Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have been used to address the challenging problems in the offloading process of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). More recently, they have been utilized to improve the dissemination of high-definition (HD) Maps. Nevertheless, implementing solutions such as deep Q-learning (DQN) and Actor-critic at the autonomous vehicle (AV) may lead to an increase in the computational load, causing a heavy burden on the computational devices and higher costs. Moreover, their implementation might raise compatibility issues between technologies due to the required modifications to the standards. Therefore, in this paper, we assess the scalability of an application utilizing a Q-learning single-agent solution in a distributed multi-agent environment. This application improves the network performance by taking advantage of a smaller state, and action space whilst using a multi-agent approach. The proposed solution is extensively evaluated with different test cases involving reward function considering individual or overall network performance, number of agents, and centralized and distributed learning comparison. The experimental results demonstrate that the time latencies of our proposed solution conducted in voice, video, HD Map, and best-effort cases have significant improvements, with 40.4%, 36%, 43%, and 12% respectively, compared to the performances with the single-agent approach.

Cooperation is a ubiquitous phenomenon in many natural, social, and engineered systems that contain multiple agents. Characterizing and quantifying cooperativeness of driving agents is of interest and significance for two reasons. Theoretically, it will enhance the understanding of micro-macro connections and emergence of cooperation in mixed traffic. Pragmatically, this understanding will benefit the design and operations of automated and mixed-autonomy transportation systems. However, it remains unclear how the cooperativeness can be accurately defined and quantified from empirical data, and it remains open when and to what extent collective cooperativeness exists. This paper is intended to fill the gap. We propose a unified conceptual framework to estimate collective cooperativeness of driving agents leveraging a recent behavioral equilibrium model of mixed autonomy traffic (Li et al. 2022a). This framework is interpretable, theoretically consistent, and enables quantifying collective cooperativeness of traffic agents from trajectory data. We apply the framework to multilane freeway traffic employing NGSIM I-80 trajectory data set and careful data selection. Our case study indicates the existence of collective cooperativeness between human-driven passenger cars and trucks in real-world traffic and reveals its other properties that are otherwise unknown.

Environment prediction frameworks are critical for the safe navigation of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in dynamic settings. LiDAR-generated occupancy grid maps (L-OGMs) offer a robust bird's-eye view for the scene representation, enabling self-supervised joint scene predictions while exhibiting resilience to partial observability and perception detection failures. Prior approaches have focused on deterministic L-OGM prediction architectures within the grid cell space. While these methods have seen some success, they frequently produce unrealistic predictions and fail to capture the stochastic nature of the environment. Additionally, they do not effectively integrate additional sensor modalities present in AVs. Our proposed framework performs stochastic L-OGM prediction in the latent space of a generative architecture and allows for conditioning on RGB cameras, maps, and planned trajectories. We decode predictions using either a single-step decoder, which provides high-quality predictions in real-time, or a diffusion-based batch decoder, which can further refine the decoded frames to address temporal consistency issues and reduce compression losses. Our experiments on the nuScenes and Waymo Open datasets show that all variants of our approach qualitatively and quantitatively outperform prior approaches.

Load data from power network clusters indicates economic development in each area, crucial for predicting regional trends and guiding power enterprise decisions. The Transformer model, a leading method for load prediction, faces challenges modeling historical data due to variables like weather, events, festivals, and data volatility. To tackle this, the cloud model's fuzzy feature is utilized to manage uncertainties effectively. Presenting an innovative approach, the Cloud Model Improved Transformer (CMIT) method integrates the Transformer model with the cloud model utilizing the particle swarm optimization algorithm, with the aim of achieving robust and precise power load predictions. Through comparative experiments conducted on 31 real datasets within a power network cluster, it is demonstrated that CMIT significantly surpasses the Transformer model in terms of prediction accuracy, thereby highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing forecasting capabilities within the power network cluster sector.

By understanding how users decide on their commuting modes, it is possible to identify factors that can be influenced to change travel behavior and promote the adoption of more sustainable transportation modes. Agent-based modeling (ABM) is particularly valuable for this purpose, as it can represent complex systems like transportation and identify emerging collective behaviors resulting from the autonomous decisions of transport users interacting among them and with the environment (Kagho, Balac, and Axhausen 2020). These capabilities make ABM suitable for analyzing the impacts of transport policies (Wise, Crooks, and Batty 2017). However, the application of ABM in analyzing transport mode choices has been limited and studies have been conducted predominantly in developed countries (Cadavid and Salazar-Serna 2021; Salazar-Serna, Cadavid, Franco, and Carley 2023). The effectiveness of these findings may not extend seamlessly to developing regions due to different contextual policy needs and the distinct ways socioeconomic and cultural factors influence human behavior (Carley 1991; Salazar-Serna et al. 2023). Therefore, policies that have been successful in one setting might not achieve similar outcomes in another. Previous studies in transportation have identified various determinants affecting mode choice. These factors can be grouped into several categories: sociodemographic characteristics such as age, sex, occupation, and income level (Ashalatha et al. 2013); travel habits including distance traveled, travel time, origin-destination pairs, and trip purpose (Madhuwanthi et al. 2016); and attributes of the built environment like design, density, and capacity (Ewing and Cervero 2010). Additionally, attitudes and perceptions regarding transport modes, which cover aspects such as comfort, cost, security, safety, quality, and reliability, play a crucial role (Fu 2021).

In recent years, Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has found application in numerous areas of science and industry, such as autonomous driving, telecommunications, and global health. Nevertheless, MARL suffers from, for instance, an exponential growth of dimensions. Inherent properties of quantum mechanics help to overcome these limitations, e.g., by significantly reducing the number of trainable parameters. Previous studies have developed an approach that uses gradient-free quantum Reinforcement Learning and evolutionary optimization for variational quantum circuits (VQCs) to reduce the trainable parameters and avoid barren plateaus as well as vanishing gradients. This leads to a significantly better performance of VQCs compared to classical neural networks with a similar number of trainable parameters and a reduction in the number of parameters by more than 97 \% compared to similarly good neural networks. We extend an approach of K\"olle et al. by proposing a Gate-Based, a Layer-Based, and a Prototype-Based concept to mutate and recombine VQCs. Our results show the best performance for mutation-only strategies and the Gate-Based approach. In particular, we observe a significantly better score, higher total and own collected coins, as well as a superior own coin rate for the best agent when evaluated in the Coin Game environment.

Non-Bayesian social learning enables multiple agents to conduct networked signal and information processing through observing environmental signals and information aggregating. Traditional non-Bayesian social learning models only consider single signals, limiting their applications in scenarios where multiple viewpoints of information are available. In this work, we exploit, in the information aggregation step, the independently learned results from observations taken from multiple viewpoints and propose a novel non-Bayesian social learning model for scenarios with multiview observations. We prove the convergence of the model under traditional assumptions and provide convergence conditions for the algorithm in the presence of misleading signals. Through theoretical analyses and numerical experiments, we validate the strong reliability and robustness of the proposed algorithm, showcasing its potential for real-world applications.

Predicting influencers' views and public sentiment on social media is crucial for anticipating societal trends and guiding strategic responses. This study introduces a novel computational framework to predict opinion leaders' perspectives and the emotive reactions of the populace, addressing the inherent challenges posed by the unstructured, context-sensitive, and heterogeneous nature of online communication. Our research introduces an innovative module that starts with the automatic 5W1H (Where, Who, When, What, Why, and How) questions formulation engine, tailored to emerging news stories and trending topics. We then build a total of 60 anonymous opinion leader agents in six domains and realize the views generation based on an enhanced large language model (LLM) coupled with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Subsequently, we synthesize the potential views of opinion leaders and predicted the emotional responses to different events. The efficacy of our automated 5W1H module is corroborated by an average GPT-4 score of 8.83/10, indicative of high fidelity. The influencer agents exhibit a consistent performance, achieving an average GPT-4 rating of 6.85/10 across evaluative metrics. Utilizing the 'Russia-Ukraine War' as a case study, our methodology accurately foresees key influencers' perspectives and aligns emotional predictions with real-world sentiment trends in various domains.

The growing demand for air travel requires technological advancements in air traffic management as well as mechanisms for monitoring and ensuring safe and efficient operations. In terminal airspaces, predictive models of future movements and traffic flows can help with proactive planning and efficient coordination; however, varying airport topologies, and interactions with other agents, among other factors, make accurate predictions challenging. Data-driven predictive models have shown promise for handling numerous variables to enable various downstream tasks, including collision risk assessment, taxi-out time prediction, departure metering, and emission estimations. While data-driven methods have shown improvements in these tasks, prior works lack large-scale curated surface movement datasets within the public domain and the development of generalizable trajectory forecasting models. In response to this, we propose two contributions: (1) Amelia-48, a large surface movement dataset collected using the System Wide Information Management (SWIM) Surface Movement Event Service (SMES). With data collection beginning in Dec 2022, the dataset provides more than a year's worth of SMES data (~30TB) and covers 48 airports within the US National Airspace System. In addition to releasing this data in the public domain, we also provide post-processing scripts and associated airport maps to enable research in the forecasting domain and beyond. (2) Amelia-TF model, a transformer-based next-token-prediction large multi-agent multi-airport trajectory forecasting model trained on 292 days or 9.4 billion tokens of position data encompassing 10 different airports with varying topology. The open-sourced model is validated on unseen airports with experiments showcasing the different prediction horizon lengths, ego-agent selection strategies, and training recipes to demonstrate the generalization capabilities.

This paper investigates the utilization of Quantum Computing and Neuromorphic Computing for Safe, Reliable, and Explainable Multi_Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) in the context of optimal control in autonomous robotics. The objective was to address the challenges of optimizing the behavior of autonomous agents while ensuring safety, reliability, and explainability. Quantum Computing techniques, including Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), were employed to efficiently explore large solution spaces and find approximate solutions to complex MARL problems. Neuromorphic Computing, inspired by the architecture of the human brain, provided parallel and distributed processing capabilities, which were leveraged to develop intelligent and adaptive systems. The combination of these technologies held the potential to enhance the safety, reliability, and explainability of MARL in autonomous robotics. This research contributed to the advancement of autonomous robotics by exploring cutting-edge technologies and their applications in multi-agent systems. Codes and data are available.