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Learning to Communicate with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the problem of multiple agents sensing and acting in environments with the goal of maximising their shared utility. In these environments, agents must learn communication protocols in order to share information that is needed to solve the tasks. By embracing deep neural networks, we are able to demonstrate endto-end learning of protocols in complex environments inspired by communication riddles and multi-agent computer vision problems with partial observability. We propose two approaches for learning in these domains: Reinforced Inter-Agent Learning (RIAL) and Differentiable Inter-Agent Learning (DIAL). The former uses deep Q-learning, while the latter exploits the fact that, during learning, agents can backpropagate error derivatives through (noisy) communication channels. Hence, this approach uses centralised learning but decentralised execution. Our experiments introduce new environments for studying the learning of communication protocols and present a set of engineering innovations that are essential for success in these domains.




Watch Party: The Best TAG in Years, a '60s Sensation, and Omega Goes All White

WIRED

Watch Party: The Best TAG in Years, a '60s Sensation, and Omega Goes All White It's LVMH Watch Week, so here's WIRED's pick of the timepieces that made their debut--plus one notable gatecrasher. The watch world is readying itself for the slew of new releases from the likes of Patek Philippe and Rolex when Watches and Wonders descends on Geneva in April. But this week, the watchmaker Omega and the luxury conglomerate LVMH both spotted a window of opportunity to get pieces out ahead of the annual gathering. Since 2020, LVMH has been kicking off each new year by serving up watches from its stable of brands, including Zenith, TAG Heuer, Hublot, and Louis Vuitton. Meanwhile, Omega--muscling in on LVMH's party somewhat--is leaning into its connection to next month's Winter Olympics in Italy, where it will once again serve as the event's official timekeeper.


LLMs contain a LOT of parameters. But what's a parameter?

MIT Technology Review

LLMs contain a LOT of parameters. They're the mysterious numbers that make your favorite AI models tick. What are they and what do they do? I am writing this because one of my editors woke up in the middle of the night and scribbled on a bedside notepad: "What is a parameter?" Unlike a lot of thoughts that hit at 4 a.m., it's a really good question--one that goes right to the heart of how large language models work. A large language model's parameters are often said to be the dials and levers that control how it behaves.


Multi-Agent Collaborative Intelligence: Dual-Dial Control for Reliable LLM Reasoning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multi-agent debate often wastes compute by using a fixed adversarial stance, aggregating without deliberation, or stopping on heuristics. We introduce MACI, an active controller with two independent dials that decouple information from behavior: an information dial that gates evidence by quality, and a behavior dial that schedules contentiousness from exploration to consolidation. A moderator tracks disagreement, overlap, evidence quality, and argument quality, and halts when gains plateau. We provide theory-lite guarantees for nonincreasing dispersion and provable termination, with a budget-feasible scheduler. Across clinical diagnosis and news-bias tasks, MACI improves accuracy and calibration while reducing tokens, and converts residual uncertainty into precision RAG plans that specify what to retrieve next. We use a cross-family LLM judge (CRIT) as a conservative soft weight and stop signal, validated for order invariance and judge-swap stability; stability depends on using high-capability judges. MACI turns debate into a budget-aware, measurable, and provably terminating controller.


Test-Time Learning and Inference-Time Deliberation for Efficiency-First Offline Reinforcement Learning in Care Coordination and Population Health Management

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Care coordination and population health management (PHM) are core functions of health systems and community partners, impacting large numbers of Americans enrolled in Medicaid and other safety-net programs. These efforts aim to proactively identify needs, prioritize outreach, and escalate appropriately, all within finite staffing and budget constraints. While outreach modalities (text, phone, video, in-person) carry low clinical risk, their time and opportunity costs vary significantly, making efficiency a primary design goal. In practice, the central operational question is when to deploy expensive in-person outreach versus efficient virtual modalities to maximize value and equity under capacity constraints. These decisions must be made in strictly offline settings, where policies are learned from logged data without exploration at deployment [1]. Classical approaches include constrained Markov decision processes [2], risk-sensitive objectives, and conservative offline RL (e.g., CQL/IQL) [3, 4]. Conformal prediction can provide calibrated error control [5, 6]; ensembles provide practical uncertainty quantification [7]; and decision-time computation is common in control [8]. In health services research and health economic evaluation, cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analyses (CEA/CBA) guide program-level choices [9-12], but they are not designed for per-patient, per-decision recommendations that adapt to granular state features and logged behavior constraints. 1


Nonlinear Concept Erasure: a Density Matching Approach

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Ensuring that neural models used in real-world applications cannot infer sensitive information, such as demographic attributes like gender or race, from text representations is a critical challenge when fairness is a concern. We address this issue through concept erasure, a process that removes information related to a specific concept from distributed representations while preserving as much of the remaining semantic information as possible. Our approach involves learning an orthogonal projection in the embedding space, designed to make the class-conditional feature distributions of the discrete concept to erase indistinguishable after projection. By adjusting the rank of the projector, we control the extent of information removal, while its orthogonality ensures strict preservation of the local structure of the embeddings. Our method, termed $\overline{\mathrm{L}}$EOPARD, achieves state-of-the-art performance in nonlinear erasure of a discrete attribute on classic natural language processing benchmarks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that $\overline{\mathrm{L}}$EOPARD effectively mitigates bias in deep nonlinear classifiers, thereby promoting fairness.


A Proofs

Neural Information Processing Systems

We will prove it by contradiction. To prove Lemma 2 we will use the following lemma. This is a special case of the simulation lemma (Kearns and Singh, 2002). We will prove it by contradiction. There is a sizeable body of literature that concentrates on the non-stationarity issues arising from having multiple agents learning simultaneously in the same environment (Laurent et al., 2011; In contrast, Foerster et al. (2018a) add an extra term to The works by Lowe et al. (2017) and Foerster The works by de Witt et al. (2020) and Y u et al. (2021) show that Y u et al. attribute the positive empirical results to the clipping parameter Global simulator, observation functions, and joint policy for n 0, ...,N/T do s The bar plots show the total runtime of training for 4M timesteps with the three simulators.