Agents
Subsidy design for better social outcomes
Balcan, Maria-Florina, Pozzi, Matteo, Sharma, Dravyansh
Overcoming the impact of selfish behavior of rational players in multiagent systems is a fundamental problem in game theory. Without any intervention from a central agent, strategic users take actions in order to maximize their personal utility, which can lead to extremely inefficient overall system performance, often indicated by a high Price of Anarchy. Recent work (Lin et al. 2021) investigated and formalized yet another undesirable behavior of rational agents, that of avoiding freely available information about the game for selfish reasons, leading to worse social outcomes. A central planner can significantly mitigate these issues by injecting a subsidy to reduce certain costs associated with the system and obtain net gains in the system performance. Crucially, the planner needs to determine how to allocate this subsidy effectively. We formally show that designing subsidies that perfectly optimize the social good, in terms of minimizing the Price of Anarchy or preventing the information avoidance behavior, is computationally hard under standard complexity theoretic assumptions. On the positive side, we show that we can learn provably good values of subsidy in repeated games coming from the same domain. This data-driven subsidy design approach avoids solving computationally hard problems for unseen games by learning over polynomially many games. We also show that optimal subsidy can be learned with no-regret given an online sequence of games, under mild assumptions on the cost matrix. Our study focuses on two distinct games: a Bayesian extension of the well-studied fair cost-sharing game, and a component maintenance game with engineering applications.
Last-Iterate Convergence of Payoff-Based Independent Learning in Zero-Sum Stochastic Games
Chen, Zaiwei, Zhang, Kaiqing, Mazumdar, Eric, Ozdaglar, Asuman, Wierman, Adam
In this paper, we consider two-player zero-sum matrix and stochastic games and develop learning dynamics that are payoff-based, convergent, rational, and symmetric between the two players. Specifically, the learning dynamics for matrix games are based on the smoothed best-response dynamics, while the learning dynamics for stochastic games build upon those for matrix games, with additional incorporation of the minimax value iteration. To our knowledge, our theoretical results present the first finite-sample analysis of such learning dynamics with last-iterate guarantees. In the matrix game setting, the results imply a sample complexity of $O(\epsilon^{-1})$ to find the Nash distribution and a sample complexity of $O(\epsilon^{-8})$ to find a Nash equilibrium. In the stochastic game setting, the results also imply a sample complexity of $O(\epsilon^{-8})$ to find a Nash equilibrium. To establish these results, the main challenge is to handle stochastic approximation algorithms with multiple sets of coupled and stochastic iterates that evolve on (possibly) different time scales. To overcome this challenge, we developed a coupled Lyapunov-based approach, which may be of independent interest to the broader community studying the convergence behavior of stochastic approximation algorithms.
MAS4POI: a Multi-Agents Collaboration System for Next POI Recommendation
Wu, Yuqian, Peng, Yuhong, Yu, Jiapeng, Lee, Raymond S. T.
LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems have potential benefits of complex decision-making tasks management across various domains but their applications in the next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation remain underexplored. This paper proposes a novel MAS4POI system designed to enhance next POI recommendations through multi-agent interactions. MAS4POI supports Large Language Models (LLMs) specializing in distinct agents such as DataAgent, Manager, Analyst, and Navigator with each contributes to a collaborative process of generating the next POI recommendations. The system is examined by integrating six distinct LLMs and evaluated by two real-world datasets for recommendation accuracy improvement in real-world scenarios.
Efficient Multi-agent Navigation with Lightweight DRL Policy
In this article, we present an end-to-end collision avoidance policy based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for multi-agent systems, demonstrating encouraging outcomes in real-world applications. In particular, our policy calculates the control commands of the agent based on the raw LiDAR observation. In addition, the number of parameters of the proposed basic model is 140,000, and the size of the parameter file is 3.5 MB, which allows the robot to calculate the actions from the CPU alone. We propose a multi-agent training platform based on a physics-based simulator to further bridge the gap between simulation and the real world. The policy is trained on a policy-gradients-based RL algorithm in a dense and messy training environment. A novel reward function is introduced to address the issue of agents choosing suboptimal actions in some common scenarios. Although the data used for training is exclusively from the simulation platform, the policy can be successfully transferred and deployed in real-world robots. Finally, our policy effectively responds to intentional obstructions and avoids collisions. The website is available at \url{https://sites.google.com/view/xingrong2024efficient/%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5}.
Behavioral Learning of Dish Rinsing and Scrubbing based on Interruptive Direct Teaching Considering Assistance Rate
Wakabayashi, Shumpei, Kawaharazuka, Kento, Okada, Kei, Inaba, Masayuki
Robots are expected to manipulate objects in a safe and dexterous way. For example, washing dishes is a dexterous operation that involves scrubbing the dishes with a sponge and rinsing them with water. It is necessary to learn it safely without splashing water and without dropping the dishes. In this study, we propose a safe and dexterous manipulation system. The robot learns a dynamics model of the object by estimating the state of the object and the robot itself, the control input, and the amount of human assistance required (assistance rate) after the human corrects the initial trajectory of the robot's hands by interruptive direct teaching. By backpropagating the error between the estimated and the reference value using the acquired dynamics model, the robot can generate a control input that approaches the reference value, for example, so that human assistance is not required and the dish does not move excessively. This allows for adaptive rinsing and scrubbing of dishes with unknown shapes and properties. As a result, it is possible to generate safe actions that require less human assistance.
Managing multiple agents by automatically adjusting incentives
Akatsuka, Shunichi, Teramoto, Yaemi, Courville, Aaron
In the coming years, AI agents will be used for making more complex decisions, including in situations involving many different groups of people. One big challenge is that AI agent tends to act in its own interest, unlike humans who often think about what will be the best for everyone in the long run. In this paper, we explore a method to get self-interested agents to work towards goals that benefit society as a whole. We propose a method to add a manager agent to mediate agent interactions by assigning incentives to certain actions. We tested our method with a supply-chain management problem and showed that this framework (1) increases the raw reward by 22.2%, (2) increases the agents' reward by 23.8%, and (3) increases the manager's reward by 20.1%.
Here's Charlie! Realising the Semantic Web vision of Agents in the age of LLMs
This paper presents our research towards a near-term future in which legal entities, such as individuals and organisations can entrust semi-autonomous AI-driven agents to carry out online interactions on their behalf. The author's research concerns the development of semi-autonomous Web agents, which consult users if and only if the system does not have sufficient context or confidence to proceed working autonomously. This creates a user-agent dialogue that allows the user to teach the agent about the information sources they trust, their data-sharing preferences, and their decision-making preferences. Ultimately, this enables the user to maximise control over their data and decisions while retaining the convenience of using agents, including those driven by LLMs. In view of developing near-term solutions, the research seeks to answer the question: "How do we build a trustworthy and reliable network of semi-autonomous agents which represent individuals and organisations on the Web?". After identifying key requirements, the paper presents a demo for a sample use case of a generic personal assistant. This is implemented using (Notation3) rules to enforce safety guarantees around belief, data sharing and data usage and LLMs to allow natural language interaction with users and serendipitous dialogues between software agents.
Learning Resilient Formation Control of Drones with Graph Attention Network
Xiao, Jiaping, Fang, Xu, Jia, Qianlei, Feroskhan, Mir
The rapid advancement of drone technology has significantly impacted various sectors, including search and rescue, environmental surveillance, and industrial inspection. Multidrone systems offer notable advantages such as enhanced efficiency, scalability, and redundancy over single-drone operations. Despite these benefits, ensuring resilient formation control in dynamic and adversarial environments, such as under communication loss or cyberattacks, remains a significant challenge. Classical approaches to resilient formation control, while effective in certain scenarios, often struggle with complex modeling and the curse of dimensionality, particularly as the number of agents increases. This paper proposes a novel, learning-based formation control for enhancing the adaptability and resilience of multidrone formations using graph attention networks (GATs). By leveraging GAT's dynamic capabilities to extract internode relationships based on the attention mechanism, this GAT-based formation controller significantly improves the robustness of drone formations against various threats, such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Our approach not only improves formation performance in normal conditions but also ensures the resilience of multidrone systems in variable and adversarial environments. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of our method over baseline formation controllers. Furthermore, the physical experiments validate the effectiveness of the trained control policy in real-world flights.
AgentRE: An Agent-Based Framework for Navigating Complex Information Landscapes in Relation Extraction
Shi, Yuchen, Jiang, Guochao, Qiu, Tian, Yang, Deqing
The relation extraction (RE) in complex scenarios faces challenges such as diverse relation types and ambiguous relations between entities within a single sentence, leading to the poor performance of pure "text-in, text-out" language models (LMs). To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose an agent-based RE framework, namely AgentRE, which fully leverages the potential of large language models (LLMs) including memory, retrieval and reflection, to achieve RE in complex scenarios. Specifically, three major modules are built in AgentRE serving as the tools to help the agent acquire and process various useful information, thereby obtaining improved RE performance. Our extensive experimental results upon two datasets in English and Chinese demonstrate our AgentRE's superior performance, especially in low-resource scenarios. Additionally, the trajectories generated by AgentRE can be refined to construct a high-quality training dataset incorporating different reasoning methods, which can be used to fine-tune smaller models. Code is available at https://github.com/Lightblues/AgentRE.
Securing Federated Learning in Robot Swarms using Blockchain Technology
Pacheco, Alexandre, De Vos, Sébastien, Reina, Andreagiovanni, Dorigo, Marco, Strobel, Volker
Federated learning is a new approach to distributed machine learning that offers potential advantages such as reducing communication requirements and distributing the costs of training algorithms. Therefore, it could hold great promise in swarm robotics applications. However, federated learning usually requires a centralized server for the aggregation of the models. In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept implementation of federated learning in a robot swarm that does not compromise decentralization. To do so, we use blockchain technology to enable our robot swarm to securely synchronize a shared model that is the aggregation of the individual models without relying on a central server. We then show that introducing a single malfunctioning robot can, however, heavily disrupt the training process. To prevent such situations, we devise protection mechanisms that are implemented through secure and tamper-proof blockchain smart contracts. Our experiments are conducted in ARGoS, a physics-based simulator for swarm robotics, using the Ethereum blockchain protocol which is executed by each simulated robot.