Agents
Multiagent Evaluation under Incomplete Information
This paper investigates the evaluation of learned multiagent strategies in the incomplete information setting, which plays a critical role in ranking and training of agents. Traditionally, researchers have relied on Elo ratings for this purpose, with recent works also using methods based on Nash equilibria. Unfortunately, Elo is unable to handle intransitive agent interactions, and other techniques are restricted to zero-sum, two-player settings or are limited by the fact that the Nash equilibrium is intractable to compute. Recently, a ranking method called \alpha -Rank, relying on a new graph-based game-theoretic solution concept, was shown to tractably apply to general games. However, evaluations based on Elo or \alpha -Rank typically assume noise-free game outcomes, despite the data often being collected from noisy simulations, making this assumption unrealistic in practice. This paper investigates multiagent evaluation in the incomplete information regime, involving general-sum many-player games with noisy outcomes.
TraderTalk: An LLM Behavioural ABM applied to Simulating Human Bilateral Trading Interactions
We introduce a novel hybrid approach that augments Agent-Based Models (ABMs) with behaviors generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate human trading interactions. We call our model TraderTalk. Leveraging LLMs trained on extensive human-authored text, we capture detailed and nuanced representations of bilateral conversations in financial trading. Applying this Generative Agent-Based Model (GABM) to government bond markets, we replicate trading decisions between two stylised virtual humans. Our method addresses both structural challenges, such as coordinating turn-taking between realistic LLM-based agents, and design challenges, including the interpretation of LLM outputs by the agent model. By exploring prompt design opportunistically rather than systematically, we enhance the realism of agent interactions without exhaustive overfitting or model reliance. Our approach successfully replicates trade-to-order volume ratios observed in related asset markets, demonstrating the potential of LLM-augmented ABMs in financial simulations
Diversity of Thought Elicits Stronger Reasoning Capabilities in Multi-Agent Debate Frameworks
Large language models (LLMs) excel in natural language generation but often confidently produce incorrect responses, especially in tasks like mathematical reasoning. Chain-of-thought prompting, self-verification, and multi-agent debate are among the strategies proposed to improve the reasoning and factual accuracy of LLMs. Building on Du et al.'s multi-agent debate framework, we find that multi-agent debate helps at any model scale, and that diversity of thought elicits stronger reasoning in debating LLMs. Across various model sizes, performance on mathematical reasoning tasks benefits most when diverse trained models are used. Remarkably, after 4 rounds of debate, a diverse set of medium-capacity models (Gemini-Pro, Mixtral 7BX8, and PaLM 2-M) outperforms GPT-4 on the GSM-8K benchmark, scoring 91% accuracy. By comparison, when 3 instances of Gemini-Pro are used, performance only reaches 82%. Finally, this diverse set of medium-capacity models sets a new state-of-the-art performance on the ASDiv benchmark (94%). These results underscore the idea that the future of AI is agentic, with diverse cooperating agents yielding emergent capabilities beyond even the most powerful individual models.
CE-MRS: Contrastive Explanations for Multi-Robot Systems
Schneider, Ethan, Wu, Daniel, Das, Devleena, Chernova, Sonia
As the complexity of multi-robot systems grows to incorporate a greater number of robots, more complex tasks, and longer time horizons, the solutions to such problems often become too complex to be fully intelligible to human users. In this work, we introduce an approach for generating natural language explanations that justify the validity of the system's solution to the user, or else aid the user in correcting any errors that led to a suboptimal system solution. Toward this goal, we first contribute a generalizable formalism of contrastive explanations for multi-robot systems, and then introduce a holistic approach to generating contrastive explanations for multi-robot scenarios that selectively incorporates data from multi-robot task allocation, scheduling, and motion-planning to explain system behavior. Through user studies with human operators we demonstrate that our integrated contrastive explanation approach leads to significant improvements in user ability to identify and solve system errors, leading to significant improvements in overall multi-robot team performance.
DA-Code: Agent Data Science Code Generation Benchmark for Large Language Models
Huang, Yiming, Luo, Jianwen, Yu, Yan, Zhang, Yitong, Lei, Fangyu, Wei, Yifan, He, Shizhu, Huang, Lifu, Liu, Xiao, Zhao, Jun, Liu, Kang
We introduce DA-Code, a code generation benchmark specifically designed to assess LLMs on agent-based data science tasks. This benchmark features three core elements: First, the tasks within DA-Code are inherently challenging, setting them apart from traditional code generation tasks and demanding advanced coding skills in grounding and planning. Second, examples in DA-Code are all based on real and diverse data, covering a wide range of complex data wrangling and analytics tasks. Third, to solve the tasks, the models must utilize complex data science programming languages, to perform intricate data processing and derive the answers. We set up the benchmark in a controllable and executable environment that aligns with real-world data analysis scenarios and is scalable. The annotators meticulously design the evaluation suite to ensure the accuracy and robustness of the evaluation. We develop the DA-Agent baseline. Experiments show that although the baseline performs better than other existing frameworks, using the current best LLMs achieves only 30.5% accuracy, leaving ample room for improvement. We release our benchmark at https://da-code-bench.github.io.
Learning to Balance Altruism and Self-interest Based on Empathy in Mixed-Motive Games
Kong, Fanqi, Huang, Yizhe, Zhu, Song-Chun, Qi, Siyuan, Feng, Xue
Real-world multi-agent scenarios often involve mixed motives, demanding altruistic agents capable of self-protection against potential exploitation. However, existing approaches often struggle to achieve both objectives. In this paper, based on that empathic responses are modulated by inferred social relationships between agents, we propose LASE Learning to balance Altruism and Self-interest based on Empathy), a distributed multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm that fosters altruistic cooperation through gifting while avoiding exploitation by other agents in mixed-motive games. LASE allocates a portion of its rewards to co-players as gifts, with this allocation adapting dynamically based on the social relationship -- a metric evaluating the friendliness of co-players estimated by counterfactual reasoning. In particular, social relationship measures each co-player by comparing the estimated $Q$-function of current joint action to a counterfactual baseline which marginalizes the co-player's action, with its action distribution inferred by a perspective-taking module. Comprehensive experiments are performed in spatially and temporally extended mixed-motive games, demonstrating LASE's ability to promote group collaboration without compromising fairness and its capacity to adapt policies to various types of interactive co-players.
Optimal Correlated Equilibria in General-Sum Extensive-Form Games: Fixed-Parameter Algorithms, Hardness, and Two-Sided Column-Generation
Zhang, Brian, Farina, Gabriele, Celli, Andrea, Sandholm, Tuomas
We study the problem of finding optimal correlated equilibria of various sorts in extensive-form games: normal-form coarse correlated equilibrium (NFCCE), extensive-form coarse correlated equilibrium (EFCCE), and extensive-form correlated equilibrium (EFCE). We make two primary contributions. First, we introduce a new algorithm for computing optimal equilibria in all three notions. Its runtime depends exponentially only on a parameter related to the information structure of the game. We also prove a fundamental complexity gap: while our size bounds for NFCCE are similar to those achieved in the case of team games by Zhang et al., this is impossible to achieve for the other two concepts under standard complexity assumptions. Second, we propose a two-sided column generation approach for use when the runtime or memory usage of the previous algorithm is prohibitive. Our algorithm improves upon the one-sided approach of Farina et al. by means of a new decomposition of correlated strategies which allows players to re-optimize their sequence-form strategies with respect to correlation plans which were previously added to the support. Experiments show that our techniques outperform the prior state of the art for computing optimal general-sum correlated equilibria.
Slow Convergence of Interacting Kalman Filters in Word-of-Mouth Social Learning
Krishnamurthy, Vikram, Rojas, Cristian
We consider word-of-mouth social learning involving $m$ Kalman filter agents that operate sequentially. The first Kalman filter receives the raw observations, while each subsequent Kalman filter receives a noisy measurement of the conditional mean of the previous Kalman filter. The prior is updated by the $m$-th Kalman filter. When $m=2$, and the observations are noisy measurements of a Gaussian random variable, the covariance goes to zero as $k^{-1/3}$ for $k$ observations, instead of $O(k^{-1})$ in the standard Kalman filter. In this paper we prove that for $m$ agents, the covariance decreases to zero as $k^{-(2^m-1)}$, i.e, the learning slows down exponentially with the number of agents. We also show that by artificially weighing the prior at each time, the learning rate can be made optimal as $k^{-1}$. The implication is that in word-of-mouth social learning, artificially re-weighing the prior can yield the optimal learning rate.
A Gentle Introduction and Tutorial on Deep Generative Models in Transportation Research
Choi, Seongjin, Jin, Zhixiong, Ham, Seung Woo, Kim, Jiwon, Sun, Lijun
Deep Generative Models (DGMs) have rapidly advanced in recent years, becoming essential tools in various fields due to their ability to learn complex data distributions and generate synthetic data. Their importance in transportation research is increasingly recognized, particularly for applications like traffic data generation, prediction, and feature extraction. This paper offers a comprehensive introduction and tutorial on DGMs, with a focus on their applications in transportation. It begins with an overview of generative models, followed by detailed explanations of fundamental models, a systematic review of the literature, and practical tutorial code to aid implementation. The paper also discusses current challenges and opportunities, highlighting how these models can be effectively utilized and further developed in transportation research. This paper serves as a valuable reference, guiding researchers and practitioners from foundational knowledge to advanced applications of DGMs in transportation research.
Agents Thinking Fast and Slow: A Talker-Reasoner Architecture
Christakopoulou, Konstantina, Mourad, Shibl, Matarić, Maja
Large language models have enabled agents of all kinds to interact with users through natural conversation. Consequently, agents now have two jobs: conversing and planning/reasoning. Their conversational responses must be informed by all available information, and their actions must help to achieve goals. This dichotomy between conversing with the user and doing multi-step reasoning and planning can be seen as analogous to the human systems of "thinking fast and slow" as introduced by Kahneman [14]. Our approach is comprised of a "Talker" agent (System 1) that is fast and intuitive, and tasked with synthesizing the conversational response; and a "Reasoner" agent (System 2) that is slower, more deliberative, and more logical, and is tasked with multi-step reasoning and planning, calling tools, performing actions in the world, and thereby producing the new agent state. We describe the new Talker-Reasoner architecture and discuss its advantages, including modularity and decreased latency. We ground the discussion in the context of a sleep coaching agent, in order to demonstrate real-world relevance.