Agents
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.
VoxelPrompt: A Vision-Language Agent for Grounded Medical Image Analysis
Hoopes, Andrew, Butoi, Victor Ion, Guttag, John V., Dalca, Adrian V.
We present VoxelPrompt, an agent-driven vision-language framework that tackles diverse radiological tasks through joint modeling of natural language, image volumes, and analytical metrics. VoxelPrompt is multi-modal and versatile, leveraging the flexibility of language interaction while providing quantitatively grounded image analysis. Given a variable number of 3D medical volumes, such as MRI and CT scans, VoxelPrompt employs a language agent that iteratively predicts executable instructions to solve a task specified by an input prompt. These instructions communicate with a vision network to encode image features and generate volumetric outputs (e.g., segmentations). VoxelPrompt interprets the results of intermediate instructions and plans further actions to compute discrete measures (e.g., tumor growth across a series of scans) and present relevant outputs to the user. We evaluate this framework in a sandbox of diverse neuroimaging tasks, and we show that the single VoxelPrompt model can delineate hundreds of anatomical and pathological features, measure many complex morphological properties, and perform open-language analysis of lesion characteristics. VoxelPrompt carries out these objectives with accuracy similar to that of fine-tuned, single-task models for segmentation and visual question-answering, while facilitating a much larger range of tasks. Therefore, by supporting accurate image processing with language interaction, VoxelPrompt provides comprehensive utility for numerous imaging tasks that traditionally require specialized models to address.
AdvDiffuser: Generating Adversarial Safety-Critical Driving Scenarios via Guided Diffusion
Xie, Yuting, Guo, Xianda, Wang, Cong, Liu, Kunhua, Chen, Long
Safety-critical scenarios are infrequent in natural driving environments but hold significant importance for the training and testing of autonomous driving systems. The prevailing approach involves generating safety-critical scenarios automatically in simulation by introducing adversarial adjustments to natural environments. These adjustments are often tailored to specific tested systems, thereby disregarding their transferability across different systems. In this paper, we propose AdvDiffuser, an adversarial framework for generating safety-critical driving scenarios through guided diffusion. By incorporating a diffusion model to capture plausible collective behaviors of background vehicles and a lightweight guide model to effectively handle adversarial scenarios, AdvDiffuser facilitates transferability. Experimental results on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that AdvDiffuser, trained on offline driving logs, can be applied to various tested systems with minimal warm-up episode data and outperform other existing methods in terms of realism, diversity, and adversarial performance.
Large Legislative Models: Towards Efficient AI Policymaking in Economic Simulations
Gasztowtt, Henry, Smith, Benjamin, Zhu, Vincent, Bai, Qinxun, Zhang, Edwin
The improvement of economic policymaking presents an opportunity for broad societal benefit, a notion that has inspired research towards AI-driven policymaking tools. AI policymaking holds the potential to surpass human performance through the ability to process data quickly at scale. However, existing RL-based methods exhibit sample inefficiency, and are further limited by an inability to flexibly incorporate nuanced information into their decision-making processes. Thus, we propose a novel method in which we instead utilize pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs), as sample-efficient policymakers in socially complex multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) scenarios. We demonstrate significant efficiency gains, outperforming existing methods across three environments. Our code is available at https://github.com/hegasz/large-legislative-models.
Agent S: An Open Agentic Framework that Uses Computers Like a Human
Agashe, Saaket, Han, Jiuzhou, Gan, Shuyu, Yang, Jiachen, Li, Ang, Wang, Xin Eric
We present Agent S, an open agentic framework that enables autonomous interaction with computers through a Graphical User Interface (GUI), aimed at transforming human-computer interaction by automating complex, multi-step tasks. Agent S aims to address three key challenges in automating computer tasks: acquiring domain-specific knowledge, planning over long task horizons, and handling dynamic, non-uniform interfaces. To this end, Agent S introduces experience-augmented hierarchical planning, which learns from external knowledge search and internal experience retrieval at multiple levels, facilitating efficient task planning and subtask execution. In addition, it employs an Agent-Computer Interface (ACI) to better elicit the reasoning and control capabilities of GUI agents based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Evaluation on the OSWorld benchmark shows that Agent S outperforms the baseline by 9.37% on success rate (an 83.6% relative improvement) and achieves a new state-of-the-art. Comprehensive analysis highlights the effectiveness of individual components and provides insights for future improvements. Furthermore, Agent S demonstrates broad generalizability to different operating systems on a newly-released WindowsAgentArena benchmark. Code available at https://github.com/simular-ai/Agent-S.
DelTA: An Online Document-Level Translation Agent Based on Multi-Level Memory
Wang, Yutong, Zeng, Jiali, Liu, Xuebo, Wong, Derek F., Meng, Fandong, Zhou, Jie, Zhang, Min
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved reasonable quality improvements in machine translation (MT). However, most current research on MT-LLMs still faces significant challenges in maintaining translation consistency and accuracy when processing entire documents. In this paper, we introduce DelTA, a Document-levEL Translation Agent designed to overcome these limitations. DelTA features a multi-level memory structure that stores information across various granularities and spans, including Proper Noun Records, Bilingual Summary, Long-Term Memory, and Short-Term Memory, which are continuously retrieved and updated by auxiliary LLM-based components. Experimental results indicate that DelTA significantly outperforms strong baselines in terms of translation consistency and quality across four open/closed-source LLMs and two representative document translation datasets, achieving an increase in consistency scores by up to 4.58 percentage points and in COMET scores by up to 3.16 points on average. DelTA employs a sentence-by-sentence translation strategy, ensuring no sentence omissions and offering a memory-efficient solution compared to the mainstream method. Furthermore, DelTA improves pronoun translation accuracy, and the summary component of the agent also shows promise as a tool for query-based summarization tasks. We release our code and data at https://github.com/YutongWang1216/DocMTAgent.
Optima: Optimizing Effectiveness and Efficiency for LLM-Based Multi-Agent System
Chen, Weize, Yuan, Jiarui, Qian, Chen, Yang, Cheng, Liu, Zhiyuan, Sun, Maosong
Large Language Model (LLM) based multi-agent systems (MAS) show remarkable potential in collaborative problem-solving, yet they still face critical challenges: low communication efficiency, poor scalability, and a lack of effective parameter-updating optimization methods. We present Optima, a novel framework that addresses these issues by significantly enhancing both communication efficiency and task effectiveness in LLM-based MAS through LLM training. Optima employs an iterative generate, rank, select, and train paradigm with a reward function balancing task performance, token efficiency, and communication readability. We explore various RL algorithms, including Supervised Fine-Tuning, Direct Preference Optimization, and their hybrid approaches, providing insights into their effectiveness-efficiency trade-offs. We integrate Monte Carlo Tree Search-inspired techniques for DPO data generation, treating conversation turns as tree nodes to explore diverse interaction paths. Evaluated on common multi-agent tasks, including information-asymmetric question answering and complex reasoning, Optima shows consistent and substantial improvements over single-agent baselines and vanilla MAS based on Llama 3 8B, achieving up to 2.8x performance gain with less than 10\% tokens on tasks requiring heavy information exchange. Moreover, Optima's efficiency gains open new possibilities for leveraging inference-compute more effectively, leading to improved inference-time scaling laws. By addressing fundamental challenges in LLM-based MAS, Optima shows the potential towards scalable, efficient, and effective MAS (https://chenweize1998.github.io/optima-project-page).