However, precisely because of the definition of such a task, the result is an artefact that, unless explicitly designed to be transparent, is often not interpretable or, hence, trustworthy (Zhang et al., 2021; Lipton, 2017). This is where the field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) shines through. A model explanation is an exercise in communication between a sender or source (i.e. the model or one of its components) and a receiver (i.e. the explainee, a human or another processor for a downstream task) that describes the relevant context or the causes surrounding some facts (Lewis, 1986; Miller, 2019; Wright, 2004), which in the context of AI is often related to its final or intermediary outputs or decisions. Any such communicative act can be considered an explanation, but not all explanations may be useful or even desirable. According to empirical studies (Slugoski et al., 1993), it can be argued that the form of an explanation must depend on its function as an answer to a question within a conversational framework. Furthermore, in the words of Herbert Paul Grice (Grice, 1975), for a communicative act to be useful, four maxims should be followed: 1. Manner: the message or explanans should be comprehensible and clear to the receiver, which within the context of XAI is often referred to as interpretability (Lipton, 2017), 2. Quality: the message contains truthful information; in the context of XAI, reliability or explanation verification (Zhou et al., 2021b; Slack et al., 2021; Arias-Duart et al., 2022), 3. Quantity: the length of a message should be just enough to be informative, often a heuristic implicitly agreed upon in the design of explainable systems which depends on both the sender and the code it uses, and 4. Relation: the explanation should be relevant to the given context, significant when one can keep searching for causes of causes beyond the scope of relevance.

Mission planning often involves optimising the use of ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) assets in order to achieve a set of mission objectives within allowed parameters subject to constraints. The missions of interest here, involve routing multiple UAVs visiting multiple targets, utilising sensors to capture data relating to each target. Finding such solutions is often an NP-Hard problem and cannot be solved efficiently on classical computers. Furthermore, during the mission new constraints and objectives may arise, requiring a new solution to be computed within a short time period. To achieve this we investigate near term quantum algorithms that have the potential to offer speed-ups against current classical methods. We demonstrate how a large family of these problems can be formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) and then converted to a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimisation (QUBO). The formulation provided is versatile and can be adapted for many different constraints with clear qubit scaling provided. We discuss the results of solving the QUBO formulation using commercial quantum annealers and compare the solutions to current edge classical solvers. We also analyse the results from solving the QUBO using Quantum Approximate Optimisation Algorithms (QAOA) and discuss their results. Finally, we also provide efficient methods to encode to the problem into the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) formalism, where we have tailored the ansatz to the problem making efficient use of the qubits available.

We present a substantial extension of our Human-Aware Task Planning framework, tailored for scenarios with intermittent shared execution experiences and significant belief divergence between humans and robots, particularly due to the uncontrollable nature of humans. Our objective is to build a robot policy that accounts for uncontrollable human behaviors, thus enabling the anticipation of possible advancements achieved by the robot when the execution is not shared, e.g. when humans are briefly absent from the shared environment to complete a subtask. But, this anticipation is considered from the perspective of humans who have access to an estimated model for the robot. To this end, we propose a novel planning framework and build a solver based on AND-OR search, which integrates knowledge reasoning, including situation assessment by perspective taking. Our approach dynamically models and manages the expansion and contraction of potential advances while precisely keeping track of when (and when not) agents share the task execution experience. The planner systematically assesses the situation and ignores worlds that it has reason to think are impossible for humans. Overall, our new solver can estimate the distinct beliefs of the human and the robot along potential courses of action, enabling the synthesis of plans where the robot selects the right moment for communication, i.e. informing, or replying to an inquiry, or defers ontic actions until the execution experiences can be shared. Preliminary experiments in two domains, one novel and one adapted, demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework.

Goal-directed interactive agents, which autonomously complete tasks through interactions with their environment, can assist humans in various domains of their daily lives. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) led to a surge of new, more and more challenging tasks to evaluate such agents. To properly contextualize performance across these tasks, it is imperative to understand the different challenges they pose to agents. To this end, this survey compiles relevant tasks and environments for evaluating goal-directed interactive agents, structuring them along dimensions relevant for understanding current obstacles. An up-to-date compilation of relevant resources can be found on our project website: https://coli-saar.github.io/interactive-agents.

In this paper, we introduce and study the Facility Location Problem with Aleatory Agents (FLPAA), where the facility accommodates n agents larger than the number of agents reporting their preferences, namely n_r. The spare capacity is used by n_u=n-n_r aleatory agents sampled from a probability distribution \mu. The goal of FLPAA is to find a location that minimizes the ex-ante social cost, which is the expected cost of the n_u agents sampled from \mu plus the cost incurred by the agents reporting their position. We investigate the mechanism design aspects of the FLPAA under the assumption that the Mechanism Designer (MD) lacks knowledge of the distribution $\mu$ but can query k quantiles of \mu. We explore the trade-off between acquiring more insights into the probability distribution and designing a better-performing mechanism, which we describe through the strong approximation ratio (SAR). The SAR of a mechanism measures the highest ratio between the cost of the mechanisms and the cost of the optimal solution on the worst-case input x and worst-case distribution \mu, offering a metric for efficiency that does not depend on \mu. We divide our study into four different information settings: the zero information case, in which the MD has access to no quantiles; the median information case, in which the MD has access to the median of \mu; the n_u-quantile information case, in which the MD has access to n_u quantiles of its choice, and the k-quantile information case, in which the MD has access to k

In this paper, a novel generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL)-powered policy learning approach is proposed for optimizing beamforming, spectrum allocation, and remote user equipment (RUE) association in NTNs. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods for wireless network optimization often rely on manually designed reward functions, which can require extensive parameter tuning. To overcome these limitations, we employ inverse RL (IRL), specifically leveraging the GAIL framework, to automatically learn reward functions without manual design. We augment this framework with an asynchronous federated learning approach, enabling decentralized multi-satellite systems to collaboratively derive optimal policies. The proposed method aims to maximize spectrum efficiency (SE) while meeting minimum information rate requirements for RUEs. To address the non-convex, NP-hard nature of this problem, we combine the many-to-one matching theory with a multi-agent asynchronous federated IRL (MA-AFIRL) framework. This allows agents to learn through asynchronous environmental interactions, improving training efficiency and scalability. The expert policy is generated using the Whale optimization algorithm (WOA), providing data to train the automatic reward function within GAIL. Simulation results show that the proposed MA-AFIRL method outperforms traditional RL approaches, achieving a $14.6\%$ improvement in convergence and reward value. The novel GAIL-driven policy learning establishes a novel benchmark for 6G NTN optimization.

This paper explores the potential of AI-powered tools to reshape data analysis, focusing on design considerations and challenges. We explore how the emergence of large language and multimodal models offers new opportunities to enhance various stages of data analysis workflow by translating high-level user intentions into executable code, charts, and insights. We then examine human-centered design principles that facilitate intuitive interactions, build user trust, and streamline the AI-assisted analysis workflow across multiple apps. Finally, we discuss the research challenges that impede the development of these AI-based systems such as enhancing model capabilities, evaluating and benchmarking, and understanding end-user needs.

In the rapidly evolving field of robotics, integration of commonsense knowledge (CSK) in AI systems is becoming highly crucial to enhance the decision-making capabilities of robots, especially in nextgeneration multipurpose environments. This paper presents Robo-CSK-Organizer, a pioneering system that employs CSK, via a classical knowledge base, to facilitate sophisticated task-based object organization helpful in multipurpose robots. Unlike systems relying solely on deep learning tools such as ChatGPT, our Robo-CSK-Organizer system stands out in various crucial aspects. This includes: (1) its ability to resolve ambiguities and maintain consistency in object placement; (2) its adaptability to diverse task-based classifications; and moreover, (3) its contributions to explainable AI (XAI), consequently helping to foster trust and human-robot collaboration. This system's efficacy is underlined by DETIC (DEtector with Image Classes), an advanced extension of Detectron2 for object identification; BLIP (Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training) for context discernment; and most vitally by the adaptation of ConceptNet, a well-grounded commonsense knowledge base for reasoning based on semantic as well as pragmatic knowledge. While we deploy ConceptNet to extract CSK, the process in Robo-CSK-Organizer is generic enough to be replicated with other state-of-the-art knowledge bases. Controlled experiments and real-world applications, synopsized in this paper, make Robo-CSK-Organizer demonstrate superior performance in placing objects in contextually relevant locations, highlighting its clear capacity for commonsense-guided decision-making closer to the thresholds of human cognition. Hence, Robo-CSK-Organizer makes valuable contributions to Robotics and AI.

In the network security arms race, the defender is significantly disadvantaged as they need to successfully detect and counter every malicious attack. In contrast, the attacker needs to succeed only once. To level the playing field, we investigate the effectiveness of autonomous agents in a realistic network defence scenario. We first outline the problem, provide the background on reinforcement learning and detail our proposed agent design. Using a network environment simulation, with 13 hosts spanning 3 subnets, we train a novel reinforcement learning agent and show that it can reliably defend continual attacks by two advanced persistent threat (APT) red agents: one with complete knowledge of the network layout and another which must discover resources through exploration but is more general.

This paper proposes a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach to learn dynamic dispatching strategies, which is crucial for optimizing throughput in material handling systems across diverse industries. To benchmark our method, we developed a material handling environment that reflects the complexities of an actual system, such as various activities at different locations, physical constraints, and inherent uncertainties. To enhance exploration during learning, we propose a method to integrate domain knowledge in the form of existing dynamic dispatching heuristics. Our experimental results show that our method can outperform heuristics by up to 7.4 percent in terms of median throughput. Additionally, we analyze the effect of different architectures on MARL performance when training multiple agents with different functions. We also demonstrate that the MARL agents performance can be further improved by using the first iteration of MARL agents as heuristics to train a second iteration of MARL agents. This work demonstrates the potential of applying MARL to learn effective dynamic dispatching strategies that may be deployed in real-world systems to improve business outcomes.