pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Heterogeneous Decision Making in Mixed Traffic: Uncertainty-aware Planning and Bounded Rationality
Authors: Hang Wang, Qiaoyi Fang, Junshan Zhang
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

The past few years have witnessed a rapid growth of the deployment of automated vehicles (AVs). Clearly, AVs and human-driven vehicles (HVs) will co-exist for many years, and AVs will have to operate around HVs, pedestrians, cyclists, and more, calling for fundamental breakthroughs in AI designed for mixed traffic to achieve mixed autonomy. Thus motivated, we study heterogeneous decision making by AVs and HVs in a mixed traffic environment, aiming to capture the interactions between human and machine decision-making and develop an AI foundation that enables vehicles to operate safely and efficiently. There are a number of challenges to achieve mixed autonomy, including 1) humans drivers make driving decisions with bounded rationality, and it remains open to develop accurate models for HVs' decision making; and 2) uncertainty-aware planning plays a critical role for AVs to take safety maneuvers in response to the human behavior. In this paper, we introduce a formulation of AV-HV interaction, where the HV makes decisions with bounded rationality and the AV employs uncertainty-aware planning based on the prediction on HV's future actions. We conduct a comprehensive analysis on AV and HV's learning regret to answer the questions: 1) {How does the learning performance depend on HV's bounded rationality and AV's planning}; 2) {How do different decision making strategies impact the overall learning performance}? Our findings reveal some intriguing phenomena, such as Goodhart's Law in AV's learning performance and compounding effects in HV's decision making process. By examining the dynamics of the regrets, we gain insights into the interplay between human and machine decision making.
Analyzing User Perceptions of Large Language Models (LLMs) on Reddit: Sentiment and Topic Modeling of ChatGPT and DeepSeek Discussions
Authors: Krishnaveni Katta
Date: 2025-02-22 00:00:00

While there is an increased discourse on large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and DeepSeek, there is no comprehensive understanding of how users of online platforms, like Reddit, perceive these models. This is an important omission because public opinion can influence AI development, trust, and future policy. This study aims at analyzing Reddit discussions about ChatGPT and DeepSeek using sentiment and topic modeling to advance the understanding of user attitudes. Some of the significant topics such as trust in AI, user expectations, potential uses of the tools, reservations about AI biases, and ethical implications of their use are explored in this study. By examining these concerns, the study provides a sense of how public sentiment might shape the direction of AI development going forward. The report also mentions whether users have faith in the technology and what they see as its future. A word frequency approach is used to identify broad topics and sentiment trends. Also, topic modeling through the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) method identifies top topics in users' language, for example, potential benefits of LLMs, their technological applications, and their overall social ramifications. The study aims to inform developers and policymakers by making it easier to see how users comprehend and experience these game-changing technologies.
AutoBS: Autonomous Base Station Deployment with Reinforcement Learning and Digital Network Twins
Authors: Ju-Hyung Lee, Andreas F. Molisch
Date: 2025-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper introduces AutoBS, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for optimal base station (BS) deployment in 6G radio access networks (RAN). AutoBS leverages the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm and fast, site-specific pathloss predictions from PMNet-a generative model for digital network twins (DNT). By efficiently learning deployment strategies that balance coverage and capacity, AutoBS achieves about 95% of the capacity of exhaustive search in single BS scenarios (and in 90% for multiple BSs), while cutting inference time from hours to milliseconds, making it highly suitable for real-time applications (e.g., ad-hoc deployments). AutoBS therefore provides a scalable, automated solution for large-scale 6G networks, meeting the demands of dynamic environments with minimal computational overhead.
Adversarial Combinatorial Semi-bandits with Graph Feedback
Authors: Yuxiao Wen
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00

In combinatorial semi-bandits, a learner repeatedly selects from a combinatorial decision set of arms, receives the realized sum of rewards, and observes the rewards of the individual selected arms as feedback. In this paper, we extend this framework to include \emph{graph feedback}, where the learner observes the rewards of all neighboring arms of the selected arms in a feedback graph $G$. We establish that the optimal regret over a time horizon $T$ scales as $\widetilde{\Theta}(S\sqrt{T}+\sqrt{\alpha ST})$, where $S$ is the size of the combinatorial decisions and $\alpha$ is the independence number of $G$. This result interpolates between the known regrets $\widetilde\Theta(S\sqrt{T})$ under full information (i.e., $G$ is complete) and $\widetilde\Theta(\sqrt{KST})$ under the semi-bandit feedback (i.e., $G$ has only self-loops), where $K$ is the total number of arms. A key technical ingredient is to realize a convexified action using a random decision vector with negative correlations. We also show that online stochastic mirror descent (OSMD) that only realizes convexified actions in expectation is suboptimal.
Faithful Logic Embeddings in HOL -- Deep and Shallow
Authors: Christoph Benzmüller
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Automated Theorem Proving

Deep and shallow embeddings of non-classical logics in classical higher-order logic have been explored, implemented, and used in various reasoning tools in recent years. This paper presents a method for the simultaneous deployment of deep and shallow embeddings of various degrees in classical higher-order logic. This enables flexible, interactive and automated theorem proving and counterexample finding at meta and object level, as well as automated faithfulness proofs between these logic embeddings. The method is beneficial for logic education, research and application and is illustrated here using a simple propositional modal logic. However, this approach is conceptual in nature and not limited to this simple logic context.
Discovering Antagonists in Networks of Systems: Robot Deployment
Authors: Ingeborg Wenger, Peter Eberhard, Henrik Ebel
Date: 2025-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Contextual Anomaly Detection

A contextual anomaly detection method is proposed and applied to the physical motions of a robot swarm executing a coverage task. Using simulations of a swarm's normal behavior, a normalizing flow is trained to predict the likelihood of a robot motion within the current context of its environment. During application, the predicted likelihood of the observed motions is used by a detection criterion that categorizes a robot agent as normal or antagonistic. The proposed method is evaluated on five different strategies of antagonistic behavior. Importantly, only readily available simulated data of normal robot behavior is used for training such that the nature of the anomalies need not be known beforehand. The best detection criterion correctly categorizes at least 80% of each antagonistic type while maintaining a false positive rate of less than 5% for normal robot agents. Additionally, the method is validated in hardware experiments, yielding results similar to the simulated scenarios. Compared to the state-of-the-art approach, both the predictive performance of the normalizing flow and the robustness of the detection criterion are increased.
Collab-Overcooked: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large Language Models as Collaborative Agents
Authors: Haochen Sun, Shuwen Zhang, Lujie Niu, Lei Ren, Hao Xu, Hao Fu, Fangkun Zhao, Caixia Yuan, Xiaojie Wang
Date: 2025-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Large language models (LLMs) based agent systems have made great strides in real-world applications beyond traditional NLP tasks. This paper proposes a new LLM-powered Multi-Agent System (LLM-MAS) benchmark, Collab-Overcooked, built on the popular Overcooked-AI game with more applicable and challenging tasks in interactive environments. Collab-Overcooked extends existing benchmarks from two novel perspectives. First, it provides a multi-agent framework supporting diverse tasks and objectives and encourages collaboration through natural language communication. Second, it introduces a spectrum of process-oriented evaluation metrics to assess the fine-grained collaboration capabilities of different LLM agents, a dimension often overlooked in prior work. We conduct extensive experiments over 11 popular LLMs and show that, while the LLMs present a strong ability in goal interpretation, there is a significant discrepancy in active collaboration and continuous adaptation which are critical for efficiently fulfilling complicated tasks. Notably, we highlight the strengths and weaknesses in LLM-MAS and provide insights for improving and evaluating LLM-MAS on a unified and open-sourced benchmark. The environments, 30 open-ended tasks, and the evaluation package are publicly available at https://github.com/YusaeMeow/Collab-Overcooked.
RouteRL: Multi-agent reinforcement learning framework for urban route choice with autonomous vehicles
Authors: Ahmet Onur Akman, Anastasia Psarou, Łukasz Gorczyca, Zoltán György Varga, Grzegorz Jamróz, Rafał Kucharski
Date: 2025-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

RouteRL is a novel framework that integrates multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) with a microscopic traffic simulation, facilitating the testing and development of efficient route choice strategies for autonomous vehicles (AVs). The proposed framework simulates the daily route choices of driver agents in a city, including two types: human drivers, emulated using behavioral route choice models, and AVs, modeled as MARL agents optimizing their policies for a predefined objective. RouteRL aims to advance research in MARL, transport modeling, and human-AI interaction for transportation applications. This study presents a technical report on RouteRL, outlines its potential research contributions, and showcases its impact via illustrative examples.
Exponential Topology-enabled Scalable Communication in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Xinran Li, Xiaolu Wang, Chenjia Bai, Jun Zhang
Date: 2025-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), well-designed communication protocols can effectively facilitate consensus among agents, thereby enhancing task performance. Moreover, in large-scale multi-agent systems commonly found in real-world applications, effective communication plays an even more critical role due to the escalated challenge of partial observability compared to smaller-scale setups. In this work, we endeavor to develop a scalable communication protocol for MARL. Unlike previous methods that focus on selecting optimal pairwise communication links-a task that becomes increasingly complex as the number of agents grows-we adopt a global perspective on communication topology design. Specifically, we propose utilizing the exponential topology to enable rapid information dissemination among agents by leveraging its small-diameter and small-size properties. This approach leads to a scalable communication protocol, named ExpoComm. To fully unlock the potential of exponential graphs as communication topologies, we employ memory-based message processors and auxiliary tasks to ground messages, ensuring that they reflect global information and benefit decision-making. Extensive experiments on large-scale cooperative benchmarks, including MAgent and Infrastructure Management Planning, demonstrate the superior performance and robust zero-shot transferability of ExpoComm compared to existing communication strategies. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/LXXXXR/ExpoComm.
Combining Planning and Reinforcement Learning for Solving Relational Multiagent Domains
Authors: Nikhilesh Prabhakar, Ranveer Singh, Harsha Kokel, Sriraam Natarajan, Prasad Tadepalli
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Multiagent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) poses significant challenges due to the exponential growth of state and action spaces and the non-stationary nature of multiagent environments. This results in notable sample inefficiency and hinders generalization across diverse tasks. The complexity is further pronounced in relational settings, where domain knowledge is crucial but often underutilized by existing MARL algorithms. To overcome these hurdles, we propose integrating relational planners as centralized controllers with efficient state abstractions and reinforcement learning. This approach proves to be sample-efficient and facilitates effective task transfer and generalization.
Multi-Agent Security Tax: Trading Off Security and Collaboration Capabilities in Multi-Agent Systems
Authors: Pierre Peigne-Lefebvre, Mikolaj Kniejski, Filip Sondej, Matthieu David, Jason Hoelscher-Obermaier, Christian Schroeder de Witt, Esben Kran
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00

As AI agents are increasingly adopted to collaborate on complex objectives, ensuring the security of autonomous multi-agent systems becomes crucial. We develop simulations of agents collaborating on shared objectives to study these security risks and security trade-offs. We focus on scenarios where an attacker compromises one agent, using it to steer the entire system toward misaligned outcomes by corrupting other agents. In this context, we observe infectious malicious prompts - the multi-hop spreading of malicious instructions. To mitigate this risk, we evaluated several strategies: two "vaccination" approaches that insert false memories of safely handling malicious input into the agents' memory stream, and two versions of a generic safety instruction strategy. While these defenses reduce the spread and fulfillment of malicious instructions in our experiments, they tend to decrease collaboration capability in the agent network. Our findings illustrate potential trade-off between security and collaborative efficiency in multi-agent systems, providing insights for designing more secure yet effective AI collaborations.
Voting or Consensus? Decision-Making in Multi-Agent Debate
Authors: Lars Benedikt Kaesberg, Jonas Becker, Jan Philip Wahle, Terry Ruas, Bela Gipp
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, MMLU, StrategyQA

Much of the success of multi-agent debates depends on carefully choosing the right parameters. The decision-making protocol stands out as it can highly impact final model answers, depending on how decisions are reached. Systematic comparison of decision protocols is difficult because many studies alter multiple discussion parameters beyond the protocol. So far, it has been largely unknown how decision-making influences different tasks. This work systematically evaluates the impact of seven decision protocols (e.g., majority voting, unanimity consensus). We change only one variable at a time - the decision protocol - to analyze how different methods affect the collaboration between agents and measure differences in knowledge and reasoning tasks. Our results show that voting protocols improve performance by 13.2% in reasoning tasks and consensus protocols by 2.8% in knowledge tasks compared to other decision protocols. Increasing the number of agents improves performance, while more discussion rounds before voting reduce it. To improve decision-making by increasing answer diversity, we propose two new methods, All-Agents Drafting (AAD) and Collective Improvement (CI). Our methods improve task performance by up to 3.3% with AAD and up to 7.4% with CI. This work demonstrates the importance of decision-making in multi-agent debates beyond scaling.
Data-Efficient Multi-Agent Spatial Planning with LLMs
Authors: Huangyuan Su, Aaron Walsman, Daniel Garces, Sham Kakade, Stephanie Gil
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, World Knowledge

In this project, our goal is to determine how to leverage the world-knowledge of pretrained large language models for efficient and robust learning in multiagent decision making. We examine this in a taxi routing and assignment problem where agents must decide how to best pick up passengers in order to minimize overall waiting time. While this problem is situated on a graphical road network, we show that with the proper prompting zero-shot performance is quite strong on this task. Furthermore, with limited fine-tuning along with the one-at-a-time rollout algorithm for look ahead, LLMs can out-compete existing approaches with 50 times fewer environmental interactions. We also explore the benefits of various linguistic prompting approaches and show that including certain easy-to-compute information in the prompt significantly improves performance. Finally, we highlight the LLM's built-in semantic understanding, showing its ability to adapt to environmental factors through simple prompts.
MA-GTS: A Multi-Agent Framework for Solving Complex Graph Problems in Real-World Applications
Authors: Zike Yuan, Ming Liu, Hui Wang, Bing Qin
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00

Graph-theoretic problems arise in real-world applications like logistics, communication networks, and traffic optimization. These problems are often complex, noisy, and irregular, posing challenges for traditional algorithms. Large language models (LLMs) offer potential solutions but face challenges, including limited accuracy and input length constraints. To address these challenges, we propose MA-GTS (Multi-Agent Graph Theory Solver), a multi-agent framework that decomposes these complex problems through agent collaboration. MA-GTS maps the implicitly expressed text-based graph data into clear, structured graph representations and dynamically selects the most suitable algorithm based on problem constraints and graph structure scale. This approach ensures that the solution process remains efficient and the resulting reasoning path is interpretable. We validate MA-GTS using the G-REAL dataset, a real-world-inspired graph theory dataset we created. Experimental results show that MA-GTS outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and scalability, with strong results across multiple benchmarks (G-REAL 94.2%, GraCoRe 96.9%, NLGraph 98.4%).MA-GTS is open-sourced at https://github.com/ZIKEYUAN/MA-GTS.git.
MAFE: Multi-Agent Fair Environments for Decision-Making Systems
Authors: Zachary McBride Lazri, Anirudh Nakra, Ivan Brugere, Danial Dervovic, Antigoni Polychroniadou, Furong Huang, Dana Dachman-Soled, Min Wu
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fairness

Fairness constraints applied to machine learning (ML) models in static contexts have been shown to potentially produce adverse outcomes among demographic groups over time. To address this issue, emerging research focuses on creating fair solutions that persist over time. While many approaches treat this as a single-agent decision-making problem, real-world systems often consist of multiple interacting entities that influence outcomes. Explicitly modeling these entities as agents enables more flexible analysis of their interventions and the effects they have on a system's underlying dynamics. A significant challenge in conducting research on multi-agent systems is the lack of realistic environments that leverage the limited real-world data available for analysis. To address this gap, we introduce the concept of a Multi-Agent Fair Environment (MAFE) and present and analyze three MAFEs that model distinct social systems. Experimental results demonstrate the utility of our MAFEs as testbeds for developing multi-agent fair algorithms.
Image Referenced Sketch Colorization Based on Animation Creation Workflow
Authors: Dingkun Yan, Xinrui Wang, Zhuoru Li, Suguru Saito, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Jiaxian Guo
Date: 2025-02-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Colorization, Sketch Colorization

Sketch colorization plays an important role in animation and digital illustration production tasks. However, existing methods still meet problems in that text-guided methods fail to provide accurate color and style reference, hint-guided methods still involve manual operation, and image-referenced methods are prone to cause artifacts. To address these limitations, we propose a diffusion-based framework inspired by real-world animation production workflows. Our approach leverages the sketch as the spatial guidance and an RGB image as the color reference, and separately extracts foreground and background from the reference image with spatial masks. Particularly, we introduce a split cross-attention mechanism with LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) modules. They are trained separately with foreground and background regions to control the corresponding embeddings for keys and values in cross-attention. This design allows the diffusion model to integrate information from foreground and background independently, preventing interference and eliminating the spatial artifacts. During inference, we design switchable inference modes for diverse use scenarios by changing modules activated in the framework. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, along with user studies, demonstrate our advantages over existing methods in generating high-qualigy artifact-free results with geometric mismatched references. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each component. Codes are available at https://github.com/ tellurion-kanata/colorizeDiffusion.
Knowledge Bridger: Towards Training-free Missing Modality Completion
Authors: Guanzhou Ke, Shengfeng He, Xiao Li Wang, Bo wang, Guoqing Chao, Yuanyang Zhang, Yi Xie, HeXing Su
Date: 2025-02-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Modality completion

Previous successful approaches to missing modality completion rely on carefully designed fusion techniques and extensive pre-training on complete data, which can limit their generalizability in out-of-domain (OOD) scenarios. In this study, we pose a new challenge: can we develop a missing modality completion model that is both resource-efficient and robust to OOD generalization? To address this, we present a training-free framework for missing modality completion that leverages large multimodal models (LMMs). Our approach, termed the "Knowledge Bridger", is modality-agnostic and integrates generation and ranking of missing modalities. By defining domain-specific priors, our method automatically extracts structured information from available modalities to construct knowledge graphs. These extracted graphs connect the missing modality generation and ranking modules through the LMM, resulting in high-quality imputations of missing modalities. Experimental results across both general and medical domains show that our approach consistently outperforms competing methods, including in OOD generalization. Additionally, our knowledge-driven generation and ranking techniques demonstrate superiority over variants that directly employ LMMs for generation and ranking, offering insights that may be valuable for applications in other domains.