Teachers in challenging conflict situations often experience shame and self-blame, which relate to the feeling of incompetence but may externalise as anger. Sensing mixed signals fails the contingency rule for developing affect regulation and may result in confusion for students about their own emotions and hinder their emotion regulation. Therefore, being able to constructively regulate emotions not only benefits individual experience of emotions but also fosters effective interpersonal emotion regulation and influences how a situation is managed. MITHOS is a system aimed at training teachers' conflict resolution skills through realistic situative learning opportunities during classroom conflicts. In four stages, MITHOS supports teachers' socio-emotional self-awareness, perspective-taking and positive regard. It provides: a) a safe virtual environment to train free social interaction and receive natural social feedback from reciprocal student-agent reactions, b) spatial situational perspective taking through an avatar, c) individual virtual reflection guidance on emotional experiences through co-regulation processes, and d) expert feedback on professional behavioural strategies. This chapter presents the four stages and their implementation in a semi-automatic Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) System. The WoZ system affords collecting data that are used for developing the fully automated hybrid (machine learning and model-based) system, and to validate the underlying psychological and conflict resolution models. We present results validating the approach in terms of scenario realism, as well as a systematic testing of the effects of external avatar similarity on antecedents of self-awareness with behavior similarity. The chapter contributes to a common methodology of conducting interdisciplinary research for human-centered and generalisable XR and presents a system designed to support it.

Patterns of human motion in outdoor and indoor environments are substantially different due to the scope of the environment and the typical intentions of people therein. While outdoor trajectory forecasting has received significant attention, indoor forecasting is still an underexplored research area. This paper proposes SITUATE, a novel approach to cope with indoor human trajectory prediction by leveraging equivariant and invariant geometric features and a self-supervised vision representation. The geometric learning modules model the intrinsic symmetries and human movements inherent in indoor spaces. This concept becomes particularly important because self-loops at various scales and rapid direction changes often characterize indoor trajectories. On the other hand, the vision representation module is used to acquire spatial-semantic information about the environment to predict users' future locations more accurately. We evaluate our method through comprehensive experiments on the two most famous indoor trajectory forecasting datasets, i.e., TH\"OR and Supermarket, obtaining state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, we also achieve competitive results in outdoor scenarios, showing that indoor-oriented forecasting models generalize better than outdoor-oriented ones. The source code is available at https://github.com/intelligolabs/SITUATE.

While Agent-Based Models can create detailed artificial societies based on individual differences and local context, they can be computationally intensive. Modelers may offset these costs through a parsimonious use of the model, for example by using smaller population sizes (which limits analyses in sub-populations), running fewer what-if scenarios, or accepting more uncertainty by performing fewer simulations. Alternatively, researchers may accelerate simulations via hardware solutions (e.g., GPU parallelism) or approximation approaches that operate a tradeoff between accuracy and compute time. In this paper, we present an approximation that combines agents who `think alike', thus reducing the population size and the compute time. Our innovation relies on representing agent behaviors as networks of rules (Fuzzy Cognitive Maps) and empirically evaluating different measures of distance between these networks. Then, we form groups of think-alike agents via community detection and simplify them to a representative agent. Case studies show that our simplifications remain accuracy.

This paper addresses the challenges of exploration and navigation in unknown environments from the perspective of evolutionary swarm robotics. A key focus is on path formation, which is essential for enabling cooperative swarm robots to navigate effectively. We designed the task allocation and path formation process based on a finite state machine, ensuring systematic decision-making and efficient state transitions. The approach is decentralized, allowing each robot to make decisions independently based on local information, which enhances scalability and robustness. We present a novel subgoal-based path formation method that establishes paths between locations by leveraging visually connected subgoals. Simulation experiments conducted in the Argos simulator show that this method successfully forms paths in the majority of trials. However, inter-collision (traffic) among numerous robots during path formation can negatively impact performance. To address this issue, we propose a task allocation strategy that uses local communication protocols and light signal-based communication to manage robot deployment. This strategy assesses the distance between points and determines the optimal number of robots needed for the path formation task, thereby reducing unnecessary exploration and traffic congestion. The performance of both the subgoal-based path formation method and the task allocation strategy is evaluated by comparing the path length, time, and resource usage against the A* algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, highlighting its scalability, robustness, and fault tolerance.

Large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have revolutionized traditional information access, enabling AI agent to search and summarize information on behalf of users during dynamic dialogues. Despite their potential, current AI search engines exhibit considerable room for improvement in several critical areas. These areas include the support for multimodal information, the delivery of personalized responses, the capability to logically answer complex questions, and the facilitation of more flexible interactions. This paper proposes a novel AI Search Engine framework called the Agent Collaboration Network (ACN). The ACN framework consists of multiple specialized agents working collaboratively, each with distinct roles such as Account Manager, Solution Strategist, Information Manager, and Content Creator. This framework integrates mechanisms for picture content understanding, user profile tracking, and online evolution, enhancing the AI search engine's response quality, personalization, and interactivity. A highlight of the ACN is the introduction of a Reflective Forward Optimization method (RFO), which supports the online synergistic adjustment among agents. This feature endows the ACN with online learning capabilities, ensuring that the system has strong interactive flexibility and can promptly adapt to user feedback. This learning method may also serve as an optimization approach for agent-based systems, potentially influencing other domains of agent applications.

Social norm is defined as a shared standard of acceptable behavior in a society. The emergence of social norms fosters coordination among agents without any hard-coded rules, which is crucial for the large-scale deployment of AVs in an intelligent transportation system. This paper explores the application of LLMs in understanding and modeling social norms in autonomous driving games. We introduce LLMs into autonomous driving games as intelligent agents who make decisions according to text prompts. These agents are referred to as LLM-based agents. Our framework involves LLM-based agents playing Markov games in a multi-agent system (MAS), allowing us to investigate the emergence of social norms among individual agents. We aim to identify social norms by designing prompts and utilizing LLMs on textual information related to the environment setup and the observations of LLM-based agents. Using the OpenAI Chat API powered by GPT-4.0, we conduct experiments to simulate interactions and evaluate the performance of LLM-based agents in two driving scenarios: unsignalized intersection and highway platoon. The results show that LLM-based agents can handle dynamically changing environments in Markov games, and social norms evolve among LLM-based agents in both scenarios. In the intersection game, LLM-based agents tend to adopt a conservative driving policy when facing a potential car crash. The advantage of LLM-based agents in games lies in their strong operability and analyzability, which facilitate experimental design.

Human intelligence emerged through the process of natural selection and evolution on Earth. We investigate what it would take to re-create this process in silico. While past work has often focused on low-level processes (such as simulating physics or chemistry), we instead take a more targeted approach, aiming to evolve agents that can accumulate open-ended culture and technologies across generations. Towards this, we present JaxLife: an artificial life simulator in which embodied agents, parameterized by deep neural networks, must learn to survive in an expressive world containing programmable systems. First, we describe the environment and show that it can facilitate meaningful Turing-complete computation. We then analyze the evolved emergent agents' behavior, such as rudimentary communication protocols, agriculture, and tool use. Finally, we investigate how complexity scales with the amount of compute used. We believe JaxLife takes a step towards studying evolved behavior in more open-ended simulations. Our code is available at https://github.com/luchris429/JaxLife

We propose that a tree-like hierarchical structure represents a simple and effective way to model the emergent behaviour of financial markets, especially markets where there exists a pronounced intersection between social media influences and investor behaviour. To explore this hypothesis, we introduce an agent-based model of financial markets, where trading agents are embedded in a hierarchical network of communities, and communities influence the strategies and opinions of traders. Empirical analysis of the model shows that its behaviour conforms to several stylized facts observed in real financial markets; and the model is able to realistically simulate the effects that social media-driven phenomena, such as echo chambers and pump-and-dump schemes, have on financial markets.

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advances in the field of natural language processing, but they still face challenges such as continuous decision-making. In this research, we propose a novel framework by integrating iterative feedback, reflective mechanisms, and a memory optimization mechanism based on the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, it significantly enhances the agents' capabilities in handling multi-tasking and long-span information.

In this paper, we study the shortest path problem (SPP) with multiple source-destination pairs (MSD), namely MSD-SPP, to minimize average travel time of all shortest paths. The inherent traffic capacity limits within a road network contributes to the competition among vehicles. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) model cannot offer effective and efficient path planning cooperation due to the asynchronous decision making setting in MSD-SPP, where vehicles (a.k.a agents) cannot simultaneously complete routing actions in the previous time step. To tackle the efficiency issue, we propose to divide an entire road network into multiple sub-graphs and subsequently execute a two-stage process of inter-region and intra-region route planning. To address the asynchronous issue, in the proposed asyn-MARL framework, we first design a global state, which exploits a low-dimensional vector to implicitly represent the joint observations and actions of multi-agents. Then we develop a novel trajectory collection mechanism to decrease the redundancy in training trajectories. Additionally, we design a novel actor network to facilitate the cooperation among vehicles towards the same or close destinations and a reachability graph aimed at preventing infinite loops in routing paths. On both synthetic and real road networks, our evaluation result demonstrates that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art planning approaches.