pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Efficient Inverse Multiagent Learning
Authors: Denizalp Goktas, Amy Greenwald, Sadie Zhao, Alec Koppel, Sumitra Ganesh
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

In this paper, we study inverse game theory (resp. inverse multiagent learning) in which the goal is to find parameters of a game's payoff functions for which the expected (resp. sampled) behavior is an equilibrium. We formulate these problems as generative-adversarial (i.e., min-max) optimization problems, for which we develop polynomial-time algorithms to solve, the former of which relies on an exact first-order oracle, and the latter, a stochastic one. We extend our approach to solve inverse multiagent simulacral learning in polynomial time and number of samples. In these problems, we seek a simulacrum, meaning parameters and an associated equilibrium that replicate the given observations in expectation. We find that our approach outperforms the widely-used ARIMA method in predicting prices in Spanish electricity markets based on time-series data.
Leveraging Small LLMs for Argument Mining in Education: Argument Component Identification, Classification, and Assessment
Authors: Lucile Favero, Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Tanja Käser, Nuria Oliver
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Argument Mining, Computational Efficiency, Decoder

Argument mining algorithms analyze the argumentative structure of essays, making them a valuable tool for enhancing education by providing targeted feedback on the students' argumentation skills. While current methods often use encoder or encoder-decoder deep learning architectures, decoder-only models remain largely unexplored, offering a promising research direction. This paper proposes leveraging open-source, small Large Language Models (LLMs) for argument mining through few-shot prompting and fine-tuning. These models' small size and open-source nature ensure accessibility, privacy, and computational efficiency, enabling schools and educators to adopt and deploy them locally. Specifically, we perform three tasks: segmentation of student essays into arguments, classification of the arguments by type, and assessment of their quality. We empirically evaluate the models on the Feedback Prize - Predicting Effective Arguments dataset of grade 6-12 students essays and demonstrate how fine-tuned small LLMs outperform baseline methods in segmenting the essays and determining the argument types while few-shot prompting yields comparable performance to that of the baselines in assessing quality. This work highlights the educational potential of small, open-source LLMs to provide real-time, personalized feedback, enhancing independent learning and writing skills while ensuring low computational cost and privacy.
Semantic Decomposition and Selective Context Filtering -- Text Processing Techniques for Context-Aware NLP-Based Systems
Authors: Karl John Villardar
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00

In this paper, we present two techniques for use in context-aware systems: Semantic Decomposition, which sequentially decomposes input prompts into a structured and hierarchal information schema in which systems can parse and process easily, and Selective Context Filtering, which enables systems to systematically filter out specific irrelevant sections of contextual information that is fed through a system's NLP-based pipeline. We will explore how context-aware systems and applications can utilize these two techniques in order to implement dynamic LLM-to-system interfaces, improve an LLM's ability to generate more contextually cohesive user-facing responses, and optimize complex automated workflows and pipelines.
Dehumanizing Machines: Mitigating Anthropomorphic Behaviors in Text Generation Systems
Authors: Myra Cheng, Su Lin Blodgett, Alicia DeVrio, Lisa Egede, Alexandra Olteanu
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

As text generation systems' outputs are increasingly anthropomorphic -- perceived as human-like -- scholars have also increasingly raised concerns about how such outputs can lead to harmful outcomes, such as users over-relying or developing emotional dependence on these systems. How to intervene on such system outputs to mitigate anthropomorphic behaviors and their attendant harmful outcomes, however, remains understudied. With this work, we aim to provide empirical and theoretical grounding for developing such interventions. To do so, we compile an inventory of interventions grounded both in prior literature and a crowdsourcing study where participants edited system outputs to make them less human-like. Drawing on this inventory, we also develop a conceptual framework to help characterize the landscape of possible interventions, articulate distinctions between different types of interventions, and provide a theoretical basis for evaluating the effectiveness of different interventions.
Human-Artificial Interaction in the Age of Agentic AI: A System-Theoretical Approach
Authors: Uwe M. Borghoff, Paolo Bottoni, Remo Pareschi
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

This paper presents a novel perspective on human-computer interaction (HCI), framing it as a dynamic interplay between human and computational agents within a networked system. Going beyond traditional interface-based approaches, we emphasize the importance of coordination and communication among heterogeneous agents with different capabilities, roles, and goals. A key distinction is made between multi-agent systems (MAS) and Centaurian systems, which represent two different paradigms of human-AI collaboration. MAS maintain agent autonomy, with structured protocols enabling cooperation, while Centaurian systems deeply integrate human and AI capabilities, creating unified decision-making entities. To formalize these interactions, we introduce a framework for communication spaces, structured into surface, observation, and computation layers, ensuring seamless integration between MAS and Centaurian architectures, where colored Petri nets effectively represent structured Centaurian systems and high-level reconfigurable networks address the dynamic nature of MAS. Our research has practical applications in autonomous robotics, human-in-the-loop decision making, and AI-driven cognitive architectures, and provides a foundation for next-generation hybrid intelligence systems that balance structured coordination with emergent behavior.
Discovering highly efficient low-weight quantum error-correcting codes with reinforcement learning
Authors: Austin Yubo He, Zi-Wen Liu
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The realization of scalable fault-tolerant quantum computing is expected to hinge on quantum error-correcting codes. In the quest for more efficient quantum fault tolerance, a critical code parameter is the weight of measurements that extract information about errors to enable error correction: as higher measurement weights require higher implementation costs and introduce more errors, it is important in code design to optimize measurement weight. This underlies the surging interest in quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes, the study of which has primarily focused on the asymptotic (large-code-limit) properties. In this work, we introduce a versatile and computationally efficient approach to stabilizer code weight reduction based on reinforcement learning (RL), which produces new low-weight codes that substantially outperform the state of the art in practically relevant parameter regimes, extending significantly beyond previously accessible small distances. For example, our approach demonstrates savings in physical qubit overhead compared to existing results by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude for weight 6 codes and brings the overhead into a feasible range for near-future experiments. We also investigate the interplay between code parameters using our RL framework, offering new insights into the potential efficiency and power of practically viable coding strategies. Overall, our results demonstrate how RL can effectively advance the crucial yet challenging problem of quantum code discovery and thereby facilitate a faster path to the practical implementation of fault-tolerant quantum technologies.
On Theoretical Limits of Learning with Label Differential Privacy
Authors: Puning Zhao, Chuan Ma, Li Shen, Shaowei Wang, Rongfei Fan
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00

Label differential privacy (DP) is designed for learning problems involving private labels and public features. While various methods have been proposed for learning under label DP, the theoretical limits remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the fundamental limits of learning with label DP in both local and central models for both classification and regression tasks, characterized by minimax convergence rates. We establish lower bounds by converting each task into a multiple hypothesis testing problem and bounding the test error. Additionally, we develop algorithms that yield matching upper bounds. Our results demonstrate that under label local DP (LDP), the risk has a significantly faster convergence rate than that under full LDP, i.e. protecting both features and labels, indicating the advantages of relaxing the DP definition to focus solely on labels. In contrast, under the label central DP (CDP), the risk is only reduced by a constant factor compared to full DP, indicating that the relaxation of CDP only has limited benefits on the performance.
A modal logic translation of the AGM axioms for belief revision
Authors: Giacomo Bonanno
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00

Building on the analysis of Bonanno (Artificial Intelligence, 2025) we introduce a simple modal logic containing three modal operators: a unimodal belief operator, a bimodal conditional operator and the unimodal global operator. For each AGM axiom for belief revision, we provide a corresponding modal axiom. The correspondence is as follows: each AGM axiom is characterized by a property of the Kripke-Lewis frames considered in Bonanno (Artificial Intelligence, 2025) and, in turn, that property characterizes the proposed modal axiom.
Optimizing Model Selection for Compound AI Systems
Authors: Lingjiao Chen, Jared Quincy Davis, Boris Hanin, Peter Bailis, Matei Zaharia, James Zou, Ion Stoica
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Model Selection

Compound AI systems that combine multiple LLM calls, such as self-refine and multi-agent-debate, achieve strong performance on many AI tasks. We address a core question in optimizing compound systems: for each LLM call or module in the system, how should one decide which LLM to use? We show that these LLM choices have a large effect on quality, but the search space is exponential. We propose LLMSelector, an efficient framework for model selection in compound systems, which leverages two key empirical insights: (i) end-to-end performance is often monotonic in how well each module performs, with all other modules held fixed, and (ii) per-module performance can be estimated accurately by an LLM. Building upon these insights, LLMSelector iteratively selects one module and allocates to it the model with the highest module-wise performance, as estimated by an LLM, until no further gain is possible. LLMSelector is applicable to any compound system with a bounded number of modules, and its number of API calls scales linearly with the number of modules, achieving high-quality model allocation both empirically and theoretically. Experiments with popular compound systems such as multi-agent debate and self-refine using LLMs such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini 1.5 show that LLMSelector confers 5%-70% accuracy gains compared to using the same LLM for all modules.
Multi-Agent Coordination across Diverse Applications: A Survey
Authors: Lijun Sun, Yijun Yang, Qiqi Duan, Yuhui Shi, Chao Lyu, Yu-Cheng Chang, Chin-Teng Lin, Yang shen
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

Multi-agent coordination studies the underlying mechanism enabling the trending spread of diverse multi-agent systems (MAS) and has received increasing attention, driven by the expansion of emerging applications and rapid AI advances. This survey outlines the current state of coordination research across applications through a unified understanding that answers four fundamental coordination questions: (1) what is coordination; (2) why coordination; (3) who to coordinate with; and (4) how to coordinate. Our purpose is to explore existing ideas and expertise in coordination and their connections across diverse applications, while identifying and highlighting emerging and promising research directions. First, general coordination problems that are essential to varied applications are identified and analyzed. Second, a number of MAS applications are surveyed, ranging from widely studied domains, e.g., search and rescue, warehouse automation and logistics, and transportation systems, to emerging fields including humanoid and anthropomorphic robots, satellite systems, and large language models (LLMs). Finally, open challenges about the scalability, heterogeneity, and learning mechanisms of MAS are analyzed and discussed. In particular, we identify the hybridization of hierarchical and decentralized coordination, human-MAS coordination, and LLM-based MAS as promising future directions.
Ranking Joint Policies in Dynamic Games using Evolutionary Dynamics
Authors: Natalia Koliou, George Vouros
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive

Game-theoretic solution concepts, such as the Nash equilibrium, have been key to finding stable joint actions in multi-player games. However, it has been shown that the dynamics of agents' interactions, even in simple two-player games with few strategies, are incapable of reaching Nash equilibria, exhibiting complex and unpredictable behavior. Instead, evolutionary approaches can describe the long-term persistence of strategies and filter out transient ones, accounting for the long-term dynamics of agents' interactions. Our goal is to identify agents' joint strategies that result in stable behavior, being resistant to changes, while also accounting for agents' payoffs, in dynamic games. Towards this goal, and building on previous results, this paper proposes transforming dynamic games into their empirical forms by considering agents' strategies instead of agents' actions, and applying the evolutionary methodology $\alpha$-Rank to evaluate and rank strategy profiles according to their long-term dynamics. This methodology not only allows us to identify joint strategies that are strong through agents' long-term interactions, but also provides a descriptive, transparent framework regarding the high ranking of these strategies. Experiments report on agents that aim to collaboratively solve a stochastic version of the graph coloring problem. We consider different styles of play as strategies to define the empirical game, and train policies realizing these strategies, using the DQN algorithm. Then we run simulations to generate the payoff matrix required by $\alpha$-Rank to rank joint strategies.
Beyond Self-Talk: A Communication-Centric Survey of LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems
Authors: Bingyu Yan, Zhibo Zhou, Litian Zhang, Lian Zhang, Ziyi Zhou, Dezhuang Miao, Zhoujun Li, Chaozhuo Li, XiaoMing Zhang
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Decision Making, Large Language Model, Survey

Large language model-based multi-agent systems have recently gained significant attention due to their potential for complex, collaborative, and intelligent problem-solving capabilities. Existing surveys typically categorize LLM-based multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS) according to their application domains or architectures, overlooking the central role of communication in coordinating agent behaviors and interactions. To address this gap, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of LLM-MAS from a communication-centric perspective. Specifically, we propose a structured framework that integrates system-level communication (architecture, goals, and protocols) with system internal communication (strategies, paradigms, objects, and content), enabling a detailed exploration of how agents interact, negotiate, and achieve collective intelligence. Through an extensive analysis of recent literature, we identify key components in multiple dimensions and summarize their strengths and limitations. In addition, we highlight current challenges, including communication efficiency, security vulnerabilities, inadequate benchmarking, and scalability issues, and outline promising future research directions. This review aims to help researchers and practitioners gain a clear understanding of the communication mechanisms in LLM-MAS, thereby facilitating the design and deployment of robust, scalable, and secure multi-agent systems.
Causal Mean Field Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Hao Ma, Zhiqiang Pu, Yi Pan, Boyin Liu, Junlong Gao, Zhenyu Guo
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Scalability remains a challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning and is currently under active research. A framework named mean-field reinforcement learning (MFRL) could alleviate the scalability problem by employing the Mean Field Theory to turn a many-agent problem into a two-agent problem. However, this framework lacks the ability to identify essential interactions under nonstationary environments. Causality contains relatively invariant mechanisms behind interactions, though environments are nonstationary. Therefore, we propose an algorithm called causal mean-field Q-learning (CMFQ) to address the scalability problem. CMFQ is ever more robust toward the change of the number of agents though inheriting the compressed representation of MFRL's action-state space. Firstly, we model the causality behind the decision-making process of MFRL into a structural causal model (SCM). Then the essential degree of each interaction is quantified via intervening on the SCM. Furthermore, we design the causality-aware compact representation for behavioral information of agents as the weighted sum of all behavioral information according to their causal effects. We test CMFQ in a mixed cooperative-competitive game and a cooperative game. The result shows that our method has excellent scalability performance in both training in environments containing a large number of agents and testing in environments containing much more agents.
LLM-EvRep: Learning an LLM-Compatible Event Representation Using a Self-Supervised Framework
Authors: Zongyou Yu, Qiang Qu, Qian Zhang, Nan Zhang, Xiaoming Chen
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00

Recent advancements in event-based recognition have demonstrated significant promise, yet most existing approaches rely on extensive training, limiting their adaptability for efficient processing of event-driven visual content. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable zero-shot capabilities across diverse domains, but their application to event-based visual recognition remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{LLM-EvGen}, an event representation generator that produces LLM-compatible event representations \textbf{LLM-EvRep}, thereby enhancing the performance of LLMs on event recognition tasks. The generator is trained using a self-supervised framework, aligning the generated representations with semantic consistency and structural fidelity. Comprehensive experiments were conducted on three datasets: N-ImageNet, N-Caltech101, and N-MNIST. The results demonstrate that our method, \textbf{LLM-EvRep}, outperforms the event-to-video method, E2VID, by 15.93\%, 0.82\%, and 50.21\%, respectively, in recognition tasks when evaluated using GPT-4o.
Meshless Shape Optimization using Neural Networks and Partial Differential Equations on Graphs
Authors: Eloi Martinet, Leon Bungert
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00

Shape optimization involves the minimization of a cost function defined over a set of shapes, often governed by a partial differential equation (PDE). In the absence of closed-form solutions, one relies on numerical methods to approximate the solution. The level set method -- when coupled with the finite element method -- is one of the most versatile numerical shape optimization approaches but still suffers from the limitations of most mesh-based methods. In this work, we present a fully meshless level set framework that leverages neural networks to parameterize the level set function and employs the graph Laplacian to approximate the underlying PDE. Our approach enables precise computations of geometric quantities such as surface normals and curvature, and allows tackling optimization problems within the class of convex shapes.
Reinforcement Learning with Graph Attention for Routing and Wavelength Assignment with Lightpath Reuse
Authors: Michael Doherty, Alejandra Beghelli
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Graph Attention, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Many works have investigated reinforcement learning (RL) for routing and spectrum assignment on flex-grid networks but only one work to date has examined RL for fixed-grid with flex-rate transponders, despite production systems using this paradigm. Flex-rate transponders allow existing lightpaths to accommodate new services, a task we term routing and wavelength assignment with lightpath reuse (RWA-LR). We re-examine this problem and present a thorough benchmarking of heuristic algorithms for RWA-LR, which are shown to have 6% increased throughput when candidate paths are ordered by number of hops, rather than total length. We train an RL agent for RWA-LR with graph attention networks for the policy and value functions to exploit the graph-structured data. We provide details of our methodology and open source all of our code for reproduction. We outperform the previous state-of-the-art RL approach by 2.5% (17.4 Tbps mean additional throughput) and the best heuristic by 1.2% (8.5 Tbps mean additional throughput). This marginal gain highlights the difficulty in learning effective RL policies on long horizon resource allocation tasks.
DFDT: Dynamic Fast Decision Tree for IoT Data Stream Mining on Edge Devices
Authors: Afonso Lourenço, João Rodrigo, João Gama, Goreti Marreiros
Date: 2025-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing

The Internet of Things generates massive data streams, with edge computing emerging as a key enabler for online IoT applications and 5G networks. Edge solutions facilitate real-time machine learning inference, but also require continuous adaptation to concept drifts. Ensemble-based solutions improve predictive performance, but incur higher resource consumption, latency, and memory demands. This paper presents DFDT: Dynamic Fast Decision Tree, a novel algorithm designed for energy-efficient memory-constrained data stream mining. DFDT improves hoeffding tree growth efficiency by dynamically adjusting grace periods, tie thresholds, and split evaluations based on incoming data. It incorporates stricter evaluation rules (based on entropy, information gain, and leaf instance count), adaptive expansion modes, and a leaf deactivation mechanism to manage memory, allowing more computation on frequently visited nodes while conserving energy on others. Experiments show that the proposed framework can achieve increased predictive performance (0.43 vs 0.29 ranking) with constrained memory and a fraction of the runtime of VFDT or SVFDT.