Swarm perception refers to the ability of a robot swarm to utilize the perception capabilities of each individual robot, forming a collective understanding of the environment. Their distributed nature enables robot swarms to continuously monitor dynamic environments by maintaining a constant presence throughout the space.In this study, we present a preliminary experiment on the collective tracking of people using a robot swarm. The experiment was conducted in simulation across four different office environments, with swarms of varying sizes. The robots were provided with images sampled from a dataset of real-world office environment pictures.We measured the time distribution required for a robot to detect a person changing location and to propagate this information to increasing fractions of the swarm. The results indicate that robot swarms show significant promise in monitoring dynamic environments.

When optimizing transportation systems, anticipating traffic flows is a central element. Yet, computing such traffic equilibria remains computationally expensive. Against this background, we introduce a novel combinatorial optimization augmented neural network architecture that allows for fast and accurate traffic flow predictions. We propose WardropNet, a neural network that combines classical layers with a subsequent equilibrium layer: the first ones inform the latter by predicting the parameterization of the equilibrium problem's latency functions. Using supervised learning we minimize the difference between the actual traffic flow and the predicted output. We show how to leverage a Bregman divergence fitting the geometry of the equilibria, which allows for end-to-end learning. WardropNet outperforms pure learning-based approaches in predicting traffic equilibria for realistic and stylized traffic scenarios. On realistic scenarios, WardropNet improves on average for time-invariant predictions by up to 72% and for time-variant predictions by up to 23% over pure learning-based approaches.

In this paper, we consider the problem of distributed reachable set computation for multi-agent systems (MASs) interacting over an undirected, stationary graph. A full state-feedback control input for such MASs depends no only on the current agent's state, but also of its neighbors. However, in most MAS applications, the dynamics are obscured by individual agents. This makes reachable set computation, in a fully distributed manner, a challenging problem. We utilize the ideas of polytopic reachable set approximation and generalize it to a MAS setup. We formulate the resulting sub-problems in a fully distributed manner and provide convergence guarantees for the associated computations. The proposed algorithm's convergence is proved for two cases: static MAS graphs, and time-varying graphs under certain restrictions.

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), recent years have witnessed many promising studies on leveraging LLM-based agents to simulate human social behavior. While prior work has demonstrated significant potential across various domains, much of it has focused on specific scenarios involving a limited number of agents and has lacked the ability to adapt when errors occur during simulation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel LLM-agent-based simulation platform called \textit{GenSim}, which: (1) \textbf{Abstracts a set of general functions} to simplify the simulation of customized social scenarios; (2) \textbf{Supports one hundred thousand agents} to better simulate large-scale populations in real-world contexts; (3) \textbf{Incorporates error-correction mechanisms} to ensure more reliable and long-term simulations. To evaluate our platform, we assess both the efficiency of large-scale agent simulations and the effectiveness of the error-correction mechanisms. To our knowledge, GenSim represents an initial step toward a general, large-scale, and correctable social simulation platform based on LLM agents, promising to further advance the field of social science.

Mental health issues, particularly depressive disorders, present significant challenges in contemporary society, necessitating the development of effective automated diagnostic methods. This paper introduces the Agent Mental Clinic (AMC), a self-improving conversational agent system designed to enhance depression diagnosis through simulated dialogues between patient and psychiatrist agents. To enhance the dialogue quality and diagnosis accuracy, we design a psychiatrist agent consisting of a tertiary memory structure, a dialogue control and reflect plugin that acts as ``supervisor'' and a memory sampling module, fully leveraging the skills reflected by the psychiatrist agent, achieving great accuracy on depression risk and suicide risk diagnosis via conversation. Experiment results on datasets collected in real-life scenarios demonstrate that the system, simulating the procedure of training psychiatrists, can be a promising optimization method for aligning LLMs with real-life distribution in specific domains without modifying the weights of LLMs, even when only a few representative labeled cases are available.

Agent-based models (ABMs) are proliferating as decision-making tools across policy areas in transportation, economics, and epidemiology. In these models, a central object of interest is the discrete origin-destination matrix which captures spatial interactions and agent trip counts between locations. Existing approaches resort to continuous approximations of this matrix and subsequent ad-hoc discretisations in order to perform ABM simulation and calibration. This impedes conditioning on partially observed summary statistics, fails to explore the multimodal matrix distribution over a discrete combinatorial support, and incurs discretisation errors. To address these challenges, we introduce a computationally efficient framework that scales linearly with the number of origin-destination pairs, operates directly on the discrete combinatorial space, and learns the agents' trip intensity through a neural differential equation that embeds spatial interactions. Our approach outperforms the prior art in terms of reconstruction error and ground truth matrix coverage, at a fraction of the computational cost. We demonstrate these benefits in large-scale spatial mobility ABMs in Cambridge, UK and Washington, DC, USA.

The problem setting would be a good contribution to the literature on crowdsourcing. However, I am not sure that paper is ready for publication for the following reasons: 1) the theoretical part looks not solid, 2) the proposed algorithm (HA) looks not grounded, 3) the results of experiments are not significant. These points are supported below. Lemmas 3,4 are reasonable, however, they cover only very special cases. Specifically, Lemma 3 considers only one agent and Lemma 4 assumes that all agents have the same amount of information (they observed exactly n samples).

The paper revisits the convergence result of multiplicative weighted update (MWU) in a congestion game, due to Kleinberg, Piliouras, and Tardos (STOC 2009), and establishes a connection between MWU and Baum-Welch algorithm in a neat and elegant style. By showing the monotonicity of the potential function in a congestion game, the authors prove that any MWU with linear updating rule converges to the set of fixed points, which is a superset of all the Nash equilibria of the congestion game. The Baum-Eagon inequality offers a new interpretation of the dynamics of the linear updating rule in MWU and their results in congestion games are quite general, and so are the conditions on initialization and isolated Nash equilibrium in a congestion game with finite set of agents and pure strategies. The results in this paper hold for any congestion game irrespective of the topology of the strategy sets by the nature of their game, however, one should emphasize the assumption that, individual earning rates \epsilon_i are bounded above, in order for Baum-Eagon inequality to work in their context.

The paper presents a policy gradient algorithm for a multiagent cooperative problem, modeled in a formalism (CDEC-POMDP) whose dynamics, like congestion games, depend on groups of agents rather than individuals. This paper follows the theme of several similar advances in theis field of complex multiagent planning, using factored models to propose practical/tractable approximations. The novelty here is the use of parameterized policies and training algorithms inspired by reinforcement learning (policy gradients). The work is well-motivated, relevant, and particularly well-presented. The theoretical results are new and important.

Specifically, it shows the connection by defining a new variant of an actor-critic algorithm that performs an exhaustive policy evaluation at each stage (denoted as policy-iteration-actor-critic), together with an adaptive learning rate. Then, under this setting, it is said that the actor-critic algorithm basically minimizes regret and converges to a Nash equilibrium. The paper suggests a few new versions of policy gradient update rules (Q-based Policy Gradient, Regret Policy Gradient, and Regret Matching Policy Gradient) and evaluates them on multi-agent zero-sum imperfect information games. To my understanding, Q-Based Policy Gradient is basically an advantage actor-critic algorithm (up to a transformation of the learned baseline) 3. The authors mention a "reasonable parameter sweep" over the hyperparameters. I'm curious to know the stability of the proposed actor-critic algorithms over the different trials 4. The paper should be proofread again.