Agents
Multi-Agent Collaborative Data Selection for Efficient LLM Pretraining
Bai, Tianyi, Yang, Ling, Wong, Zhen Hao, Peng, Jiahui, Zhuang, Xinlin, Zhang, Chi, Wu, Lijun, Qiu, Jiantao, Zhang, Wentao, Yuan, Binhang, He, Conghui
Efficient data selection is crucial to accelerate the pretraining of large language models (LLMs). While various methods have been proposed to enhance data efficiency, limited research has addressed the inherent conflicts between these approaches to achieve optimal data selection for LLM pretraining. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel multi-agent collaborative data selection mechanism. In this framework, each data selection method serves as an independent agent, and an agent console is designed to dynamically integrate the information from all agents throughout the LLM training process. We conduct extensive empirical studies to evaluate our multi-agent framework. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves data efficiency, accelerates convergence in LLM training, and achieves an average performance gain up to 10.5% across multiple language model benchmarks compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
M3Bench: Benchmarking Whole-body Motion Generation for Mobile Manipulation in 3D Scenes
Zhang, Zeyu, Yan, Sixu, Han, Muzhi, Wang, Zaijin, Wang, Xinggang, Zhu, Song-Chun, Liu, Hangxin
We propose M^3Bench, a new benchmark of whole-body motion generation for mobile manipulation tasks. Given a 3D scene context, M^3Bench requires an embodied agent to understand its configuration, environmental constraints and task objectives, then generate coordinated whole-body motion trajectories for object rearrangement tasks. M^3Bench features 30k object rearrangement tasks across 119 diverse scenes, providing expert demonstrations generated by our newly developed M^3BenchMaker. This automatic data generation tool produces coordinated whole-body motion trajectories from high-level task instructions, requiring only basic scene and robot information. Our benchmark incorporates various task splits to assess generalization across different dimensions and leverages realistic physics simulation for trajectory evaluation. Through extensive experimental analyses, we reveal that state-of-the-art models still struggle with coordinated base-arm motion while adhering to environment-context and task-specific constraints, highlighting the need to develop new models that address this gap. Through M^3Bench, we aim to facilitate future robotics research towards more adaptive and capable mobile manipulation in diverse, real-world environments.
Coupled autoregressive active inference agents for control of multi-joint dynamical systems
Nisslbeck, Tim N., Kouw, Wouter M.
We propose an active inference agent to identify and control a mechanical system with multiple bodies connected by joints. This agent is constructed from multiple scalar autoregressive model-based agents, coupled together by virtue of sharing memories. Each subagent infers parameters through Bayesian filtering and controls by minimizing expected free energy over a finite time horizon. We demonstrate that a coupled agent of this kind is able to learn the dynamics of a double mass-spring-damper system, and drive it to a desired position through a balance of explorative and exploitative actions. It outperforms the uncoupled subagents in terms of surprise and goal alignment.
Crowd IQ -- Aggregating Opinions to Boost Performance
Kosinski, Michal, Bachrach, Yoram, Graepel, Thore, Kasneci, Giergji, Van Gael, Jurgen
We show how the quality of decisions based on the aggregated opinions of the crowd can be conveniently studied using a sample of individual responses to a standard IQ questionnaire. We aggregated the responses to the IQ questionnaire using simple majority voting and a machine learning approach based on a probabilistic graphical model. The score for the aggregated questionnaire, Crowd IQ, serves as a quality measure of decisions based on aggregating opinions, which also allows quantifying individual and crowd performance on the same scale. We show that Crowd IQ grows quickly with the size of the crowd but saturates, and that for small homogeneous crowds the Crowd IQ significantly exceeds the IQ of even their most intelligent member. We investigate alternative ways of aggregating the responses and the impact of the aggregation method on the resulting Crowd IQ. We also discuss Contextual IQ, a method of quantifying the individual participant's contribution to the Crowd IQ based on the Shapley value from cooperative game theory.
Content Caching-Assisted Vehicular Edge Computing Using Multi-Agent Graph Attention Reinforcement Learning
Shen, Jinjin, Lin, Yan, Zhang, Yijin, Zhang, Weibin, Shu, Feng, Li, Jun
In order to avoid repeated task offloading and realize the reuse of popular task computing results, we construct a novel content caching-assisted vehicular edge computing (VEC) framework. In the face of irregular network topology and unknown environmental dynamics, we further propose a multi-agent graph attention reinforcement learning (MGARL) based edge caching scheme, which utilizes the graph attention convolution kernel to integrate the neighboring nodes' features of each agent and further enhance the cooperation among agents. Our simulation results show that our proposed scheme is capable of improving the utilization of caching resources while reducing the long-term task computing latency compared to the baselines.
IMAS: A Comprehensive Agentic Approach to Rural Healthcare Delivery
Gangavarapu, Agasthya, Gangavarapu, Ananya
Since the onset of COVID-19, rural communities worldwide have faced significant challenges in accessing healthcare due to the migration of experienced medical professionals to urban centers. Semi-trained caregivers, such as Community Health Workers (CHWs) and Registered Medical Practitioners (RMPs), have stepped in to fill this gap, but often lack formal training. This paper proposes an advanced agentic medical assistant system designed to improve healthcare delivery in rural areas by utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic approaches. The system is composed of five crucial components: translation, medical complexity assessment, expert network integration, final medical advice generation, and response simplification. Our innovative framework ensures context-sensitive, adaptive, and reliable medical assistance, capable of clinical triaging, diagnostics, and identifying cases requiring specialist intervention. The system is designed to handle cultural nuances and varying literacy levels, providing clear and actionable medical advice in local languages. Evaluation results using the MedQA, PubMedQA, and JAMA datasets demonstrate that this integrated approach significantly enhances the effectiveness of rural healthcare workers, making healthcare more accessible and understandable for underserved populations. All code and supplemental materials associated with the paper and IMAS are available at https://github.com/uheal/imas.
Learning to Rank for Multiple Retrieval-Augmented Models through Iterative Utility Maximization
Salemi, Alireza, Zamani, Hamed
This paper investigates the design of a unified search engine to serve multiple retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) agents, each with a distinct task, backbone large language model (LLM), and retrieval-augmentation strategy. We introduce an iterative approach where the search engine generates retrieval results for these RAG agents and gathers feedback on the quality of the retrieved documents during an offline phase. This feedback is then used to iteratively optimize the search engine using a novel expectation-maximization algorithm, with the goal of maximizing each agent's utility function. Additionally, we adapt this approach to an online setting, allowing the search engine to refine its behavior based on real-time individual agents feedback to better serve the results for each of them. Experiments on diverse datasets from the Knowledge-Intensive Language Tasks (KILT) benchmark demonstrates that our approach significantly on average outperforms competitive baselines across 18 RAG models. We also demonstrate that our method effectively ``personalizes'' the retrieval process for each RAG agent based on the collected feedback. Finally, we provide a comprehensive ablation study to explore various aspects of our method.
Queueing Matching Bandits with Preference Feedback
In this study, we consider multi-class multi-server asymmetric queueing systems consisting of $N$ queues on one side and $K$ servers on the other side, where jobs randomly arrive in queues at each time. The service rate of each job-server assignment is unknown and modeled by a feature-based Multi-nomial Logit (MNL) function. At each time, a scheduler assigns jobs to servers, and each server stochastically serves at most one job based on its preferences over the assigned jobs. The primary goal of the algorithm is to stabilize the queues in the system while learning the service rates of servers. To achieve this goal, we propose algorithms based on UCB and Thompson Sampling, which achieve system stability with an average queue length bound of $O(\min\{N,K\}/\epsilon)$ for a large time horizon $T$, where $\epsilon$ is a traffic slackness of the system. Furthermore, the algorithms achieve sublinear regret bounds of $\tilde{O}(\min\{\sqrt{T} Q_{\max},T^{3/4}\})$, where $Q_{\max}$ represents the maximum queue length over agents and times. Lastly, we provide experimental results to demonstrate the performance of our algorithms.
Transformers as Game Players: Provable In-context Game-playing Capabilities of Pre-trained Models
Shi, Chengshuai, Yang, Kun, Yang, Jing, Shen, Cong
The in-context learning (ICL) capability of pre-trained models based on the transformer architecture has received growing interest in recent years. While theoretical understanding has been obtained for ICL in reinforcement learning (RL), the previous results are largely confined to the single-agent setting. This work proposes to further explore the in-context learning capabilities of pre-trained transformer models in competitive multi-agent games, i.e., in-context game-playing (ICGP). Focusing on the classical two-player zero-sum games, theoretical guarantees are provided to demonstrate that pre-trained transformers can provably learn to approximate Nash equilibrium in an in-context manner for both decentralized and centralized learning settings. As a key part of the proof, constructional results are established to demonstrate that the transformer architecture is sufficiently rich to realize celebrated multi-agent game-playing algorithms, in particular, decentralized V-learning and centralized VI-ULCB.
Multiple Ships Cooperative Navigation and Collision Avoidance using Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning with Communication
In the real world, unmanned surface vehicles (USV) often need to coordinate with each other to accomplish specific tasks. However, achieving cooperative control in multi-agent systems is challenging due to issues such as non-stationarity and partial observability. Recent advancements in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) provide new perspectives to address these challenges. Therefore, we propose using the multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) algorithm with communication to address multiple ships' cooperation problems under partial observability. We developed two tasks based on OpenAI's gym environment: cooperative navigation and cooperative collision avoidance. In these tasks, ships must not only learn effective control strategies but also establish communication protocols with other agents. We analyze the impact of external noise on communication, the effect of inter-agent communication on performance, and the communication patterns learned by the agents. The results demonstrate that our proposed framework effectively addresses cooperative navigation and collision avoidance among multiple vessels, significantly outperforming traditional single-agent algorithms. Agents establish a consistent communication protocol, enabling them to compensate for missing information through shared observations and achieve better coordination.