As large language models (LLMs) advance, their potential applications have grown significantly. However, it remains difficult to evaluate LLM behavior on user-specific tasks and craft effective pipelines to do so. Many users struggle with where to start, often referred to as the "blank page" problem. ChainBuddy, an AI assistant for generating evaluative LLM pipelines built into the ChainForge platform, aims to tackle this issue. ChainBuddy offers a straightforward and user-friendly way to plan and evaluate LLM behavior, making the process less daunting and more accessible across a wide range of possible tasks and use cases. We report a within-subjects user study comparing ChainBuddy to the baseline interface. We find that when using AI assistance, participants reported a less demanding workload and felt more confident setting up evaluation pipelines of LLM behavior. We derive insights for the future of interfaces that assist users in the open-ended evaluation of AI.

Navigating in human-filled public spaces is a critical challenge for deploying autonomous robots in real-world environments. This paper introduces NaviDIFF, a novel Hamiltonian-constrained socially-aware navigation framework designed to address the complexities of human-robot interaction and socially-aware path planning. NaviDIFF integrates a port-Hamiltonian framework to model dynamic physical interactions and a diffusion model to manage uncertainty in human-robot cooperation. The framework leverages a spatial-temporal transformer to capture social and temporal dependencies, enabling more accurate pedestrian strategy predictions and port-Hamiltonian dynamics construction. Additionally, reinforcement learning from human feedback is employed to fine-tune robot policies, ensuring adaptation to human preferences and social norms. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NaviDIFF outperforms state-of-the-art methods in social navigation tasks, offering improved stability, efficiency, and adaptability.

Real-time dynamic scheduling is a crucial but notoriously challenging task in modern manufacturing processes due to its high decision complexity. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has been gaining attention as an impactful technique to handle this challenge. However, classical RL methods typically rely on human-made dispatching rules, which are not suitable for large-scale factory-wide scheduling. To bridge this gap, this paper applies a leader-follower multi-agent RL (MARL) concept to obtain desired coordination after decomposing the scheduling problem into a set of sub-problems that are handled by each individual agent for scalability. We further strengthen the procedure by proposing a rule-based conversion algorithm to prevent catastrophic loss of production capacity due to an agent's error. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art deep RL-based scheduling models in various aspects. Additionally, the proposed model provides the most robust scheduling performance to demand changes. Overall, the proposed MARL-based scheduling model presents a promising solution to the real-time scheduling problem, with potential applications in various manufacturing industries.

A human interacting with a robot often forms predictions of what the robot will do next. For instance, based on the recent behavior of an autonomous car, a nearby human driver might predict that the car is going to remain in the same lane. It is important for the robot to understand the human's prediction for safe and seamless interaction: e.g., if the autonomous car knows the human thinks it is not merging -- but the autonomous car actually intends to merge -- then the car can adjust its behavior to prevent an accident. Prior works typically assume that humans make precise predictions of robot behavior. However, recent research on human-human prediction suggests the opposite: humans tend to approximate other agents by predicting their high-level behaviors. We apply this finding to develop a second-order theory of mind approach that enables robots to estimate how humans predict they will behave. To extract these high-level predictions directly from data, we embed the recent human and robot trajectories into a discrete latent space. Each element of this latent space captures a different type of behavior (e.g., merging in front of the human, remaining in the same lane) and decodes into a vector field across the state space that is consistent with the underlying behavior type. We hypothesize that our resulting high-level and course predictions of robot behavior will correspond to actual human predictions. We provide initial evidence in support of this hypothesis through a proof-of-concept user study.

LASTIC pollution in rivers has become a pressing global issue, with 11 million tons of plastic waste entering the ocean annually, 80% of which is caused by 1,000 major polluting rivers [1]. To address this problem, it is desired to develop a solution capable of removing plastic and other waste objects without interfering with the existing flora and fauna essential to river ecosystems [2] . Our Autonomous River Cleanup (ARC) project, initiated in 2019, leverages robotics and automation to remove plastic waste from rivers. In order to increase the capacity at which this can be done, we enhance the existing single arm sorting station [3] with additional robot arms. For multiple robot agents to efficiently sort waste on a conveyor belt, we develop and evaluate novel strategy algorithms using reinforcement learning that assign pick-and-place (PnP) tasks to the respective robot agents (Figure 1). Given a set of objects on the moving conveyor belt, the robot agents are tasked with removing waste objects, whilst bio-matter is ignored and collected at the end of the belt. The challenge is to allocate each robot optimally with PnP operations for objects within its reachable workspace.

To navigate safely and efficiently in crowded spaces, robots should not only perceive the current state of the environment but also anticipate future human movements. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning architecture, namely Falcon, to tackle socially-aware navigation by explicitly predicting human trajectories and penalizing actions that block future human paths. To facilitate realistic evaluation, we introduce a novel SocialNav benchmark containing two new datasets, Social-HM3D and Social-MP3D. This benchmark offers large-scale photo-realistic indoor scenes populated with a reasonable amount of human agents based on scene area size, incorporating natural human movements and trajectory patterns. We conduct a detailed experimental analysis with the state-of-the-art learning-based method and two classic rule-based path-planning algorithms on the new benchmark. The results demonstrate the importance of future prediction and our method achieves the best task success rate of 55% while maintaining about 90% personal space compliance. We will release our code and datasets. Videos of demonstrations can be viewed at https://zeying-gong.github.io/projects/falcon/ .

In their paper Fraud Risk Mitigation in Real-Time Payments: A Strategic Agent-Based Analysis, Katherine Mayo, Nicholas Grabill and Michael Wellman consider real-time payments, and employ an agent-based model to investigate potential strategies for banks in the face of fraud. We asked Katherine about this work, why it is an important topic, and how the team went about tackling the problem. Payments generally adhere to the following sequence of steps: initiation by the sender, processing by the bank, and then final funds are released to the receiver. The standard debit or credit transactions most people are familiar with often suffer delays in their processing of one or more days. However, recent advancements in technology have allowed for the introduction of a new, faster payment type boasting drastic decreases in processing times.

In image-based reinforcement learning (RL), policies usually operate in two steps: first extracting lower-dimensional features from raw images (the "recognition" step), and then taking actions based on the extracted features (the "decision" step). Extracting features that are spuriously correlated with performance or irrelevant for decision-making can lead to poor generalization performance, known as observational overfitting in image-based RL. In such cases, it can be hard to quantify how much of the error can be attributed to poor feature extraction vs. poor decision-making. In order to disentangle the two sources of error, we introduce the notions of recognition regret and decision regret. Using these notions, we characterize and disambiguate the two distinct causes behind observational overfitting: over-specific representations, which include features that are not needed for optimal decision-making (leading to high decision regret), vs. under-specific representations, which only include a limited set of features that were spuriously correlated with performance during training (leading to high recognition regret). Finally, we provide illustrative examples of observational overfitting due to both over-specific and under-specific representations in maze environments as well as the Atari game Pong.

This paper investigates data-driven cooperative output regulation for continuous-time multi-agent systems with unknown network topology. Unlike existing studies that typically assume a known network topology to directly compute controller parameters, a novel approach is proposed that allows for the computation of the parameter without prior knowledge of the topology. A lower bound on the minimum non-zero eigenvalue of the Laplacian matrix is estimated using only edge weight bounds, enabling the output regulation controller design to be independent of global network information. Additionally, the common need for state derivative measurements is eliminated, reducing the amount of data requirements. Furthermore, necessary and sufficient conditions are established to ensure that the data are informative for cooperative output regulation, leading to the design of a distributed output regulation controller. For the case with noisy data, the bound of the output error is provided, which is positively correlated with the noise bound, and a distributed controller is constructed for the approximate cooperative output regulation. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed methods is verified through numerical simulations.

Anti-viral therapies are typically designed or evolved towards the current strains of a virus. In learning terms, this corresponds to a myopic best response, i.e., not considering the possible adaptive moves of the opponent. However, therapy-induced selective pressures act on viral antigens to drive the emergence of mutated strains, against which initial therapies have reduced efficacy. To motivate our work, we consider antibody designs that target not only the current viral strains but also the wide range of possible future variants that the virus might evolve into under the evolutionary pressure exerted by said antibodies. Building on a computational model of binding between antibodies and viral antigens (the Absolut! framework), we design and implement a genetic simulation of the viral evolutionary escape. Crucially, this allows our antibody optimisation algorithm to consider and influence the entire escape curve of the virus, i.e. to guide (or ''shape'') the viral evolution. This is inspired by opponent shaping which, in general-sum learning, accounts for the adaptation of the co-player rather than playing a myopic best response. Hence we call the optimised antibodies shapers. Within our simulations, we demonstrate that our shapers target both current and simulated future viral variants, outperforming the antibodies chosen in a myopic way. Furthermore, we show that shapers exert specific evolutionary pressure on the virus compared to myopic antibodies. Altogether, shapers modify the evolutionary trajectories of viral strains and minimise the viral escape compared to their myopic counterparts. While this is a simple model, we hope that our proposed paradigm will enable the discovery of better long-lived vaccines and antibody therapies in the future, enabled by rapid advancements in the capabilities of simulation tools.