pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards Practical First-Order Model Counting
Authors: Ananth K. Kidambi, Guramrit Singh, Paulius Dilkas, Kuldeep S. Meel
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: C++ code, model, Sentence

First-order model counting (FOMC) is the problem of counting the number of models of a sentence in first-order logic. Since lifted inference techniques rely on reductions to variants of FOMC, the design of scalable methods for FOMC has attracted attention from both theoreticians and practitioners over the past decade. Recently, a new approach based on first-order knowledge compilation was proposed. This approach, called Crane, instead of simply providing the final count, generates definitions of (possibly recursive) functions that can be evaluated with different arguments to compute the model count for any domain size. However, this approach is not fully automated, as it requires manual evaluation of the constructed functions. The primary contribution of this work is a fully automated compilation algorithm, called Crane2, which transforms the function definitions into C++ code equipped with arbitrary-precision arithmetic. These additions allow the new FOMC algorithm to scale to domain sizes over 500,000 times larger than the current state of the art, as demonstrated through experimental results.
Causes and Strategies in Multiagent Systems
Authors: Sylvia S. Kerkhove, Natasha Alechina, Mehdi Dastani
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00

Causality plays an important role in daily processes, human reasoning, and artificial intelligence. There has however not been much research on causality in multi-agent strategic settings. In this work, we introduce a systematic way to build a multi-agent system model, represented as a concurrent game structure, for a given structural causal model. In the obtained so-called causal concurrent game structure, transitions correspond to interventions on agent variables of the given causal model. The Halpern and Pearl framework of causality is used to determine the effects of a certain value for an agent variable on other variables. The causal concurrent game structure allows us to analyse and reason about causal effects of agents' strategic decisions. We formally investigate the relation between causal concurrent game structures and the original structural causal models.
Learning Symbolic Task Decompositions for Multi-Agent Teams
Authors: Ameesh Shah, Niklas Lauffer, Thomas Chen, Nikhil Pitta, Sanjit A. Seshia
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

One approach for improving sample efficiency in cooperative multi-agent learning is to decompose overall tasks into sub-tasks that can be assigned to individual agents. We study this problem in the context of reward machines: symbolic tasks that can be formally decomposed into sub-tasks. In order to handle settings without a priori knowledge of the environment, we introduce a framework that can learn the optimal decomposition from model-free interactions with the environment. Our method uses a task-conditioned architecture to simultaneously learn an optimal decomposition and the corresponding agents' policies for each sub-task. In doing so, we remove the need for a human to manually design the optimal decomposition while maintaining the sample-efficiency benefits of improved credit assignment. We provide experimental results in several deep reinforcement learning settings, demonstrating the efficacy of our approach. Our results indicate that our approach succeeds even in environments with codependent agent dynamics, enabling synchronous multi-agent learning not achievable in previous works.
Communication Strategy on Macro-and-Micro Traffic State in Cooperative Deep Reinforcement Learning for Regional Traffic Signal Control
Authors: Hankang Gu, Shangbo Wang, Dongyao Jia, Yuli Zhang, Yanrong Luo, Guoqiang Mao, JianPing Wang, Eng Gee Lim
Date: 2025-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Traffic Signal Control

Adaptive Traffic Signal Control (ATSC) has become a popular research topic in intelligent transportation systems. Regional Traffic Signal Control (RTSC) using the Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL) technique has become a promising approach for ATSC due to its ability to achieve the optimum trade-off between scalability and optimality. Most existing RTSC approaches partition a traffic network into several disjoint regions, followed by applying centralized reinforcement learning techniques to each region. However, the pursuit of cooperation among RTSC agents still remains an open issue and no communication strategy for RTSC agents has been investigated. In this paper, we propose communication strategies to capture the correlation of micro-traffic states among lanes and the correlation of macro-traffic states among intersections. We first justify the evolution equation of the RTSC process is Markovian via a system of store-and-forward queues. Next, based on the evolution equation, we propose two GAT-Aggregated (GA2) communication modules--GA2-Naive and GA2-Aug to extract both intra-region and inter-region correlations between macro and micro traffic states. While GA2-Naive only considers the movements at each intersection, GA2-Aug also considers the lane-changing behavior of vehicles. Two proposed communication modules are then aggregated into two existing novel RTSC frameworks--RegionLight and Regional-DRL. Experimental results demonstrate that both GA2-Naive and GA2-Aug effectively improve the performance of existing RTSC frameworks under both real and synthetic scenarios. Hyperparameter testing also reveals the robustness and potential of our communication modules in large-scale traffic networks.
Conditional Max-Sum for Asynchronous Multiagent Decision Making
Authors: Dimitrios Troullinos, Georgios Chalkiadakis, Ioannis Papamichail, Markos Papageorgiou
Date: 2025-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

In this paper we present a novel approach for multiagent decision making in dynamic environments based on Factor Graphs and the Max-Sum algorithm, considering asynchronous variable reassignments and distributed message-passing among agents. Motivated by the challenging domain of lane-free traffic where automated vehicles can communicate and coordinate as agents, we propose a more realistic communication framework for Factor Graph formulations that satisfies the above-mentioned restrictions, along with Conditional Max-Sum: an extension of Max-Sum with a revised message-passing process that is better suited for asynchronous settings. The overall application in lane-free traffic can be viewed as a hybrid system where the Factor Graph formulation undertakes the strategic decision making of vehicles, that of desired lateral alignment in a coordinated manner; and acts on top of a rule-based method we devise that provides a structured representation of the lane-free environment for the factors, while also handling the underlying control of vehicles regarding core operations and safety. Our experimental evaluation showcases the capabilities of the proposed framework in problems with intense coordination needs when compared to a domain-specific baseline without communication, and an increased adeptness of Conditional Max-Sum with respect to the standard algorithm.
Agentic Medical Knowledge Graphs Enhance Medical Question Answering: Bridging the Gap Between LLMs and Evolving Medical Knowledge
Authors: Mohammad Reza Rezaei, Reza Saadati Fard, Rahul G. Krishnan, Milad Lankarany
Date: 2025-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Generation, Knowledge Graphs, Medical Question Answering, MedQA, Question Answering, RAG

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced medical question-answering by leveraging extensive clinical data and medical literature. However, the rapid evolution of medical knowledge and the labor-intensive process of manually updating domain-specific resources pose challenges to the reliability of these systems. To address this, we introduce Agentic Medical Graph-RAG (AMG-RAG), a comprehensive framework that automates the construction and continuous updating of medical knowledge graphs, integrates reasoning, and retrieves current external evidence, such as PubMed and WikiSearch. By dynamically linking new findings and complex medical concepts, AMG-RAG not only improves accuracy but also enhances interpretability in medical queries. Evaluations on the MEDQA and MEDMCQA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of AMG-RAG, achieving an F1 score of 74.1 percent on MEDQA and an accuracy of 66.34 percent on MEDMCQA, outperforming both comparable models and those 10 to 100 times larger. Notably, these improvements are achieved without increasing computational overhead, highlighting the critical role of automated knowledge graph generation and external evidence retrieval in delivering up-to-date, trustworthy medical insights.
Collaboration Between the City and Machine Learning Community is Crucial to Efficient Autonomous Vehicles Routing
Authors: Anastasia Psarou, Ahmet Onur Akman, Łukasz Gorczyca, Michał Hoffmann, Grzegorz Jamróz, Rafał Kucharski
Date: 2025-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Autonomous vehicles (AVs), possibly using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) for simultaneous route optimization, may destabilize traffic networks, with human drivers potentially experiencing longer travel times. We study this interaction by simulating human drivers and AVs. Our experiments with standard MARL algorithms reveal that, both in simplified and complex networks, policies often fail to converge to an optimal solution or require long training periods. This problem is amplified by the fact that we cannot rely entirely on simulated training, as there are no accurate models of human routing behavior. At the same time, real-world training in cities risks destabilizing urban traffic systems, increasing externalities, such as $CO_2$ emissions, and introducing non-stationarity as human drivers will adapt unpredictably to AV behaviors. In this position paper, we argue that city authorities must collaborate with the ML community to monitor and critically evaluate the routing algorithms proposed by car companies toward fair and system-efficient routing algorithms and regulatory standards.
Implicit Repair with Reinforcement Learning in Emergent Communication
Authors: Fábio Vital, Alberto Sardinha, Francisco S. Melo
Date: 2025-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Conversational repair is a mechanism used to detect and resolve miscommunication and misinformation problems when two or more agents interact. One particular and underexplored form of repair in emergent communication is the implicit repair mechanism, where the interlocutor purposely conveys the desired information in such a way as to prevent misinformation from any other interlocutor. This work explores how redundancy can modify the emergent communication protocol to continue conveying the necessary information to complete the underlying task, even with additional external environmental pressures such as noise. We focus on extending the signaling game, called the Lewis Game, by adding noise in the communication channel and inputs received by the agents. Our analysis shows that agents add redundancy to the transmitted messages as an outcome to prevent the negative impact of noise on the task success. Additionally, we observe that the emerging communication protocol's generalization capabilities remain equivalent to architectures employed in simpler games that are entirely deterministic. Additionally, our method is the only one suitable for producing robust communication protocols that can handle cases with and without noise while maintaining increased generalization performance levels.
Hypernetwork-based approach for optimal composition design in partially controlled multi-agent systems
Authors: Kyeonghyeon Park, David Molina Concha, Hyun-Rok Lee, Chi-Guhn Lee, Taesik Lee
Date: 2025-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Partially Controlled Multi-Agent Systems (PCMAS) are comprised of controllable agents, managed by a system designer, and uncontrollable agents, operating autonomously. This study addresses an optimal composition design problem in PCMAS, which involves the system designer's problem, determining the optimal number and policies of controllable agents, and the uncontrollable agents' problem, identifying their best-response policies. Solving this bi-level optimization problem is computationally intensive, as it requires repeatedly solving multi-agent reinforcement learning problems under various compositions for both types of agents. To address these challenges, we propose a novel hypernetwork-based framework that jointly optimizes the system's composition and agent policies. Unlike traditional methods that train separate policy networks for each composition, the proposed framework generates policies for both controllable and uncontrollable agents through a unified hypernetwork. This approach enables efficient information sharing across similar configurations, thereby reducing computational overhead. Additional improvements are achieved by incorporating reward parameter optimization and mean action networks. Using real-world New York City taxi data, we demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods in approximating equilibrium policies. Our experimental results show significant improvements in key performance metrics, such as order response rate and served demand, highlighting the practical utility of controlling agents and their potential to enhance decision-making in PCMAS.
Mean-Field Bayesian Optimisation
Authors: Petar Steinberg, Juliusz Ziomek, Matej Jusup, Ilija Bogunovic
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimisation

We address the problem of optimising the average payoff for a large number of cooperating agents, where the payoff function is unknown and treated as a black box. While standard Bayesian Optimisation (BO) methods struggle with the scalability required for high-dimensional input spaces, we demonstrate how leveraging the mean-field assumption on the black-box function can transform BO into an efficient and scalable solution. Specifically, we introduce MF-GP-UCB, a novel efficient algorithm designed to optimise agent payoffs in this setting. Our theoretical analysis establishes a regret bound for MF-GP-UCB that is independent of the number of agents, contrasting sharply with the exponential dependence observed when naive BO methods are applied. We evaluate our algorithm on a diverse set of tasks, including real-world problems, such as optimising the location of public bikes for a bike-sharing programme, distributing taxi fleets, and selecting refuelling ports for maritime vessels. Empirical results demonstrate that MF-GP-UCB significantly outperforms existing benchmarks, offering substantial improvements in performance and scalability, constituting a promising solution for mean-field, black-box optimisation. The code is available at https://github.com/petarsteinberg/MF-BO.
Integrating Expert Knowledge into Logical Programs via LLMs
Authors: Franciszek Górski, Oskar Wysocki, Marco Valentino, Andre Freitas
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Logical Reasoning

This paper introduces ExKLoP, a novel framework designed to evaluate how effectively Large Language Models (LLMs) integrate expert knowledge into logical reasoning systems. This capability is especially valuable in engineering, where expert knowledge-such as manufacturer-recommended operational ranges-can be directly embedded into automated monitoring systems. By mirroring expert verification steps, tasks like range checking and constraint validation help ensure system safety and reliability. Our approach systematically evaluates LLM-generated logical rules, assessing both syntactic fluency and logical correctness in these critical validation tasks. We also explore the models' capacity for self-correction via an iterative feedback loop based on code execution outcomes. ExKLoP presents an extensible dataset comprising 130 engineering premises, 950 prompts, and corresponding validation points. It enables comprehensive benchmarking while allowing control over task complexity and scalability of experiments. We leverage the synthetic data creation methodology to conduct extensive empirical evaluation on a diverse set of LLMs including Llama3, Gemma3, Codestral and QwenCoder. The results reveal that most models generate nearly perfect syntactically correct code and exhibit strong performance in translating expert knowledge into correct code. At the same time, while most LLMs produce nearly flawless syntactic output, their ability to correctly implement logical rules varies, as does their capacity for self-improvement. Overall, ExKLoP serves as a robust evaluation platform that streamlines the selection of effective models for self-correcting systems while clearly delineating the types of errors encountered.
HedgeAgents: A Balanced-aware Multi-agent Financial Trading System
Authors: Xiangyu Li, Yawen Zeng, Xiaofen Xing, Jin Xu, Xiangmin Xu
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00

As automated trading gains traction in the financial market, algorithmic investment strategies are increasingly prominent. While Large Language Models (LLMs) and Agent-based models exhibit promising potential in real-time market analysis and trading decisions, they still experience a significant -20% loss when confronted with rapid declines or frequent fluctuations, impeding their practical application. Hence, there is an imperative to explore a more robust and resilient framework. This paper introduces an innovative multi-agent system, HedgeAgents, aimed at bolstering system robustness via ``hedging'' strategies. In this well-balanced system, an array of hedging agents has been tailored, where HedgeAgents consist of a central fund manager and multiple hedging experts specializing in various financial asset classes. These agents leverage LLMs' cognitive capabilities to make decisions and coordinate through three types of conferences. Benefiting from the powerful understanding of LLMs, our HedgeAgents attained a 70% annualized return and a 400% total return over a period of 3 years. Moreover, we have observed with delight that HedgeAgents can even formulate investment experience comparable to those of human experts (https://hedgeagents.github.io/).
Multi-Agent Actor-Critic Generative AI for Query Resolution and Analysis
Authors: Mohammad Wali Ur Rahman, Ric Nevarez, Lamia Tasnim Mim, Salim Hariri
Date: 2025-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Interaction, Diagnostic

In this paper, we introduce MASQRAD (Multi-Agent Strategic Query Resolution and Diagnostic tool), a transformative framework for query resolution based on the actor-critic model, which utilizes multiple generative AI agents. MASQRAD is excellent at translating imprecise or ambiguous user inquiries into precise and actionable requests. This framework generates pertinent visualizations and responses to these focused queries, as well as thorough analyses and insightful interpretations for users. MASQRAD addresses the common shortcomings of existing solutions in domains that demand fast and precise data interpretation, such as their incapacity to successfully apply AI for generating actionable insights and their challenges with the inherent ambiguity of user queries. MASQRAD functions as a sophisticated multi-agent system but "masquerades" to users as a single AI entity, which lowers errors and enhances data interaction. This approach makes use of three primary AI agents: Actor Generative AI, Critic Generative AI, and Expert Analysis Generative AI. Each is crucial for creating, enhancing, and evaluating data interactions. The Actor AI generates Python scripts to generate data visualizations from large datasets within operational constraints, and the Critic AI rigorously refines these scripts through multi-agent debate. Finally, the Expert Analysis AI contextualizes the outcomes to aid in decision-making. With an accuracy rate of 87\% when handling tasks related to natural language visualization, MASQRAD establishes new benchmarks for automated data interpretation and showcases a noteworthy advancement that has the potential to revolutionize AI-driven applications.
Attention Mechanism for LLM-based Agents Dynamic Diffusion under Information Asymmetry
Authors: Yiwen Zhang, YiFu Wu, Wenyue Hua, Xiang Lu, Xuming Hu
Date: 2025-02-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Large language models have been used to simulate human society using multi-agent systems. Most current social simulation research emphasizes interactive behaviors in fixed environments, ignoring information opacity, relationship variability, and diffusion diversity. In this paper, we first propose a general framework for exploring multi-agent information diffusion. We identified LLMs' deficiency in the perception and utilization of social relationships, as well as diverse actions. Then, we designed a dynamic attention mechanism to help agents allocate attention to different information, addressing the limitations of the LLM attention mechanism. Agents start by responding to external information stimuli within a five-agent group, increasing group size and forming information circles while developing relationships and sharing information. Additionally, we explore the information diffusion features in the asymmetric open environment by observing the evolution of information gaps, diffusion patterns, and the accumulation of social capital, which are closely linked to psychological, sociological, and communication theories.
Direct Preference Optimization-Enhanced Multi-Guided Diffusion Model for Traffic Scenario Generation
Authors: Seungjun Yu, Kisung Kim, Daejung Kim, Haewook Han, Jinhan Lee
Date: 2025-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Multi-Task Learning

Diffusion-based models are recognized for their effectiveness in using real-world driving data to generate realistic and diverse traffic scenarios. These models employ guided sampling to incorporate specific traffic preferences and enhance scenario realism. However, guiding the sampling process to conform to traffic rules and preferences can result in deviations from real-world traffic priors and potentially leading to unrealistic behaviors. To address this challenge, we introduce a multi-guided diffusion model that utilizes a novel training strategy to closely adhere to traffic priors, even when employing various combinations of guides. This model adopts a multi-task learning framework, enabling a single diffusion model to process various guide inputs. For increased guided sampling precision, our model is fine-tuned using the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) algorithm. This algorithm optimizes preferences based on guide scores, effectively navigating the complexities and challenges associated with the expensive and often non-differentiable gradient calculations during the guided sampling fine-tuning process. Evaluated using the nuScenes dataset our model provides a strong baseline for balancing realism, diversity and controllability in the traffic scenario generation.