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Improving Environment Novelty Quantification for Effective Unsupervised Environment Design

Neural Information Processing Systems

Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) formalizes the problem of autocur-ricula through interactive training between a teacher agent and a student agent. The teacher generates new training environments with high learning potential, curating an adaptive curriculum that strengthens the student's ability to handle unseen scenarios. Existing UED methods mainly rely on regret, a metric that measures the difference between the agent's optimal and actual performance, to




A Theoretical Results

Neural Information Processing Systems

The first theorem is the main result that allows us to analyze dual curriculum games. We provide a formal proof below: Proof. We get the desired result by combining these two arguments. Repeating the symmetric argument shows the desired property for the second teacher. Following this main theorem, we can apply it to two of our methods.


Style-Preserving Policy Optimization for Game Agents

Li, Lingfeng, Lu, Yunlong, Wang, Yongyi, Li, Wenxin

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Proficient game agents with diverse play styles enrich the gaming experience and enhance the replay value of games. However, recent advancements in game AI based on reinforcement learning have predominantly focused on improving proficiency, whereas methods based on evolution algorithms generate agents with diverse play styles but exhibit subpar performance compared to RL methods. To address this gap, this paper proposes Mixed Proximal Policy Optimization (MPPO), a method designed to improve the proficiency of existing suboptimal agents while retaining their distinct styles. MPPO unifies loss objectives for both online and offline samples and introduces an implicit constraint to approximate demonstrator policies by adjusting the empirical distribution of samples. Empirical results across environments of varying scales demonstrate that MPPO achieves proficiency levels comparable to, or even superior to, pure online algorithms while preserving demonstrators' play styles. This work presents an effective approach for generating highly proficient and diverse game agents, ultimately contributing to more engaging gameplay experiences.


Towards Agent-based Test Support Systems: An Unsupervised Environment Design Approach

Ogbodo, Collins O., Rogers, Timothy J., Borgo, Mattia Dal, Wagg, David J.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Modal testing plays a critical role in structural analysis by providing essential insights into dynamic behaviour across a wide range of engineering industries. In practice, designing an effective modal test campaign involves complex experimental planning, comprising a series of interdependent decisions that significantly influence the final test outcome. Traditional approaches to test design are typically static-focusing only on global tests without accounting for evolving test campaign parameters or the impact of such changes on previously established decisions, such as sensor configurations, which have been found to significantly influence test outcomes. These rigid methodologies often compromise test accuracy and adaptability. To address these limitations, this study introduces an agent-based decision support framework for adaptive sensor placement across dynamically changing modal test environments. The framework formulates the problem using an underspecified partially observable Markov decision process, enabling the training of a generalist reinforcement learning agent through a dual-curriculum learning strategy. A detailed case study on a steel cantilever structure demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed method in optimising sensor locations across frequency segments, validating its robustness and real-world applicability in experimental settings.


1.5M Steps 3.1M Steps RND BeBold 6.4M Steps 4.6M Steps 7.5M Steps 9.8M Steps 1.0M Steps 1.4M Steps 3.4M Steps 2.4M Steps 3.9M Steps 4.8M Steps

Neural Information Processing Systems

We provide final testing performance for NovelD and all baselines in MiniGrid. We also provide more intrinsic analysis similar to Sec. 4.2 in a seven-room environment in Figure 1. There are other categories of static environment. The initial position of the agent and goal can be random. The position of the agent and goal is randomized.


AgentDistill: Training-Free Agent Distillation with Generalizable MCP Boxes

Qiu, Jiahao, Juan, Xinzhe, Wang, Yimin, Yang, Ling, Qi, Xuan, Zhang, Tongcheng, Guo, Jiacheng, Lu, Yifu, Yao, Zixin, Wang, Hongru, Liu, Shilong, Jiang, Xun, Leqi, Liu, Wang, Mengdi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While knowledge distillation has become a mature field for compressing large language models (LLMs) into smaller ones by aligning their outputs or internal representations, the distillation of LLM-based agents, which involve planning, memory, and tool use, remains relatively underexplored. Existing agent distillation methods typically replay full teacher trajectories or imitate step-by-step teacher tool usage, but they often struggle to train student agents to dynamically plan and act in novel environments. We propose AgentDistill, a novel, training-free agent distillation framework that enables efficient and scalable knowledge transfer via direct reuse of Model-Context-Protocols (MCPs), which are structured and reusable task-solving modules autonomously generated by teacher agents. The reuse of these distilled MCPs enables student agents to generalize their capabilities across domains and solve new problems with minimal supervision or human intervention. Experiments on biomedical and mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that our distilled student agents, built on small language models, can achieve performance comparable to advanced systems using large LLMs such as OctoTools (GPT-4o), highlighting the effectiveness of our framework in building scalable and cost-efficient intelligent agents.


Investigating Pedagogical Teacher and Student LLM Agents: Genetic Adaptation Meets Retrieval Augmented Generation Across Learning Style

Sanyal, Debdeep, Maiti, Agniva, Maharana, Umakanta, Kumar, Dhruv, Mali, Ankur, Giles, C. Lee, Mandal, Murari

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Effective teaching requires adapting instructional strategies to accommodate the diverse cognitive and behavioral profiles of students, a persistent challenge in education and teacher training. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promise as tools to simulate such complex pedagogical environments, current simulation frameworks are limited in two key respects: (1) they often reduce students to static knowledge profiles, and (2) they lack adaptive mechanisms for modeling teachers who evolve their strategies in response to student feedback. To address these gaps, \textbf{we introduce a novel simulation framework that integrates LLM-based heterogeneous student agents with a self-optimizing teacher agent}. The teacher agent's pedagogical policy is dynamically evolved using a genetic algorithm, allowing it to discover and refine effective teaching strategies based on the aggregate performance of diverse learners. In addition, \textbf{we propose Persona-RAG}, a Retrieval Augmented Generation module that enables student agents to retrieve knowledge tailored to their individual learning styles. Persona-RAG preserves the retrieval accuracy of standard RAG baselines while enhancing personalization, an essential factor in modeling realistic educational scenarios. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate how our framework supports the emergence of distinct and interpretable teaching patterns when interacting with varied student populations. Our results highlight the potential of LLM-driven simulations to inform adaptive teaching practices and provide a testbed for training human educators in controlled, data-driven environments.