To address this challenge, we present OSCAR: Operating System Control via state-Aware reasoning and Re-planning. OSCAR is a generalist agent designed to autonomously navigate and interact with various desktop and mobile applications through standardized controls, such as mouse and keyboard inputs, while processing screen images to fulfill user commands. To enhance stability and adaptability, OSCAR operates as a state machine, equipped with error-handling mechanisms and task-driven re-planning, allowing it to efficiently adjust to real-time feedback and exceptions. We demonstrate OSCAR's effectiveness through extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks across desktop and mobile platforms, where it transforms complex workflows into simple natural language commands, significantly boosting user productivity. Our code will be open-source upon publication. These model-centric agents show revolutionary potential for automating real-world tasks such as web browsing (Gur et al., 2023), gaming (Krzywinska, 2024), and software development (Hong et al.). However, despite impressive results, these agents struggle to generalize across different applications due to variations in observation and action spaces. In real-world scenarios, workflows often involve switching between applications and interacting with diverse graphical or command-line interfaces. This raises an intriguing and practical question: can we build a generalist agent capable of following user instructions across various applications using standardized operating system (OS) controls like mouse and keyboard inputs, while processing screen outputs?