Agents
V2I-Calib++: A Multi-terminal Spatial Calibration Approach in Urban Intersections for Collaborative Perception
Qu, Qianxin, Zhang, Xinyu, Xiong, Yijin, Guo, Shichun, Song, Ziqiang, Li, Jun
Urban intersections, dense with pedestrian and vehicular traffic and compounded by GPS signal obstructions from high-rise buildings, are among the most challenging areas in urban traffic systems. Traditional single-vehicle intelligence systems often perform poorly in such environments due to a lack of global traffic flow information and the ability to respond to unexpected events. Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technology, through real-time communication between vehicles (V2V) and vehicles to infrastructure (V2I), offers a robust solution. However, practical applications still face numerous challenges. Calibration among heterogeneous vehicle and infrastructure endpoints in multi-end LiDAR systems is crucial for ensuring the accuracy and consistency of perception system data. Most existing multi-end calibration methods rely on initial calibration values provided by positioning systems, but the instability of GPS signals due to high buildings in urban canyons poses severe challenges to these methods. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel multi-end LiDAR system calibration method that does not require positioning priors to determine initial external parameters and meets real-time requirements. Our method introduces an innovative multi-end perception object association technique, utilizing a new Overall Distance metric (oDist) to measure the spatial association between perception objects, and effectively combines global consistency search algorithms with optimal transport theory. By this means, we can extract co-observed targets from object association results for further external parameter computation and optimization. Extensive comparative and ablation experiments conducted on the simulated dataset V2X-Sim and the real dataset DAIR-V2X confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. The code for this method can be accessed at: \url{https://github.com/MassimoQu/v2i-calib}.
Learning Sub-Second Routing Optimization in Computer Networks requires Packet-Level Dynamics
Boltres, Andreas, Freymuth, Niklas, Jahnke, Patrick, Karl, Holger, Neumann, Gerhard
Finding efficient routes for data packets is an essential task in computer networking. The optimal routes depend greatly on the current network topology, state and traffic demand, and they can change within milliseconds. Reinforcement Learning can help to learn network representations that provide routing decisions for possibly novel situations. So far, this has commonly been done using fluid network models. We investigate their suitability for millisecond-scale adaptations with a range of traffic mixes and find that packet-level network models are necessary to capture true dynamics, in particular in the presence of TCP traffic. To this end, we present $\textit{PackeRL}$, the first packet-level Reinforcement Learning environment for routing in generic network topologies. Our experiments confirm that learning-based strategies that have been trained in fluid environments do not generalize well to this more realistic, but more challenging setup. Hence, we also introduce two new algorithms for learning sub-second Routing Optimization. We present $\textit{M-Slim}$, a dynamic shortest-path algorithm that excels at high traffic volumes but is computationally hard to scale to large network topologies, and $\textit{FieldLines}$, a novel next-hop policy design that re-optimizes routing for any network topology within milliseconds without requiring any re-training. Both algorithms outperform current learning-based approaches as well as commonly used static baseline protocols in scenarios with high-traffic volumes. All findings are backed by extensive experiments in realistic network conditions in our fast and versatile training and evaluation framework.
A Scalable Communication Protocol for Networks of Large Language Models
Marro, Samuele, La Malfa, Emanuele, Wright, Jesse, Li, Guohao, Shadbolt, Nigel, Wooldridge, Michael, Torr, Philip
Communication is a prerequisite for collaboration. When scaling networks of AI-powered agents, communication must be versatile, efficient, and portable. These requisites, which we refer to as the Agent Communication Trilemma, are hard to achieve in large networks of agents. We introduce Agora, a meta protocol that leverages existing communication standards to make LLM-powered agents solve complex problems efficiently. In Agora, agents typically use standardised routines for frequent communications, natural language for rare communications, and LLM-written routines for everything in between. Agora sidesteps the Agent Communication Trilemma and robustly handles changes in interfaces and members, allowing unprecedented scalability with full decentralisation and minimal involvement of human beings. On large Agora networks, we observe the emergence of self-organising, fully automated protocols that achieve complex goals without human intervention.
Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning: A Tool for Pluralistic Alignment
Vamplew, Peter, Hayes, Conor F, Foale, Cameron, Dazeley, Richard, Harland, Hadassah
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a valuable tool for the creation of AI systems. However it may be problematic to adequately align RL based on scalar rewards if there are multiple conflicting values or stakeholders to be considered. Over the last decade multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) using vector rewards has emerged as an alternative to standard, scalar RL. This paper provides an overview of the role which MORL can play in creating pluralistically-aligned AI.
Biologically Inspired Swarm Dynamic Target Tracking and Obstacle Avoidance
This study proposes a novel artificial intelligence (AI) driven flight computer, integrating an online free-retraining-prediction model, a swarm control, and an obstacle avoidance strategy, to track dynamic targets using a distributed drone swarm for military applications. To enable dynamic target tracking the swarm requires a trajectory prediction capability to achieve intercept allowing for the tracking of rapid maneuvers and movements while maintaining efficient path planning. Traditional predicative methods such as curve fitting or Long ShortTerm Memory (LSTM) have low robustness and struggle with dynamic target tracking in the short term due to slow convergence of single agent-based trajectory prediction and often require extensive offline training or tuning to be effective. Consequently, this paper introduces a novel robust adaptive bidirectional fuzzy brain emotional learning prediction (BFBEL-P) methodology to address these challenges. The controller integrates a fuzzy interface, a neural network enabling rapid adaption, predictive capability and multi-agent solving enabling multiple solutions to be aggregated to achieve rapid convergence times and high accuracy in both the short and long term. This was verified through the use of numerical simulations seeing complex trajectory being predicted and tracked by a swarm of drones. These simulations show improved adaptability and accuracy to state of the art methods in the short term and strong results over long time domains, enabling accurate swarm target tracking and predictive capability.
Navigation under uncertainty: Trajectory prediction and occlusion reasoning with switching dynamical systems
Wei, Ran, Lee, Joseph, Wakayama, Shohei, Tschantz, Alexander, Heins, Conor, Buckley, Christopher, Carenbauer, John, Thiruvengada, Hari, Albarracin, Mahault, de Prado, Miguel, Horling, Petter, Winzell, Peter, Rajagopal, Renjith
Predicting future trajectories of nearby objects, especially under occlusion, is a crucial task in autonomous driving and safe robot navigation. Prior works typically neglect to maintain uncertainty about occluded objects and only predict trajectories of observed objects using high-capacity models such as Transformers trained on large datasets. While these approaches are effective in standard scenarios, they can struggle to generalize to the long-tail, safety-critical scenarios. In this work, we explore a conceptual framework unifying trajectory prediction and occlusion reasoning under the same class of structured probabilistic generative model, namely, switching dynamical systems. We then present some initial experiments illustrating its capabilities using the Waymo open dataset.
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.