Daily Papers

Existing LLMs exhibit remarkable performance on various NLP tasks, but still struggle with complex real-world tasks, even equipped with advanced strategies like CoT and ReAct. In this work, we propose the CoAct framework, which transfers the hierarchical planning and collaboration patterns in human society to LLM systems. Specifically, our CoAct framework involves two agents: (1) A global planning agent, to comprehend the problem scope, formulate macro-level plans and provide detailed sub-task descriptions to local execution agents, which serves as the initial rendition of a global plan. (2) A local execution agent, to operate within the multi-tier task execution structure, focusing on detailed execution and implementation of specific tasks within the global plan. Experimental results on the WebArena benchmark show that CoAct can re-arrange the process trajectory when facing failures, and achieves superior performance over baseline methods on long-horizon web tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/xmhou2002/CoAct.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have been remarkable. Users face a choice between using cloud-based LLMs for generation quality and deploying local-based LLMs for lower computational cost. The former option is typically costly and inefficient, while the latter usually fails to deliver satisfactory performance for reasoning steps requiring deliberate thought processes. In this work, we propose a novel LLM utilization paradigm that facilitates the collaborative operation of large cloud-based LLMs and smaller local-deployed LLMs. Our framework comprises two primary modules: the local agent instantiated with a relatively smaller LLM, handling less complex reasoning steps, and the cloud agent equipped with a larger LLM, managing more intricate reasoning steps. This collaborative processing is enabled through an adaptive mechanism where the local agent introspectively identifies errors and proactively seeks assistance from the cloud agent, thereby effectively integrating the strengths of both locally-deployed and cloud-based LLMs, resulting in significant enhancements in task completion performance and efficiency. We evaluate AdaSwitch across 7 benchmarks, ranging from mathematical reasoning and complex question answering, using various types of LLMs to instantiate the local and cloud agents. The empirical results show that AdaSwitch effectively improves the performance of the local agent, and sometimes achieves competitive results compared to the cloud agent while utilizing much less computational overhead.

We study reinforcement learning for global decision-making in the presence of many local agents, where the global decision-maker makes decisions affecting all local agents, and the objective is to learn a policy that maximizes the rewards of both the global and the local agents. Such problems find many applications, e.g. demand response, EV charging, queueing, etc. In this setting, scalability has been a long-standing challenge due to the size of the state/action space which can be exponential in the number of agents. This work proposes the SUB-SAMPLE-Q algorithm where the global agent subsamples kleq n local agents to compute an optimal policy in time that is only exponential in k, providing an exponential speedup from standard methods that are exponential in n. We show that the learned policy converges to the optimal policy in the order of O(1/k+epsilon_{k,m}) as the number of sub-sampled agents k increases, where epsilon_{k,m} is the Bellman noise. We also conduct numerical simulations in a demand-response setting and a queueing setting.

Current mobile assistants are limited by dependence on system APIs or struggle with complex user instructions and diverse interfaces due to restricted comprehension and decision-making abilities. To address these challenges, we propose MobA, a novel Mobile phone Agent powered by multimodal large language models that enhances comprehension and planning capabilities through a sophisticated two-level agent architecture. The high-level Global Agent (GA) is responsible for understanding user commands, tracking history memories, and planning tasks. The low-level Local Agent (LA) predicts detailed actions in the form of function calls, guided by sub-tasks and memory from the GA. Integrating a Reflection Module allows for efficient task completion and enables the system to handle previously unseen complex tasks. MobA demonstrates significant improvements in task execution efficiency and completion rate in real-life evaluations, underscoring the potential of MLLM-empowered mobile assistants.

This paper introduces Multi-Agent MDP Homomorphic Networks, a class of networks that allows distributed execution using only local information, yet is able to share experience between global symmetries in the joint state-action space of cooperative multi-agent systems. In cooperative multi-agent systems, complex symmetries arise between different configurations of the agents and their local observations. For example, consider a group of agents navigating: rotating the state globally results in a permutation of the optimal joint policy. Existing work on symmetries in single agent reinforcement learning can only be generalized to the fully centralized setting, because such approaches rely on the global symmetry in the full state-action spaces, and these can result in correspondences across agents. To encode such symmetries while still allowing distributed execution we propose a factorization that decomposes global symmetries into local transformations. Our proposed factorization allows for distributing the computation that enforces global symmetries over local agents and local interactions. We introduce a multi-agent equivariant policy network based on this factorization. We show empirically on symmetric multi-agent problems that globally symmetric distributable policies improve data efficiency compared to non-equivariant baselines.

Value function factorization has achieved great success in multi-agent reinforcement learning by optimizing joint action-value functions through the maximization of factorized per-agent utilities. To ensure Individual-Global-Maximum property, existing works often focus on value factorization using monotonic functions, which are known to result in restricted representation expressiveness. In this paper, we analyze the limitations of monotonic factorization and present ConcaveQ, a novel non-monotonic value function factorization approach that goes beyond monotonic mixing functions and employs neural network representations of concave mixing functions. Leveraging the concave property in factorization, an iterative action selection scheme is developed to obtain optimal joint actions during training. It is used to update agents' local policy networks, enabling fully decentralized execution. The effectiveness of the proposed ConcaveQ is validated across scenarios involving multi-agent predator-prey environment and StarCraft II micromanagement tasks. Empirical results exhibit significant improvement of ConcaveQ over state-of-the-art multi-agent reinforcement learning approaches.

Multi-agent systems often require agents to collaborate with or compete against other agents with diverse goals, behaviors, or strategies. Agent modeling is essential when designing adaptive policies for intelligent machine agents in multiagent systems, as this is the means by which the ego agent understands other agents' behavior and extracts their meaningful policy representations. These representations can be used to enhance the ego agent's adaptive policy which is trained by reinforcement learning. However, existing agent modeling approaches typically assume the availability of local observations from other agents (modeled agents) during training or a long observation trajectory for policy adaption. To remove these constrictive assumptions and improve agent modeling performance, we devised a Contrastive Learning-based Agent Modeling (CLAM) method that relies only on the local observations from the ego agent during training and execution. With these observations, CLAM is capable of generating consistent high-quality policy representations in real-time right from the beginning of each episode. We evaluated the efficacy of our approach in both cooperative and competitive multi-agent environments. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art on both cooperative and competitive tasks, highlighting the potential of contrastive learning-based agent modeling for enhancing reinforcement learning.

We consider the problem of multi-agent navigation and collision avoidance when observations are limited to the local neighborhood of each agent. We propose InforMARL, a novel architecture for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) which uses local information intelligently to compute paths for all the agents in a decentralized manner. Specifically, InforMARL aggregates information about the local neighborhood of agents for both the actor and the critic using a graph neural network and can be used in conjunction with any standard MARL algorithm. We show that (1) in training, InforMARL has better sample efficiency and performance than baseline approaches, despite using less information, and (2) in testing, it scales well to environments with arbitrary numbers of agents and obstacles. We illustrate these results using four task environments, including one with predetermined goals for each agent, and one in which the agents collectively try to cover all goals. Code available at https://github.com/nsidn98/InforMARL.

Recently, large reasoning models have demonstrated strong mathematical and coding abilities, and deep search leverages their reasoning capabilities in challenging information retrieval tasks. Existing deep search works are generally limited to a single knowledge source, either local or the Web. However, enterprises often require private deep search systems that can leverage search tools over both local and the Web corpus. Simply training an agent equipped with multiple search tools using flat reinforcement learning (RL) is a straightforward idea, but it has problems such as low training data efficiency and poor mastery of complex tools. To address the above issue, we propose a hierarchical agentic deep search framework, HierSearch, trained with hierarchical RL. At the low level, a local deep search agent and a Web deep search agent are trained to retrieve evidence from their corresponding domains. At the high level, a planner agent coordinates low-level agents and provides the final answer. Moreover, to prevent direct answer copying and error propagation, we design a knowledge refiner that filters out hallucinations and irrelevant evidence returned by low-level agents. Experiments show that HierSearch achieves better performance compared to flat RL, and outperforms various deep search and multi-source retrieval-augmented generation baselines in six benchmarks across general, finance, and medical domains.

We propose a many-sorted modal logic for reasoning about knowledge in multi-agent systems. Our logic introduces a clear distinction between participating agents and the environment. This allows to express local properties of agents and global properties of worlds in a uniform way, as well as to talk about the presence or absence of agents in a world. The logic subsumes the standard epistemic logic and is a conservative extension of it. The semantics is given in chromatic hypergraphs, a generalization of chromatic simplicial complexes, which were recently used to model knowledge in distributed systems. We show that the logic is sound and complete with respect to the intended semantics. We also show a further connection of chromatic hypergraphs with neighborhood frames.

We investigate the challenge of parametrizing policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-dimensional continuous action spaces. Our objective is to develop a multimodal policy that overcomes limitations inherent in the commonly-used Gaussian parameterization. To achieve this, we propose a principled framework that models the continuous RL policy as a generative model of optimal trajectories. By conditioning the policy on a latent variable, we derive a novel variational bound as the optimization objective, which promotes exploration of the environment. We then present a practical model-based RL method, called Reparameterized Policy Gradient (RPG), which leverages the multimodal policy parameterization and learned world model to achieve strong exploration capabilities and high data efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that our method can help agents evade local optima in tasks with dense rewards and solve challenging sparse-reward environments by incorporating an object-centric intrinsic reward. Our method consistently outperforms previous approaches across a range of tasks. Code and supplementary materials are available on the project page https://haosulab.github.io/RPG/

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is an effective data representation tool with numerous applications in signal processing and machine learning. However, deploying NMF in a decentralized manner over ad-hoc networks introduces privacy concerns due to the conventional approach of sharing raw data among network agents. To address this, we propose a privacy-preserving algorithm for fully-distributed NMF that decomposes a distributed large data matrix into left and right matrix factors while safeguarding each agent's local data privacy. It facilitates collaborative estimation of the left matrix factor among agents and enables them to estimate their respective right factors without exposing raw data. To ensure data privacy, we secure information exchanges between neighboring agents utilizing the Paillier cryptosystem, a probabilistic asymmetric algorithm for public-key cryptography that allows computations on encrypted data without decryption. Simulation results conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in achieving privacy-preserving distributed NMF over ad-hoc networks.

Video paragraph captioning aims to generate a multi-sentence description of an untrimmed video with several temporal event locations in coherent storytelling. Following the human perception process, where the scene is effectively understood by decomposing it into visual (e.g. human, animal) and non-visual components (e.g. action, relations) under the mutual influence of vision and language, we first propose a visual-linguistic (VL) feature. In the proposed VL feature, the scene is modeled by three modalities including (i) a global visual environment; (ii) local visual main agents; (iii) linguistic scene elements. We then introduce an autoregressive Transformer-in-Transformer (TinT) to simultaneously capture the semantic coherence of intra- and inter-event contents within a video. Finally, we present a new VL contrastive loss function to guarantee learnt embedding features are matched with the captions semantics. Comprehensive experiments and extensive ablation studies on ActivityNet Captions and YouCookII datasets show that the proposed Visual-Linguistic Transformer-in-Transform (VLTinT) outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods on accuracy and diversity. Source code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/UARK-AICV/VLTinT.

Policy optimization methods with function approximation are widely used in multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, it remains elusive how to design such algorithms with statistical guarantees. Leveraging a multi-agent performance difference lemma that characterizes the landscape of multi-agent policy optimization, we find that the localized action value function serves as an ideal descent direction for each local policy. Motivated by the observation, we present a multi-agent PPO algorithm in which the local policy of each agent is updated similarly to vanilla PPO. We prove that with standard regularity conditions on the Markov game and problem-dependent quantities, our algorithm converges to the globally optimal policy at a sublinear rate. We extend our algorithm to the off-policy setting and introduce pessimism to policy evaluation, which aligns with experiments. To our knowledge, this is the first provably convergent multi-agent PPO algorithm in cooperative Markov games.

State-of-the-art conversational agents have advanced significantly in conjunction with the use of large transformer-based language models. However, even with these advancements, conversational agents still lack the ability to produce responses that are informative and coherent with the local context. In this work, we propose a dialog framework that incorporates both local knowledge as well as users' past dialogues to generate high quality conversations. We introduce an approach to build a dataset based on Reddit conversations, where outbound URL links are widely available in the conversations and the hyperlinked documents can be naturally included as local external knowledge. Using our framework and dataset, we demonstrate that incorporating local knowledge can largely improve informativeness, coherency and realisticness measures using human evaluations. In particular, our approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art conversational model on the Reddit dataset across all three measures. We also find that scaling the size of our models from 117M to 8.3B parameters yields consistent improvement of validation perplexity as well as human evaluated metrics. Our model with 8.3B parameters can generate human-like responses as rated by various human evaluations in a single-turn dialog setting.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential across various domains, including cybersecurity. Using commercial cloud-based LLMs may be undesirable due to privacy concerns, costs, and network connectivity constraints. In this paper, we present Hackphyr, a locally fine-tuned LLM to be used as a red-team agent within network security environments. Our fine-tuned 7 billion parameter model can run on a single GPU card and achieves performance comparable with much larger and more powerful commercial models such as GPT-4. Hackphyr clearly outperforms other models, including GPT-3.5-turbo, and baselines, such as Q-learning agents in complex, previously unseen scenarios. To achieve this performance, we generated a new task-specific cybersecurity dataset to enhance the base model's capabilities. Finally, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of the agents' behaviors that provides insights into the planning abilities and potential shortcomings of such agents, contributing to the broader understanding of LLM-based agents in cybersecurity contexts

We describe an approach for aligning an LLM-based dialogue agent based on global (i.e., dialogue-level) rewards, while also taking into account naturally-occurring multimodal signals. At a high level, our approach (dubbed GELI) learns a local, turn-level reward model by decomposing the human-provided Global Explicit (GE) session-level reward, using Local Implicit (LI) multimodal reward signals to crossmodally shape the reward decomposition step. This decomposed reward model is then used as part of the standard RHLF pipeline improve an LLM-based dialog agent. We run quantitative and qualitative human studies to evaluate the performance of our GELI approach, and find that it shows consistent improvements across various conversational metrics compared to baseline methods.

Multi-agent coordination is crucial for reliable multi-robot navigation in shared spaces such as automated warehouses. In regions of dense robot traffic, local coordination methods may fail to find a deadlock-free solution. In these scenarios, it is appropriate to let a central unit generate a global schedule that decides the passing order of robots. However, the runtime of such centralized coordination methods increases significantly with the problem scale. In this paper, we propose to leverage Graph Neural Network Variational Autoencoders (GNN-VAE) to solve the multi-agent coordination problem at scale faster than through centralized optimization. We formulate the coordination problem as a graph problem and collect ground truth data using a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) solver. During training, our learning framework encodes good quality solutions of the graph problem into a latent space. At inference time, solution samples are decoded from the sampled latent variables, and the lowest-cost sample is selected for coordination. Finally, the feasible proposal with the highest performance index is selected for the deployment. By construction, our GNN-VAE framework returns solutions that always respect the constraints of the considered coordination problem. Numerical results show that our approach trained on small-scale problems can achieve high-quality solutions even for large-scale problems with 250 robots, being much faster than other baselines. Project page: https://mengyuest.github.io/gnn-vae-coord

Computed Tomography (CT) scan, which produces 3D volumetric medical data that can be viewed as hundreds of cross-sectional images (a.k.a. slices), provides detailed anatomical information for diagnosis. For radiologists, creating CT radiology reports is time-consuming and error-prone. A visual question answering (VQA) system that can answer radiologists' questions about some anatomical regions on the CT scan and even automatically generate a radiology report is urgently needed. However, existing VQA systems cannot adequately handle the CT radiology question answering (CTQA) task for: (1) anatomic complexity makes CT images difficult to understand; (2) spatial relationship across hundreds slices is difficult to capture. To address these issues, this paper proposes CT-Agent, a multimodal agentic framework for CTQA. CT-Agent adopts anatomically independent tools to break down the anatomic complexity; furthermore, it efficiently captures the across-slice spatial relationship with a global-local token compression strategy. Experimental results on two 3D chest CT datasets, CT-RATE and RadGenome-ChestCT, verify the superior performance of CT-Agent.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have recently shown impressive capabilities in complex reasoning and tool use via multi-step interactions with their environments. While these agents have the potential to tackle complicated tasks, their problem-solving process, i.e., agents' interaction trajectory leading to task completion, remains underexploited. These trajectories contain rich feedback that can navigate agents toward the right directions for solving problems correctly. Although prevailing approaches, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), can effectively balance exploration and exploitation, they ignore the interdependence among various trajectories and lack the diversity of search spaces, which leads to redundant reasoning and suboptimal outcomes. To address these challenges, we propose SE-Agent, a Self-Evolution framework that enables Agents to optimize their reasoning processes iteratively. Our approach revisits and enhances former pilot trajectories through three key operations: revision, recombination, and refinement. This evolutionary mechanism enables two critical advantages: (1) it expands the search space beyond local optima by intelligently exploring diverse solution paths guided by previous trajectories, and (2) it leverages cross-trajectory inspiration to efficiently enhance performance while mitigating the impact of suboptimal reasoning paths. Through these mechanisms, SE-Agent achieves continuous self-evolution that incrementally improves reasoning quality. We evaluate SE-Agent on SWE-bench Verified to resolve real-world GitHub issues. Experimental results across five strong LLMs show that integrating SE-Agent delivers up to 55% relative improvement, achieving state-of-the-art performance among all open-source agents on SWE-bench Verified. Our code and demonstration materials are publicly available at https://github.com/JARVIS-Xs/SE-Agent.

Vision-language model-based mobile agents have gained the ability to not only understand complex instructions and mobile screenshots, but also optimize their action outputs via thinking and reasoning, benefiting from reinforcement learning, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). However, existing research centers on offline reinforcement learning training or online optimization using action-level rewards, which limits the agent's dynamic interaction with the environment. This often results in agents settling into local optima, thereby weakening their ability for exploration and error action correction. To address these challenges, we introduce an approach called Mobile-R1, which employs interactive multi-turn reinforcement learning with task-level rewards for mobile agents. Our training framework consists of three stages: initial format finetuning, single-step online training via action-level reward, followed by online training via task-level reward based on multi-turn trajectories. This strategy is designed to enhance the exploration and error correction capabilities of Mobile-R1, leading to significant performance improvements. Moreover, we have collected a dataset covering 28 Chinese applications with 24,521 high-quality manual annotations and established a new benchmark with 500 trajectories. We will open source all resources, including the dataset, benchmark, model weight, and codes: https://mobile-r1.github.io/Mobile-R1/.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) utilizing multiple Large Language Model agents with Retrieval Augmented Generation and that can execute code locally may become beneficial in cosmological data analysis. Here, we illustrate a first small step towards AI-assisted analyses and a glimpse of the potential of MAS to automate and optimize scientific workflows in Cosmology. The system architecture of our example package, that builds upon the autogen/ag2 framework, can be applied to MAS in any area of quantitative scientific research. The particular task we apply our methods to is the cosmological parameter analysis of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope lensing power spectrum likelihood using Monte Carlo Markov Chains. Our work-in-progress code is open source and available at https://github.com/CMBAgents/cmbagent.

Deep neural networks (DNN) can approximate value functions or policies for reinforcement learning, which makes the reinforcement learning algorithms more powerful. However, some DNNs, such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), cannot extract enough information or take too long to obtain enough features from the inputs under specific circumstances of reinforcement learning. For example, the input data of Google Research Football, a reinforcement learning environment which trains agents to play football, is the small map of players' locations. The information is contained not only in the coordinates of players, but also in the relationships between different players. CNNs can neither extract enough information nor take too long to train. To address this issue, this paper proposes a deep q-learning network (DQN) with a graph neural network (GNN) as its model. The GNN transforms the input data into a graph which better represents the football players' locations so that it extracts more information of the interactions between different players. With two GNNs to approximate its local and target value functions, this DQN allows players to learn from their experience by using value functions to see the prospective value of each intended action. The proposed model demonstrated the power of GNN in the football game by outperforming other DRL models with significantly fewer steps.

We introduce Pok\'eChamp, a minimax agent powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) for Pok\'emon battles. Built on a general framework for two-player competitive games, Pok\'eChamp leverages the generalist capabilities of LLMs to enhance minimax tree search. Specifically, LLMs replace three key modules: (1) player action sampling, (2) opponent modeling, and (3) value function estimation, enabling the agent to effectively utilize gameplay history and human knowledge to reduce the search space and address partial observability. Notably, our framework requires no additional LLM training. We evaluate Pok\'eChamp in the popular Gen 9 OU format. When powered by GPT-4o, it achieves a win rate of 76% against the best existing LLM-based bot and 84% against the strongest rule-based bot, demonstrating its superior performance. Even with an open-source 8-billion-parameter Llama 3.1 model, Pok\'eChamp consistently outperforms the previous best LLM-based bot, Pok\'ellmon powered by GPT-4o, with a 64% win rate. Pok\'eChamp attains a projected Elo of 1300-1500 on the Pok\'emon Showdown online ladder, placing it among the top 30%-10% of human players. In addition, this work compiles the largest real-player Pok\'emon battle dataset, featuring over 3 million games, including more than 500k high-Elo matches. Based on this dataset, we establish a series of battle benchmarks and puzzles to evaluate specific battling skills. We further provide key updates to the local game engine. We hope this work fosters further research that leverage Pok\'emon battle as benchmark to integrate LLM technologies with game-theoretic algorithms addressing general multiagent problems. Videos, code, and dataset available at https://sites.google.com/view/pokechamp-llm.

Rapid Large Language Model (LLM) advancements are fueling autonomous Multi-Agent System (MAS) development. However, current frameworks often lack flexibility, resource awareness, model diversity, and autonomous tool creation. This paper introduces HASHIRU (Hierarchical Agent System for Hybrid Intelligent Resource Utilization), a novel MAS framework enhancing flexibility, resource efficiency, and adaptability. HASHIRU features a "CEO" agent dynamically managing specialized "employee" agents, instantiated based on task needs and resource constraints (cost, memory). Its hybrid intelligence prioritizes smaller, local LLMs (via Ollama) while flexibly using external APIs and larger models when necessary. An economic model with hiring/firing costs promotes team stability and efficient resource allocation. The system also includes autonomous API tool creation and a memory function. Evaluations on tasks like academic paper review (58% success), safety assessments (100% on a JailbreakBench subset), and complex reasoning (outperforming Gemini 2.0 Flash on GSM8K: 96% vs. 61%; JEEBench: 80% vs. 68.3%; SVAMP: 92% vs. 84%) demonstrate HASHIRU's capabilities. Case studies illustrate its self-improvement via autonomous cost model generation, tool integration, and budget management. HASHIRU offers a promising approach for more robust, efficient, and adaptable MAS through dynamic hierarchical control, resource-aware hybrid intelligence, and autonomous functional extension. Source code and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/HASHIRU-AI/HASHIRU and https://github.com/HASHIRU-AI/HASHIRUBench respectively, and a live demo is available at https://hashiruagentx-hashiruai.hf.space upon request.

Code generation aims to produce code that fulfills requirements written in natural languages automatically. Large language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have demonstrated promising effectiveness in this area. Nonetheless, these LLMs often fail to ensure the syntactic and semantic correctness of the generated code. Recently, researchers proposed multi-agent frameworks that guide LLMs with different prompts to analyze programming tasks, generate code, perform testing in a sequential workflow. However, the performance of the workflow is not robust as the code generation depends on the performance of each agent. To address this challenge, we propose CodeCoR, a self-reflective multi-agent framework that evaluates the effectiveness of each agent and their collaborations. Specifically, for a given task description, four agents in CodeCoR generate prompts, code, test cases, and repair advice, respectively. Each agent generates more than one output and prunes away the low-quality ones. The generated code is tested in the local environment: the code that fails to pass the generated test cases is sent to the repair agent and the coding agent re-generates the code based on repair advice. Finally, the code that passes the most number of generated test cases is returned to users. Our experiments on four widely used datasets, HumanEval, HumanEval-ET, MBPP, and MBPP-ET, demonstrate that CodeCoR significantly outperforms existing baselines (e.g., CodeCoT and MapCoder), achieving an average Pass@1 score of 77.8%.

Recent advances in group-based reinforcement learning (RL) have driven frontier large language models (LLMs) in single-turn tasks like mathematical reasoning. However, their scalability to long-horizon LLM agent training remains limited. Unlike static tasks, agent-environment interactions unfold over many steps and often yield sparse or delayed rewards, making credit assignment across individual steps significantly more challenging. In this work, we propose Group-in-Group Policy Optimization (GiGPO), a novel RL algorithm that achieves fine-grained credit assignment for LLM agents while preserving the appealing properties of group-based RL: critic-free, low memory, and stable convergence. GiGPO introduces a two-level structure for estimating relative advantage: (i) At the episode-level, GiGPO computes macro relative advantages based on groups of complete trajectories; (ii) At the step-level, GiGPO introduces an anchor state grouping mechanism that retroactively constructs step-level groups by identifying repeated environment states across trajectories. Actions stemming from the same state are grouped together, enabling micro relative advantage estimation. This hierarchical structure effectively captures both global trajectory quality and local step effectiveness without relying on auxiliary models or additional rollouts. We evaluate GiGPO on two challenging agent benchmarks, ALFWorld and WebShop, using Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. Crucially, GiGPO delivers fine-grained per-step credit signals and achieves performance gains of > 12\% on ALFWorld and > 9\% on WebShop over the GRPO baseline: all while maintaining the same GPU memory overhead, identical LLM rollout, and incurring little to no additional time cost.

Large language models, employed as multiple agents that interact and collaborate with each other, have excelled at solving complex tasks. The agents are programmed with prompts that declare their functionality, along with the topologies that orchestrate interactions across agents. Designing prompts and topologies for multi-agent systems (MAS) is inherently complex. To automate the entire design process, we first conduct an in-depth analysis of the design space aiming to understand the factors behind building effective MAS. We reveal that prompts together with topologies play critical roles in enabling more effective MAS design. Based on the insights, we propose Multi-Agent System Search (MASS), a MAS optimization framework that efficiently exploits the complex MAS design space by interleaving its optimization stages, from local to global, from prompts to topologies, over three stages: 1) block-level (local) prompt optimization; 2) workflow topology optimization; 3) workflow-level (global) prompt optimization, where each stage is conditioned on the iteratively optimized prompts/topologies from former stages. We show that MASS-optimized multi-agent systems outperform a spectrum of existing alternatives by a substantial margin. Based on the MASS-found systems, we finally propose design principles behind building effective multi-agent systems.

Recent endeavors towards directly using large language models (LLMs) as agent models to execute interactive planning tasks have shown commendable results. Despite their achievements, however, they still struggle with brainless trial-and-error in global planning and generating hallucinatory actions in local planning due to their poor understanding of the ''real'' physical world. Imitating humans' mental world knowledge model which provides global prior knowledge before the task and maintains local dynamic knowledge during the task, in this paper, we introduce parametric World Knowledge Model (WKM) to facilitate agent planning. Concretely, we steer the agent model to self-synthesize knowledge from both expert and sampled trajectories. Then we develop WKM, providing prior task knowledge to guide the global planning and dynamic state knowledge to assist the local planning. Experimental results on three complex real-world simulated datasets with three state-of-the-art open-source LLMs, Mistral-7B, Gemma-7B, and Llama-3-8B, demonstrate that our method can achieve superior performance compared to various strong baselines. Besides, we analyze to illustrate that our WKM can effectively alleviate the blind trial-and-error and hallucinatory action issues, providing strong support for the agent's understanding of the world. Other interesting findings include: 1) our instance-level task knowledge can generalize better to unseen tasks, 2) weak WKM can guide strong agent model planning, and 3) unified WKM training has promising potential for further development. Code will be available at https://github.com/zjunlp/WKM.

For clinical data integration and healthcare services, the HL7 FHIR standard has established itself as a desirable format for interoperability between complex health data. Previous attempts at automating the translation from free-form clinical notes into structured FHIR resources rely on modular, rule-based systems or LLMs with instruction tuning and constrained decoding. Since they frequently suffer from limited generalizability and structural inconformity, we propose an end-to-end framework powered by LLM agents, code execution, and healthcare terminology database tools to address these issues. Our solution, called Infherno, is designed to adhere to the FHIR document schema and competes well with a human baseline in predicting FHIR resources from unstructured text. The implementation features a front end for custom and synthetic data and both local and proprietary models, supporting clinical data integration processes and interoperability across institutions.

Leveraging multiple Large Language Models(LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network(ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative "team" focused on a specific subtask. Agentic Neural Network follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase-Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase-Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables ANN to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across four benchmark datasets, ANN surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements. Our findings indicate that ANN provides a scalable, data-driven framework for multi-agent systems, combining the collaborative capabilities of LLMs with the efficiency and flexibility of neural network principles. We plan to open-source the entire framework.

LLM-based autonomous agents often fail to execute complex web tasks that require dynamic interaction due to the inherent uncertainty and complexity of these environments. Existing LLM-based web agents typically rely on rigid, expert-designed policies specific to certain states and actions, which lack the flexibility and generalizability needed to adapt to unseen tasks. In contrast, humans excel by exploring unknowns, continuously adapting strategies, and resolving ambiguities through exploration. To emulate human-like adaptability, web agents need strategic exploration and complex decision-making. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is well-suited for this, but classical MCTS struggles with vast action spaces, unpredictable state transitions, and incomplete information in web tasks. In light of this, we develop WebPilot, a multi-agent system with a dual optimization strategy that improves MCTS to better handle complex web environments. Specifically, the Global Optimization phase involves generating a high-level plan by breaking down tasks into manageable subtasks and continuously refining this plan, thereby focusing the search process and mitigating the challenges posed by vast action spaces in classical MCTS. Subsequently, the Local Optimization phase executes each subtask using a tailored MCTS designed for complex environments, effectively addressing uncertainties and managing incomplete information. Experimental results on WebArena and MiniWoB++ demonstrate the effectiveness of WebPilot. Notably, on WebArena, WebPilot achieves SOTA performance with GPT-4, achieving a 93% relative increase in success rate over the concurrent tree search-based method. WebPilot marks a significant advancement in general autonomous agent capabilities, paving the way for more advanced and reliable decision-making in practical environments.

Human pose forecasting garners attention for its diverse applications. However, challenges in modeling the multi-modal nature of human motion and intricate interactions among agents persist, particularly with longer timescales and more agents. In this paper, we propose an interaction-aware trajectory-conditioned long-term multi-agent human pose forecasting model, utilizing a coarse-to-fine prediction approach: multi-modal global trajectories are initially forecasted, followed by respective local pose forecasts conditioned on each mode. In doing so, our Trajectory2Pose model introduces a graph-based agent-wise interaction module for a reciprocal forecast of local motion-conditioned global trajectory and trajectory-conditioned local pose. Our model effectively handles the multi-modality of human motion and the complexity of long-term multi-agent interactions, improving performance in complex environments. Furthermore, we address the lack of long-term (6s+) multi-agent (5+) datasets by constructing a new dataset from real-world images and 2D annotations, enabling a comprehensive evaluation of our proposed model. State-of-the-art prediction performance on both complex and simpler datasets confirms the generalized effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/Jaewoo97/T2P.

Autonomous agents powered by multimodal large language models have been developed to facilitate task execution on mobile devices. However, prior work has predominantly focused on atomic tasks -- such as shot-chain execution tasks and single-screen grounding tasks -- while overlooking the generalization to compositional tasks, which are indispensable for real-world applications. This work introduces UI-NEXUS, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate mobile agents on three categories of compositional operations: Simple Concatenation, Context Transition, and Deep Dive. UI-NEXUS supports interactive evaluation in 20 fully controllable local utility app environments, as well as 30 online Chinese and English service apps. It comprises 100 interactive task templates with an average optimal step count of 14.05. Experimental results across a range of mobile agents with agentic workflow or agent-as-a-model show that UI-NEXUS presents significant challenges. Specifically, existing agents generally struggle to balance performance and efficiency, exhibiting representative failure modes such as under-execution, over-execution, and attention drift, causing visible atomic-to-compositional generalization gap. Inspired by these findings, we propose AGENT-NEXUS, a lightweight and efficient scheduling system to tackle compositional mobile tasks. AGENT-NEXUS extrapolates the abilities of existing mobile agents by dynamically decomposing long-horizon tasks to a series of self-contained atomic subtasks. AGENT-NEXUS achieves 24% to 40% task success rate improvement for existing mobile agents on compositional operation tasks within the UI-NEXUS benchmark without significantly sacrificing inference overhead. The demo video, dataset, and code are available on the project page at https://ui-nexus.github.io.

Computer use agents (CUA) are systems that automatically interact with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to complete tasks. CUA have made significant progress with the advent of large vision-language models (VLMs). However, these agents typically rely on cloud-based inference with substantial compute demands, raising critical privacy and scalability concerns, especially when operating on personal devices. In this work, we take a step toward privacy-preserving and resource-efficient agents by developing a lightweight vision-language model that runs entirely on local machines. To train this compact agent, we introduce an LLM-as-Judge framework that automatically evaluates and filters synthetic interaction trajectories, producing high-quality data for reinforcement learning without human annotation. Experiments on the OS-World benchmark demonstrate that our fine-tuned local model outperforms existing baselines, highlighting a promising path toward private, efficient, and generalizable GUI agents.

Recent advancements in visual language models (VLMs) have notably enhanced their capabilities in handling complex Graphical User Interface (GUI) interaction tasks. Despite these improvements, current frameworks often struggle to generate correct actions in challenging GUI environments. State-of-the-art commercial VLMs are black-boxes, and fine-tuning open-source VLMs for GUI tasks requires significant resources. Additionally, existing trajectory-level evaluation and refinement techniques frequently fall short due to delayed feedback and local optimization issues. To address these challenges, we propose an approach that guides VLM agents with process supervision by a reward model during GUI navigation and control at inference time. This guidance allows the VLM agent to optimize actions at each inference step, thereby improving performance in both static and dynamic environments. In particular, our method demonstrates significant performance gains in three GUI navigation tasks, achieving a 3.4% improvement in single step action accuracy for static environments, along with a around 33% increase in task success rate in one dynamic environment. With further integration of trajectory reflection and retry mechanisms, we also demonstrate even greater enhancement in task success.

Although memory capabilities of AI agents are gaining increasing attention, existing solutions remain fundamentally limited. Most rely on flat, narrowly scoped memory components, constraining their ability to personalize, abstract, and reliably recall user-specific information over time. To this end, we introduce MIRIX, a modular, multi-agent memory system that redefines the future of AI memory by solving the field's most critical challenge: enabling language models to truly remember. Unlike prior approaches, MIRIX transcends text to embrace rich visual and multimodal experiences, making memory genuinely useful in real-world scenarios. MIRIX consists of six distinct, carefully structured memory types: Core, Episodic, Semantic, Procedural, Resource Memory, and Knowledge Vault, coupled with a multi-agent framework that dynamically controls and coordinates updates and retrieval. This design enables agents to persist, reason over, and accurately retrieve diverse, long-term user data at scale. We validate MIRIX in two demanding settings. First, on ScreenshotVQA, a challenging multimodal benchmark comprising nearly 20,000 high-resolution computer screenshots per sequence, requiring deep contextual understanding and where no existing memory systems can be applied, MIRIX achieves 35% higher accuracy than the RAG baseline while reducing storage requirements by 99.9%. Second, on LOCOMO, a long-form conversation benchmark with single-modal textual input, MIRIX attains state-of-the-art performance of 85.4%, far surpassing existing baselines. These results show that MIRIX sets a new performance standard for memory-augmented LLM agents. To allow users to experience our memory system, we provide a packaged application powered by MIRIX. It monitors the screen in real time, builds a personalized memory base, and offers intuitive visualization and secure local storage to ensure privacy.

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), significant progress has been made in multi-agent applications. However, the complexities in coordinating agents' cooperation and LLMs' erratic performance pose notable challenges in developing robust and efficient multi-agent applications. To tackle these challenges, we propose AgentScope, a developer-centric multi-agent platform with message exchange as its core communication mechanism. Together with abundant syntactic tools, built-in resources, and user-friendly interactions, our communication mechanism significantly reduces the barriers to both development and understanding. Towards robust and flexible multi-agent application, AgentScope provides both built-in and customizable fault tolerance mechanisms while it is also armed with system-level supports for multi-modal data generation, storage and transmission. Additionally, we design an actor-based distribution framework, enabling easy conversion between local and distributed deployments and automatic parallel optimization without extra effort. With these features, AgentScope empowers developers to build applications that fully realize the potential of intelligent agents. We have released AgentScope at https://github.com/modelscope/agentscope, and hope AgentScope invites wider participation and innovation in this fast-moving field.

Issue resolution has made remarkable progress thanks to the advanced reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Recently, agent-based frameworks such as SWE-agent have further advanced this progress by enabling autonomous, tool-using agents to tackle complex software engineering tasks. While existing agent-based issue resolution approaches are primarily based on agents' independent explorations, they often get stuck in local solutions and fail to identify issue patterns that span across different parts of the codebase. To address this limitation, we propose SWE-Debate, a competitive multi-agent debate framework that encourages diverse reasoning paths and achieves more consolidated issue localization. SWE-Debate first creates multiple fault propagation traces as localization proposals by traversing a code dependency graph. Then, it organizes a three-round debate among specialized agents, each embodying distinct reasoning perspectives along the fault propagation trace. This structured competition enables agents to collaboratively converge on a consolidated fix plan. Finally, this consolidated fix plan is integrated into an MCTS-based code modification agent for patch generation. Experiments on the SWE-bench benchmark show that SWE-Debate achieves new state-of-the-art results in open-source agent frameworks and outperforms baselines by a large margin.

Deep reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for obtaining high-performance policies. However, the safety of these policies has been a long-standing issue. One promising paradigm to guarantee safety is a shield, which shields a policy from making unsafe actions. However, computing a shield scales exponentially in the number of state variables. This is a particular concern in multi-agent systems with many agents. In this work, we propose a novel approach for multi-agent shielding. We address scalability by computing individual shields for each agent. The challenge is that typical safety specifications are global properties, but the shields of individual agents only ensure local properties. Our key to overcome this challenge is to apply assume-guarantee reasoning. Specifically, we present a sound proof rule that decomposes a (global, complex) safety specification into (local, simple) obligations for the shields of the individual agents. Moreover, we show that applying the shields during reinforcement learning significantly improves the quality of the policies obtained for a given training budget. We demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our multi-agent shielding framework in two case studies, reducing the computation time from hours to seconds and achieving fast learning convergence.

This paper presents a novel approach for the Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task in continuous 3D environments, which requires an autonomous agent to follow natural language instructions in unseen environments. Existing end-to-end learning-based VLN methods struggle at this task as they focus mostly on utilizing raw visual observations and lack the semantic spatio-temporal reasoning capabilities which is crucial in generalizing to new environments. In this regard, we present a hybrid transformer-recurrence model which focuses on combining classical semantic mapping techniques with a learning-based method. Our method creates a temporal semantic memory by building a top-down local ego-centric semantic map and performs cross-modal grounding to align map and language modalities to enable effective learning of VLN policy. Empirical results in a photo-realistic long-horizon simulation environment show that the proposed approach outperforms a variety of state-of-the-art methods and baselines with over 22% relative improvement in SPL in prior unseen environments.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the power of reasoning through self-generated chains of thought. Multiple reasoning agents can collaborate to raise joint reasoning quality above individual outcomes. However, such agents typically interact in a turn-based manner, trading increased latency for improved quality. In this paper, we propose Group Think--a single LLM that acts as multiple concurrent reasoning agents, or thinkers. With shared visibility into each other's partial generation progress, Group Think introduces a new concurrent-reasoning paradigm in which multiple reasoning trajectories adapt dynamically to one another at the token level. For example, a reasoning thread may shift its generation mid-sentence upon detecting that another thread is better positioned to continue. This fine-grained, token-level collaboration enables Group Think to reduce redundant reasoning and improve quality while achieving significantly lower latency. Moreover, its concurrent nature allows for efficient utilization of idle computational resources, making it especially suitable for edge inference, where very small batch size often underutilizes local~GPUs. We give a simple and generalizable modification that enables any existing LLM to perform Group Think on a local GPU. We also present an evaluation strategy to benchmark reasoning latency and empirically demonstrate latency improvements using open-source LLMs that were not explicitly trained for Group Think. We hope this work paves the way for future LLMs to exhibit more sophisticated and more efficient collaborative behavior for higher quality generation.

Recent advances in leveraging the agentic paradigm of large language models (LLMs) utilization have significantly enhanced Text-to-SQL capabilities, enabling users without specialized database expertise to query data intuitively. However, deploying these agentic LLM-based Text-to-SQL systems in production poses substantial challenges due to their inherently multi-stage workflows, stringent latency constraints, and potentially heterogeneous GPU infrastructure in enterprise environments. Current LLM serving frameworks lack effective mechanisms for handling interdependent inference tasks, dynamic latency variability, and resource heterogeneity, leading to suboptimal performance and frequent service-level objective (SLO) violations. In this paper, we introduce HEXGEN-TEXT2SQL, a novel framework designed explicitly to schedule and execute agentic multi-stage LLM-based Text-to-SQL workflows on heterogeneous GPU clusters that handle multi-tenant end-to-end queries. HEXGEN-TEXT2SQL introduce a hierarchical scheduling approach combining global workload-balanced task dispatching and local adaptive urgency-guided prioritization, guided by a systematic analysis of agentic Text-to-SQL workflows. Additionally, we propose a lightweight simulation-based method for tuning critical scheduling hyperparameters, further enhancing robustness and adaptability. Our extensive evaluation on realistic Text-to-SQL benchmarks demonstrates that HEXGEN-TEXT2SQL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art LLM serving frameworks. Specifically, HEXGEN-TEXT2SQL reduces latency deadlines by up to 1.67times (average: 1.41times) and improves system throughput by up to 1.75times (average: 1.65times) compared to vLLM under diverse, realistic workload conditions. Our code is available at https://github.com/Relaxed-System-Lab/Hexgen-Flow.

Mobile agents have attracted tremendous research participation recently. Traditional approaches to mobile agent training rely on centralized data collection, leading to high cost and limited scalability. Distributed training utilizing federated learning offers an alternative by harnessing real-world user data, providing scalability and reducing costs. However, pivotal challenges, including the absence of standardized benchmarks, hinder progress in this field. To tackle the challenges, we introduce FedMABench, the first benchmark for federated training and evaluation of mobile agents, specifically designed for heterogeneous scenarios. FedMABench features 6 datasets with 30+ subsets, 8 federated algorithms, 10+ base models, and over 800 apps across 5 categories, providing a comprehensive framework for evaluating mobile agents across diverse environments. Through extensive experiments, we uncover several key insights: federated algorithms consistently outperform local training; the distribution of specific apps plays a crucial role in heterogeneity; and, even apps from distinct categories can exhibit correlations during training. FedMABench is publicly available at: https://github.com/wwh0411/FedMABench with the datasets at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/wwh0411/FedMABench.

Modern AI agents, driven by advances in large foundation models, promise to enhance our productivity and transform our lives by augmenting our knowledge and capabilities. To achieve this vision, AI agents must effectively plan, perform multi-step reasoning and actions, respond to novel observations, and recover from errors, to successfully complete complex tasks across a wide range of scenarios. In this work, we introduce Magentic-One, a high-performing open-source agentic system for solving such tasks. Magentic-One uses a multi-agent architecture where a lead agent, the Orchestrator, plans, tracks progress, and re-plans to recover from errors. Throughout task execution, the Orchestrator directs other specialized agents to perform tasks as needed, such as operating a web browser, navigating local files, or writing and executing Python code. We show that Magentic-One achieves statistically competitive performance to the state-of-the-art on three diverse and challenging agentic benchmarks: GAIA, AssistantBench, and WebArena. Magentic-One achieves these results without modification to core agent capabilities or to how they collaborate, demonstrating progress towards generalist agentic systems. Moreover, Magentic-One's modular design allows agents to be added or removed from the team without additional prompt tuning or training, easing development and making it extensible to future scenarios. We provide an open-source implementation of Magentic-One, and we include AutoGenBench, a standalone tool for agentic evaluation. AutoGenBench provides built-in controls for repetition and isolation to run agentic benchmarks in a rigorous and contained manner -- which is important when agents' actions have side-effects. Magentic-One, AutoGenBench and detailed empirical performance evaluations of Magentic-One, including ablations and error analysis are available at https://aka.ms/magentic-one

We introduce ELA-ZSON, an efficient layout-aware zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) approach designed for complex multi-room indoor environments. By planning hierarchically leveraging a global topologigal map with layout information and local imperative approach with detailed scene representation memory, ELA-ZSON achieves both efficient and effective navigation. The process is managed by an LLM-powered agent, ensuring seamless effective planning and navigation, without the need for human interaction, complex rewards, or costly training. Our experimental results on the MP3D benchmark achieves 85\% object navigation success rate (SR) and 79\% success rate weighted by path length (SPL) (over 40\% point improvement in SR and 60\% improvement in SPL compared to exsisting methods). Furthermore, we validate the robustness of our approach through virtual agent and real-world robotic deployment, showcasing its capability in practical scenarios. See https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ELA-ZSON-C67E/ for details.

Recently, mobile AI agents have gained increasing attention. Given a task, mobile AI agents can interact with mobile devices in multiple steps and finally form a GUI flow that solves the task. However, existing agents tend to focus on most task-relevant elements at each step, leading to local optimal solutions and ignoring the overall GUI flow. To address this issue, we constructed a training dataset called MobileReach, which breaks the task into page reaching and operation subtasks. Furthermore, we propose ReachAgent, a two-stage framework that focuses on improving its task-completion abilities. It utilizes the page reaching and page operation subtasks, along with reward-based preference GUI flows, to further enhance the agent. Experimental results show that ReachAgent significantly improves the IoU Acc and Text Acc by 7.12% and 7.69% on the step-level and 4.72% and 4.63% on the task-level compared to the SOTA agent. Our data and code will be released upon acceptance.

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), agents aim to achieve a common goal, such as defeating enemies or scoring a goal. Existing MARL algorithms are effective but still require significant learning time and often get trapped in local optima by complex tasks, subsequently failing to discover a goal-reaching policy. To address this, we introduce Efficient episodic Memory Utilization (EMU) for MARL, with two primary objectives: (a) accelerating reinforcement learning by leveraging semantically coherent memory from an episodic buffer and (b) selectively promoting desirable transitions to prevent local convergence. To achieve (a), EMU incorporates a trainable encoder/decoder structure alongside MARL, creating coherent memory embeddings that facilitate exploratory memory recall. To achieve (b), EMU introduces a novel reward structure called episodic incentive based on the desirability of states. This reward improves the TD target in Q-learning and acts as an additional incentive for desirable transitions. We provide theoretical support for the proposed incentive and demonstrate the effectiveness of EMU compared to conventional episodic control. The proposed method is evaluated in StarCraft II and Google Research Football, and empirical results indicate further performance improvement over state-of-the-art methods.

Language agents show potential in being capable of utilizing natural language for varied and intricate tasks in diverse environments, particularly when built upon large language models (LLMs). Current language agent frameworks aim to facilitate the construction of proof-of-concept language agents while neglecting the non-expert user access to agents and paying little attention to application-level designs. We present OpenAgents, an open platform for using and hosting language agents in the wild of everyday life. OpenAgents includes three agents: (1) Data Agent for data analysis with Python/SQL and data tools; (2) Plugins Agent with 200+ daily API tools; (3) Web Agent for autonomous web browsing. OpenAgents enables general users to interact with agent functionalities through a web user interface optimized for swift responses and common failures while offering developers and researchers a seamless deployment experience on local setups, providing a foundation for crafting innovative language agents and facilitating real-world evaluations. We elucidate the challenges and opportunities, aspiring to set a foundation for future research and development of real-world language agents.

Intelligent agent systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in real-world applications. However, existing agent frameworks still face critical limitations in task planning and execution, restricting their effectiveness and generalizability. Specifically, current planning methods often lack clear global goals, leading agents to get stuck in local branches, or produce non-executable plans. Meanwhile, existing execution mechanisms struggle to balance complexity and stability, and their limited action space restricts their ability to handle diverse real-world tasks. To address these limitations, we propose GoalAct, a novel agent framework that introduces a continuously updated global planning mechanism and integrates a hierarchical execution strategy. GoalAct decomposes task execution into high-level skills, including searching, coding, writing and more, thereby reducing planning complexity while enhancing the agents' adaptability across diverse task scenarios. We evaluate GoalAct on LegalAgentBench, a benchmark with multiple types of legal tasks that require the use of multiple types of tools. Experimental results demonstrate that GoalAct achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, with an average improvement of 12.22% in success rate. These findings highlight GoalAct's potential to drive the development of more advanced intelligent agent systems, making them more effective across complex real-world applications. Our code can be found at https://github.com/cjj826/GoalAct.

We develop a cost-efficient neurosymbolic agent to address challenging multi-turn image editing tasks such as "Detect the bench in the image while recoloring it to pink. Also, remove the cat for a clearer view and recolor the wall to yellow.'' It combines the fast, high-level subtask planning by large language models (LLMs) with the slow, accurate, tool-use, and local A^* search per subtask to find a cost-efficient toolpath -- a sequence of calls to AI tools. To save the cost of A^* on similar subtasks, we perform inductive reasoning on previously successful toolpaths via LLMs to continuously extract/refine frequently used subroutines and reuse them as new tools for future tasks in an adaptive fast-slow planning, where the higher-level subroutines are explored first, and only when they fail, the low-level A^* search is activated. The reusable symbolic subroutines considerably save exploration cost on the same types of subtasks applied to similar images, yielding a human-like fast-slow toolpath agent "FaSTA^*'': fast subtask planning followed by rule-based subroutine selection per subtask is attempted by LLMs at first, which is expected to cover most tasks, while slow A^* search is only triggered for novel and challenging subtasks. By comparing with recent image editing approaches, we demonstrate FaSTA^* is significantly more computationally efficient while remaining competitive with the state-of-the-art baseline in terms of success rate.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive action sequence prediction capabilities but often struggle with dynamic, long-horizon tasks such as real-time strategic games. In a game such as StarCraftII (SC2), agents need to manage resource constraints and adapt to evolving battlefield situations in a partially observable environment. This often overwhelms exisiting LLM-based approaches. To address these challenges, we propose a hierarchical multi-agent framework that employs specialized imitation learning agents under a meta-controller called Strategic Planner (SP). By expert demonstrations, each specialized agent learns a distinctive strategy, such as aerial support or defensive maneuvers, and produces coherent, structured multistep action sequences. The SP then orchestrates these proposals into a single, environmentally adaptive plan that ensures local decisions aligning with long-term strategies. We call this HIMA (Hierarchical Imitation Multi-Agent). We also present TEXTSCII-ALL, a comprehensive SC2 testbed that encompasses all race match combinations in SC2. Our empirical results show that HIMA outperforms state of the arts in strategic clarity, adaptability, and computational efficiency, underscoring the potential of combining specialized imitation modules with meta-level orchestration to develop more robust, general-purpose AI agents.

Critic-free reinforcement learning methods, particularly group policies, have attracted considerable attention for their efficiency in complex tasks. However, these methods rely heavily on multiple sampling and comparisons within the policy to estimate advantage, which may cause the policy to fall into local optimum and increase computational cost. To address these issues, we propose PVPO, an efficient reinforcement learning method enhanced by an advantage reference anchor and data pre-sampling. Specifically, we use the reference model to rollout in advance and employ the calculated reward score as a reference anchor. Our approach effectively corrects the cumulative bias introduced by intra-group comparisons and significantly reduces reliance on the number of rollouts. Meanwhile, the reference model can assess sample difficulty during data pre-sampling, enabling effective selection of high-gain data to improve training efficiency. Experiments conducted on nine datasets across two domains demonstrate that PVPO achieves State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) performance. Our approach not only demonstrates robust generalization across multiple tasks, but also exhibits scalable performance across models of varying scales.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently transformed from text-based assistants to autonomous agents capable of planning, reasoning, and iteratively improving their actions. While numerical reward signals and verifiers can effectively rank candidate actions, they often provide limited contextual guidance. In contrast, natural language feedback better aligns with the generative capabilities of LLMs, providing richer and more actionable suggestions. However, parsing and implementing this feedback effectively can be challenging for LLM-based agents. In this work, we introduce Critique-Guided Improvement (CGI), a novel two-player framework, comprising an actor model that explores an environment and a critic model that generates detailed nature language feedback. By training the critic to produce fine-grained assessments and actionable revisions, and the actor to utilize these critiques, our approach promotes more robust exploration of alternative strategies while avoiding local optima. Experiments in three interactive environments show that CGI outperforms existing baselines by a substantial margin. Notably, even a small critic model surpasses GPT-4 in feedback quality. The resulting actor achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the power of explicit iterative guidance to enhance decision-making in LLM-based agents.

Photo retouching has become integral to contemporary visual storytelling, enabling users to capture aesthetics and express creativity. While professional tools such as Adobe Lightroom offer powerful capabilities, they demand substantial expertise and manual effort. In contrast, existing AI-based solutions provide automation but often suffer from limited adjustability and poor generalization, failing to meet diverse and personalized editing needs. To bridge this gap, we introduce JarvisArt, a multi-modal large language model (MLLM)-driven agent that understands user intent, mimics the reasoning process of professional artists, and intelligently coordinates over 200 retouching tools within Lightroom. JarvisArt undergoes a two-stage training process: an initial Chain-of-Thought supervised fine-tuning to establish basic reasoning and tool-use skills, followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization for Retouching (GRPO-R) to further enhance its decision-making and tool proficiency. We also propose the Agent-to-Lightroom Protocol to facilitate seamless integration with Lightroom. To evaluate performance, we develop MMArt-Bench, a novel benchmark constructed from real-world user edits. JarvisArt demonstrates user-friendly interaction, superior generalization, and fine-grained control over both global and local adjustments, paving a new avenue for intelligent photo retouching. Notably, it outperforms GPT-4o with a 60% improvement in average pixel-level metrics on MMArt-Bench for content fidelity, while maintaining comparable instruction-following capabilities. Project Page: https://jarvisart.vercel.app/.

Navigating safely and efficiently in dense and heterogeneous traffic scenarios is challenging for autonomous vehicles (AVs) due to their inability to infer the behaviors or intentions of nearby drivers. In this work, we introduce a distributed multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm that can predict trajectories and intents in dense and heterogeneous traffic scenarios. Our approach for intent-aware planning, iPLAN, allows agents to infer nearby drivers' intents solely from their local observations. We model two distinct incentives for agents' strategies: Behavioral Incentive for high-level decision-making based on their driving behavior or personality and Instant Incentive for motion planning for collision avoidance based on the current traffic state. Our approach enables agents to infer their opponents' behavior incentives and integrate this inferred information into their decision-making and motion-planning processes. We perform experiments on two simulation environments, Non-Cooperative Navigation and Heterogeneous Highway. In Heterogeneous Highway, results show that, compared with centralized training decentralized execution (CTDE) MARL baselines such as QMIX and MAPPO, our method yields a 4.3% and 38.4% higher episodic reward in mild and chaotic traffic, with 48.1% higher success rate and 80.6% longer survival time in chaotic traffic. We also compare with a decentralized training decentralized execution (DTDE) baseline IPPO and demonstrate a higher episodic reward of 12.7% and 6.3% in mild traffic and chaotic traffic, 25.3% higher success rate, and 13.7% longer survival time.

Most recently developed approaches to cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning in the centralized training with decentralized execution setting involve estimating a centralized, joint value function. In this paper, we demonstrate that, despite its various theoretical shortcomings, Independent PPO (IPPO), a form of independent learning in which each agent simply estimates its local value function, can perform just as well as or better than state-of-the-art joint learning approaches on popular multi-agent benchmark suite SMAC with little hyperparameter tuning. We also compare IPPO to several variants; the results suggest that IPPO's strong performance may be due to its robustness to some forms of environment non-stationarity.

Tiny machine learning (TinyML) is a rapidly growing field aiming to democratize machine learning (ML) for resource-constrained microcontrollers (MCUs). Given the pervasiveness of these tiny devices, it is inherent to ask whether TinyML applications can benefit from aggregating their knowledge. Federated learning (FL) enables decentralized agents to jointly learn a global model without sharing sensitive local data. However, a common global model may not work for all devices due to the complexity of the actual deployment environment and the heterogeneity of the data available on each device. In addition, the deployment of TinyML hardware has significant computational and communication constraints, which traditional ML fails to address. Considering these challenges, we propose TinyReptile, a simple but efficient algorithm inspired by meta-learning and online learning, to collaboratively learn a solid initialization for a neural network (NN) across tiny devices that can be quickly adapted to a new device with respect to its data. We demonstrate TinyReptile on Raspberry Pi 4 and Cortex-M4 MCU with only 256-KB RAM. The evaluations on various TinyML use cases confirm a resource reduction and training time saving by at least two factors compared with baseline algorithms with comparable performance.

Despite significant advancements in text-to-image models for generating high-quality images, these methods still struggle to ensure the controllability of text prompts over images in the context of complex text prompts, especially when it comes to retaining object attributes and relationships. In this paper, we propose CompAgent, a training-free approach for compositional text-to-image generation, with a large language model (LLM) agent as its core. The fundamental idea underlying CompAgent is premised on a divide-and-conquer methodology. Given a complex text prompt containing multiple concepts including objects, attributes, and relationships, the LLM agent initially decomposes it, which entails the extraction of individual objects, their associated attributes, and the prediction of a coherent scene layout. These individual objects can then be independently conquered. Subsequently, the agent performs reasoning by analyzing the text, plans and employs the tools to compose these isolated objects. The verification and human feedback mechanism is finally incorporated into our agent to further correct the potential attribute errors and refine the generated images. Guided by the LLM agent, we propose a tuning-free multi-concept customization model and a layout-to-image generation model as the tools for concept composition, and a local image editing method as the tool to interact with the agent for verification. The scene layout controls the image generation process among these tools to prevent confusion among multiple objects. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach for compositional text-to-image generation: CompAgent achieves more than 10\% improvement on T2I-CompBench, a comprehensive benchmark for open-world compositional T2I generation. The extension to various related tasks also illustrates the flexibility of our CompAgent for potential applications.

In this paper, we introduce HEADS-UP, the first egocentric dataset collected from head-mounted cameras, designed specifically for trajectory prediction in blind assistance systems. With the growing population of blind and visually impaired individuals, the need for intelligent assistive tools that provide real-time warnings about potential collisions with dynamic obstacles is becoming critical. These systems rely on algorithms capable of predicting the trajectories of moving objects, such as pedestrians, to issue timely hazard alerts. However, existing datasets fail to capture the necessary information from the perspective of a blind individual. To address this gap, HEADS-UP offers a novel dataset focused on trajectory prediction in this context. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a semi-local trajectory prediction approach to assess collision risks between blind individuals and pedestrians in dynamic environments. Unlike conventional methods that separately predict the trajectories of both the blind individual (ego agent) and pedestrians, our approach operates within a semi-local coordinate system, a rotated version of the camera's coordinate system, facilitating the prediction process. We validate our method on the HEADS-UP dataset and implement the proposed solution in ROS, performing real-time tests on an NVIDIA Jetson GPU through a user study. Results from both dataset evaluations and live tests demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our approach.

Collaborative perception empowers each agent to improve its perceptual ability through the exchange of perceptual messages with other agents. It inherently results in a fundamental trade-off between perception ability and communication cost. To address this bottleneck issue, our core idea is to optimize the collaborative messages from two key aspects: representation and selection. The proposed codebook-based message representation enables the transmission of integer codes, rather than high-dimensional feature maps. The proposed information-filling-driven message selection optimizes local messages to collectively fill each agent's information demand, preventing information overflow among multiple agents. By integrating these two designs, we propose CodeFilling, a novel communication-efficient collaborative perception system, which significantly advances the perception-communication trade-off and is inclusive to both homogeneous and heterogeneous collaboration settings. We evaluate CodeFilling in both a real-world dataset, DAIR-V2X, and a new simulation dataset, OPV2VH+. Results show that CodeFilling outperforms previous SOTA Where2comm on DAIR-V2X/OPV2VH+ with 1,333/1,206 times lower communication volume. Our code is available at https://github.com/PhyllisH/CodeFilling.

Recent advances in decentralized deep learning algorithms have demonstrated cutting-edge performance on various tasks with large pre-trained models. However, a pivotal prerequisite for achieving this level of competitiveness is the significant communication and computation overheads when updating these models, which prohibits the applications of them to real-world scenarios. To address this issue, drawing inspiration from advanced model merging techniques without requiring additional training, we introduce the Decentralized Iterative Merging-And-Training (DIMAT) paradigm--a novel decentralized deep learning framework. Within DIMAT, each agent is trained on their local data and periodically merged with their neighboring agents using advanced model merging techniques like activation matching until convergence is achieved. DIMAT provably converges with the best available rate for nonconvex functions with various first-order methods, while yielding tighter error bounds compared to the popular existing approaches. We conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis to validate DIMAT's superiority over baselines across diverse computer vision tasks sourced from multiple datasets. Empirical results validate our theoretical claims by showing that DIMAT attains faster and higher initial gain in accuracy with independent and identically distributed (IID) and non-IID data, incurring lower communication overhead. This DIMAT paradigm presents a new opportunity for the future decentralized learning, enhancing its adaptability to real-world with sparse and light-weight communication and computation.

Deceptive path planning (DPP) is the problem of designing a path that hides its true goal from an outside observer. Existing methods for DPP rely on unrealistic assumptions, such as global state observability and perfect model knowledge, and are typically problem-specific, meaning that even minor changes to a previously solved problem can force expensive computation of an entirely new solution. Given these drawbacks, such methods do not generalize to unseen problem instances, lack scalability to realistic problem sizes, and preclude both on-the-fly tunability of deception levels and real-time adaptivity to changing environments. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based scheme for training policies to perform DPP over arbitrary weighted graphs that overcomes these issues. The core of our approach is the introduction of a local perception model for the agent, a new state space representation distilling the key components of the DPP problem, the use of graph neural network-based policies to facilitate generalization and scaling, and the introduction of new deception bonuses that translate the deception objectives of classical methods to the RL setting. Through extensive experimentation we show that, without additional fine-tuning, at test time the resulting policies successfully generalize, scale, enjoy tunable levels of deception, and adapt in real-time to changes in the environment.

Vision-language navigation (VLN), which entails an agent to navigate 3D environments following human instructions, has shown great advances. However, current agents are built upon panoramic observations, which hinders their ability to perceive 3D scene geometry and easily leads to ambiguous selection of panoramic view. To address these limitations, we present a BEV Scene Graph (BSG), which leverages multi-step BEV representations to encode scene layouts and geometric cues of indoor environment under the supervision of 3D detection. During navigation, BSG builds a local BEV representation at each step and maintains a BEV-based global scene map, which stores and organizes all the online collected local BEV representations according to their topological relations. Based on BSG, the agent predicts a local BEV grid-level decision score and a global graph-level decision score, combined with a sub-view selection score on panoramic views, for more accurate action prediction. Our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on REVERIE, R2R, and R4R, showing the potential of BEV perception in VLN.

AI development environments are evolving into observability first platforms that integrate real time telemetry, prompt traces, and evaluation feedback into the developer workflow. This paper introduces telemetry aware integrated development environments (IDEs) enabled by the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a system that connects IDEs with prompt metrics, trace logs, and versioned control for real time refinement. We present design patterns for local prompt iteration, CI based optimization, and autonomous agents that adapt behavior using telemetry. Rather than focusing on a single algorithm, we describe an architecture that supports integration with frameworks like DSPy, PromptWizard, and Prompts as Programs. We demonstrate this through Opik, an open source MCP server for LLM telemetry, and position our approach within the emerging LLMOps ecosystem. This work lays a foundation for future research on prompt optimization, IDE agent tooling, and empirical benchmarking in telemetry rich AI development workflows.

The conjugate gradient method is a crucial first-order optimization method that generally converges faster than the steepest descent method, and its computational cost is much lower than that of second-order methods. However, while various types of conjugate gradient methods have been studied in Euclidean spaces and on Riemannian manifolds, there is little study for those in distributed scenarios. This paper proposes a decentralized Riemannian conjugate gradient descent (DRCGD) method that aims at minimizing a global function over the Stiefel manifold. The optimization problem is distributed among a network of agents, where each agent is associated with a local function, and the communication between agents occurs over an undirected connected graph. Since the Stiefel manifold is a non-convex set, a global function is represented as a finite sum of possibly non-convex (but smooth) local functions. The proposed method is free from expensive Riemannian geometric operations such as retractions, exponential maps, and vector transports, thereby reducing the computational complexity required by each agent. To the best of our knowledge, DRCGD is the first decentralized Riemannian conjugate gradient algorithm to achieve global convergence over the Stiefel manifold.

The main challenge in vision-and-language navigation (VLN) is how to understand natural-language instructions in an unseen environment. The main limitation of conventional VLN algorithms is that if an action is mistaken, the agent fails to follow the instructions or explores unnecessary regions, leading the agent to an irrecoverable path. To tackle this problem, we propose Meta-Explore, a hierarchical navigation method deploying an exploitation policy to correct misled recent actions. We show that an exploitation policy, which moves the agent toward a well-chosen local goal among unvisited but observable states, outperforms a method which moves the agent to a previously visited state. We also highlight the demand for imagining regretful explorations with semantically meaningful clues. The key to our approach is understanding the object placements around the agent in spectral-domain. Specifically, we present a novel visual representation, called scene object spectrum (SOS), which performs category-wise 2D Fourier transform of detected objects. Combining exploitation policy and SOS features, the agent can correct its path by choosing a promising local goal. We evaluate our method in three VLN benchmarks: R2R, SOON, and REVERIE. Meta-Explore outperforms other baselines and shows significant generalization performance. In addition, local goal search using the proposed spectral-domain SOS features significantly improves the success rate by 17.1% and SPL by 20.6% for the SOON benchmark.

3D occupancy prediction provides a comprehensive description of the surrounding scenes and has become an essential task for 3D perception. Most existing methods focus on offline perception from one or a few views and cannot be applied to embodied agents that demand to gradually perceive the scene through progressive embodied exploration. In this paper, we formulate an embodied 3D occupancy prediction task to target this practical scenario and propose a Gaussian-based EmbodiedOcc framework to accomplish it. We initialize the global scene with uniform 3D semantic Gaussians and progressively update local regions observed by the embodied agent. For each update, we extract semantic and structural features from the observed image and efficiently incorporate them via deformable cross-attention to refine the regional Gaussians. Finally, we employ Gaussian-to-voxel splatting to obtain the global 3D occupancy from the updated 3D Gaussians. Our EmbodiedOcc assumes an unknown (i.e., uniformly distributed) environment and maintains an explicit global memory of it with 3D Gaussians. It gradually gains knowledge through the local refinement of regional Gaussians, which is consistent with how humans understand new scenes through embodied exploration. We reorganize an EmbodiedOcc-ScanNet benchmark based on local annotations to facilitate the evaluation of the embodied 3D occupancy prediction task. Our EmbodiedOcc outperforms existing methods by a large margin and accomplishes the embodied occupancy prediction with high accuracy and efficiency. Code: https://github.com/YkiWu/EmbodiedOcc.

Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential for complex reasoning, yet their capacity for emergent coordination in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) when operating under strict constraints-such as limited local perception and communication, characteristic of natural swarms-remains largely unexplored, particularly concerning the nuances of swarm intelligence. Existing benchmarks often do not fully capture the unique challenges of decentralized coordination that arise when agents operate with incomplete spatio-temporal information. To bridge this gap, we introduce SwarmBench, a novel benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the swarm intelligence capabilities of LLMs acting as decentralized agents. SwarmBench features five foundational MAS coordination tasks within a configurable 2D grid environment, forcing agents to rely primarily on local sensory input (k x k view) and local communication. We propose metrics for coordination effectiveness and analyze emergent group dynamics. Evaluating several leading LLMs in a zero-shot setting, we find significant performance variations across tasks, highlighting the difficulties posed by local information constraints. While some coordination emerges, results indicate limitations in robust planning and strategy formation under uncertainty in these decentralized scenarios. Assessing LLMs under swarm-like conditions is crucial for realizing their potential in future decentralized systems. We release SwarmBench as an open, extensible toolkit-built upon a customizable and scalable physical system with defined mechanical properties. It provides environments, prompts, evaluation scripts, and the comprehensive experimental datasets generated, aiming to foster reproducible research into LLM-based MAS coordination and the theoretical underpinnings of Embodied MAS. Our code repository is available at https://github.com/x66ccff/swarmbench.

Message passing graph neural networks (GNNs) would appear to be powerful tools to learn distributed algorithms via gradient descent, but generate catastrophically incorrect predictions when nodes update asynchronously during inference. This failure under asynchrony effectively excludes these architectures from many potential applications, such as learning local communication policies between resource-constrained agents in, e.g., robotic swarms or sensor networks. In this work we explore why this failure occurs in common GNN architectures, and identify "implicitly-defined" GNNs as a class of architectures which is provably robust to partially asynchronous "hogwild" inference, adapting convergence guarantees from work in asynchronous and distributed optimization, e.g., Bertsekas (1982); Niu et al. (2011). We then propose a novel implicitly-defined GNN architecture, which we call an energy GNN. We show that this architecture outperforms other GNNs from this class on a variety of synthetic tasks inspired by multi-agent systems, and achieves competitive performance on real-world datasets.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has recently achieved remarkable success in robotic control. However, most works in RL operate in simulated environments where privileged knowledge (e.g., dynamics, surroundings, terrains) is readily available. Conversely, in real-world scenarios, robot agents usually rely solely on local states (e.g., proprioceptive feedback of robot joints) to select actions, leading to a significant sim-to-real gap. Existing methods address this gap by either gradually reducing the reliance on privileged knowledge or performing a two-stage policy imitation. However, we argue that these methods are limited in their ability to fully leverage the available privileged knowledge, resulting in suboptimal performance. In this paper, we formulate the sim-to-real gap as an information bottleneck problem and therefore propose a novel privileged knowledge distillation method called the Historical Information Bottleneck (HIB). In particular, HIB learns a privileged knowledge representation from historical trajectories by capturing the underlying changeable dynamic information. Theoretical analysis shows that the learned privileged knowledge representation helps reduce the value discrepancy between the oracle and learned policies. Empirical experiments on both simulated and real-world tasks demonstrate that HIB yields improved generalizability compared to previous methods. Videos of real-world experiments are available at https://sites.google.com/view/history-ib .

We consider cross-silo federated linear contextual bandit (LCB) problem under differential privacy, where multiple silos (agents) interact with the local users and communicate via a central server to realize collaboration while without sacrificing each user's privacy. We identify three issues in the state-of-the-art: (i) failure of claimed privacy protection and (ii) incorrect regret bound due to noise miscalculation and (iii) ungrounded communication cost. To resolve these issues, we take a two-step principled approach. First, we design an algorithmic framework consisting of a generic federated LCB algorithm and flexible privacy protocols. Then, leveraging the proposed framework, we study federated LCBs under two different privacy constraints. We first establish privacy and regret guarantees under silo-level local differential privacy, which fix the issues present in state-of-the-art algorithm. To further improve the regret performance, we next consider shuffle model of differential privacy, under which we show that our algorithm can achieve nearly ``optimal'' regret without a trusted server. We accomplish this via two different schemes -- one relies on a new result on privacy amplification via shuffling for DP mechanisms and another one leverages the integration of a shuffle protocol for vector sum into the tree-based mechanism, both of which might be of independent interest. Finally, we support our theoretical results with numerical evaluations over contextual bandit instances generated from both synthetic and real-life data.

Embodied agents equipped with GPT as their brain have exhibited extraordinary thinking and decision-making abilities across various tasks. However, existing zero-shot agents for vision-and-language navigation (VLN) only prompt the GPT to handle excessive environmental information and select potential locations within localized environments, without constructing an effective ''global-view'' (e.g., a commonly-used map) for the agent to understand the overall environment. In this work, we present a novel map-guided GPT-based path-planning agent, dubbed MapGPT, for the zero-shot VLN task. Specifically, we convert a topological map constructed online into prompts to encourage map-guided global exploration, and require the agent to explicitly output and update multi-step path planning to avoid getting stuck in local exploration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MapGPT is effective, achieving impressive performance on both the R2R and REVERIE datasets (38.8% and 28.4% success rate, respectively) and showcasing the newly emerged global thinking and path planning capabilities of the GPT model. Unlike previous VLN agents, which require separate parameters fine-tuning or specific prompt design to accommodate various instruction styles across different datasets, our MapGPT is more unified as it can adapt to different instruction styles seamlessly, which is the first of its kind in this field.

Federated reinforcement learning (FRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for reducing the sample complexity of reinforcement learning tasks by exploiting information from different agents. However, when each agent interacts with a potentially different environment, little to nothing is known theoretically about the non-asymptotic performance of FRL algorithms. The lack of such results can be attributed to various technical challenges and their intricate interplay: Markovian sampling, linear function approximation, multiple local updates to save communication, heterogeneity in the reward functions and transition kernels of the agents' MDPs, and continuous state-action spaces. Moreover, in the on-policy setting, the behavior policies vary with time, further complicating the analysis. In response, we introduce FedSARSA, a novel federated on-policy reinforcement learning scheme, equipped with linear function approximation, to address these challenges and provide a comprehensive finite-time error analysis. Notably, we establish that FedSARSA converges to a policy that is near-optimal for all agents, with the extent of near-optimality proportional to the level of heterogeneity. Furthermore, we prove that FedSARSA leverages agent collaboration to enable linear speedups as the number of agents increases, which holds for both fixed and adaptive step-size configurations.

In this paper, we propose the problem of collaborative perception, where robots can combine their local observations with those of neighboring agents in a learnable way to improve accuracy on a perception task. Unlike existing work in robotics and multi-agent reinforcement learning, we formulate the problem as one where learned information must be shared across a set of agents in a bandwidth-sensitive manner to optimize for scene understanding tasks such as semantic segmentation. Inspired by networking communication protocols, we propose a multi-stage handshake communication mechanism where the neural network can learn to compress relevant information needed for each stage. Specifically, a target agent with degraded sensor data sends a compressed request, the other agents respond with matching scores, and the target agent determines who to connect with (i.e., receive information from). We additionally develop the AirSim-CP dataset and metrics based on the AirSim simulator where a group of aerial robots perceive diverse landscapes, such as roads, grasslands, buildings, etc. We show that for the semantic segmentation task, our handshake communication method significantly improves accuracy by approximately 20% over decentralized baselines, and is comparable to centralized ones using a quarter of the bandwidth.