Daily Papers

Agent-based modeling has been around for decades, and applied widely across the social and natural sciences. The scope of this research method is now poised to grow dramatically as it absorbs the new affordances provided by Large Language Models (LLM)s. Generative Agent-Based Models (GABM) are not just classic Agent-Based Models (ABM)s where the agents talk to one another. Rather, GABMs are constructed using an LLM to apply common sense to situations, act "reasonably", recall common semantic knowledge, produce API calls to control digital technologies like apps, and communicate both within the simulation and to researchers viewing it from the outside. Here we present Concordia, a library to facilitate constructing and working with GABMs. Concordia makes it easy to construct language-mediated simulations of physically- or digitally-grounded environments. Concordia agents produce their behavior using a flexible component system which mediates between two fundamental operations: LLM calls and associative memory retrieval. A special agent called the Game Master (GM), which was inspired by tabletop role-playing games, is responsible for simulating the environment where the agents interact. Agents take actions by describing what they want to do in natural language. The GM then translates their actions into appropriate implementations. In a simulated physical world, the GM checks the physical plausibility of agent actions and describes their effects. In digital environments simulating technologies such as apps and services, the GM may handle API calls to integrate with external tools such as general AI assistants (e.g., Bard, ChatGPT), and digital apps (e.g., Calendar, Email, Search, etc.). Concordia was designed to support a wide array of applications both in scientific research and for evaluating performance of real digital services by simulating users and/or generating synthetic data.

In social sciences, researchers often face challenges when conducting large-scale experiments, particularly due to the simulations' complexity and the lack of technical expertise required to develop such frameworks. Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) is a computational approach that simulates agents' actions and interactions to evaluate how their behaviors influence the outcomes. However, the traditional implementation of ABM can be demanding and complex. Generative Agent-Based Modeling (GABM) offers a solution by enabling scholars to create simulations where AI-driven agents can generate complex behaviors based on underlying rules and interactions. This paper introduces a framework for designing reliable experiments using GABM, making sophisticated simulation techniques more accessible to researchers across various fields. We provide a step-by-step guide for selecting appropriate tools, designing the model, establishing experimentation protocols, and validating results.

Agent-based modeling and simulation has evolved as a powerful tool for modeling complex systems, offering insights into emergent behaviors and interactions among diverse agents. Integrating large language models into agent-based modeling and simulation presents a promising avenue for enhancing simulation capabilities. This paper surveys the landscape of utilizing large language models in agent-based modeling and simulation, examining their challenges and promising future directions. In this survey, since this is an interdisciplinary field, we first introduce the background of agent-based modeling and simulation and large language model-empowered agents. We then discuss the motivation for applying large language models to agent-based simulation and systematically analyze the challenges in environment perception, human alignment, action generation, and evaluation. Most importantly, we provide a comprehensive overview of the recent works of large language model-empowered agent-based modeling and simulation in multiple scenarios, which can be divided into four domains: cyber, physical, social, and hybrid, covering simulation of both real-world and virtual environments. Finally, since this area is new and quickly evolving, we discuss the open problems and promising future directions.

The final frontier for simulation is the accurate representation of complex, real-world social systems. While agent-based modeling (ABM) seeks to study the behavior and interactions of agents within a larger system, it is unable to faithfully capture the full complexity of human-driven behavior. Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have emerged as a potential solution to this bottleneck by enabling researchers to explore human-driven interactions in previously unimaginable ways. Our research investigates simulations of human interactions using LLMs. Through prompt engineering, inspired by Park et al. (2023), we present two simulations of believable proxies of human behavior: a two-agent negotiation and a six-agent murder mystery game.

Generative Agent-Based Modeling (GABM) is an emerging simulation paradigm that combines the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models with traditional Agent-Based Modeling to replicate complex social behaviors, including interactions on social media. While prior work has focused on localized phenomena such as opinion formation and information spread, its potential to capture global network dynamics remains underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing GABM-based social media simulations through the lens of the Friendship Paradox (FP), a counterintuitive phenomenon where individuals, on average, have fewer friends than their friends. We propose a GABM framework for social media simulations, featuring generative agents that emulate real users with distinct personalities and interests. Using Twitter datasets on the US 2020 Election and the QAnon conspiracy, we show that the FP emerges naturally in GABM simulations. Consistent with real-world observations, the simulations unveil a hierarchical structure, where agents preferentially connect with others displaying higher activity or influence. Additionally, we find that infrequent connections primarily drive the FP, reflecting patterns in real networks. These findings validate GABM as a robust tool for modeling global social media phenomena and highlight its potential for advancing social science by enabling nuanced analysis of user behavior.

We develop a simulation framework for studying misinformation spread within online social networks that blends agent-based modeling and natural language processing techniques. While many other agent-based simulations exist in this space, questions over their fidelity and generalization to existing networks in part hinders their ability to provide actionable insights. To partially address these concerns, we create a 'digital clone' of a known misinformation sharing network by downloading social media histories for over ten thousand of its users. We parse these histories to both extract the structure of the network and model the nuanced ways in which information is shared and spread among its members. Unlike many other agent-based methods in this space, information sharing between users in our framework is sensitive to topic of discussion, user preferences, and online community dynamics. To evaluate the fidelity of our method, we seed our cloned network with a set of posts recorded in the base network and compare propagation dynamics between the two, observing reasonable agreement across the twin networks over a variety of metrics. Lastly, we explore how the cloned network may serve as a flexible, low-cost testbed for misinformation countermeasure evaluation and red teaming analysis. We hope the tools explored here augment existing efforts in the space and unlock new opportunities for misinformation countermeasure evaluation, a field that may become increasingly important to consider with the anticipated rise of misinformation campaigns fueled by generative artificial intelligence.

Recent interest in human-AI interactions in agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) has grown rapidly due to the widespread utilization of large language models (LLMs). ABMS is an intelligent approach that simulates autonomous agents' behaviors within a defined environment to research emergent phenomena. Integrating LLMs into ABMS enables natural language interaction between humans and models. Meanwhile, it introduces new challenges that rely on human interaction to address. Human involvement can assist ABMS in adapting to flexible and complex research demands. However, systematic reviews of interactions that examine how humans and AI interact in ABMS are lacking. In this paper, we investigate existing works and propose a novel taxonomy to categorize the interactions derived from them. Specifically, human users refer to researchers who utilize ABMS tools to conduct their studies in our survey. We decompose interactions into five dimensions: the goals that users want to achieve (Why), the phases that users are involved (When), the components of the system (What), the roles of users (Who), and the means of interactions (How). Our analysis summarizes the findings that reveal existing interaction patterns. They provide researchers who develop interactions with comprehensive guidance on how humans and AI interact. We further discuss the unexplored interactions and suggest future research directions.

Several approaches are proposed to deal with the problem of the Automatic Schema Matching (ASM). The challenges and difficulties caused by the complexity and uncertainty characterizing both the process and the outcome of Schema Matching motivated us to investigate how bio-inspired emerging paradigm can help with understanding, managing, and ultimately overcoming those challenges. In this paper, we explain how we approached Automatic Schema Matching as a systemic and Complex Adaptive System (CAS) and how we modeled it using the approach of Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS). This effort gives birth to a tool (prototype) for schema matching called Reflex-SMAS. A set of experiments demonstrates the viability of our approach on two main aspects: (i) effectiveness (increasing the quality of the found matchings) and (ii) efficiency (reducing the effort required for this efficiency). Our approach represents a significant paradigm-shift, in the field of Automatic Schema Matching.

Agent-based modeling (ABM) seeks to understand the behavior of complex systems by simulating a collection of agents that act and interact within an environment. Their practical utility requires capturing realistic environment dynamics and adaptive agent behavior while efficiently simulating million-size populations. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) present an opportunity to enhance ABMs by using LLMs as agents with further potential to capture adaptive behavior. However, the computational infeasibility of using LLMs for large populations has hindered their widespread adoption. In this paper, we introduce AgentTorch -- a framework that scales ABMs to millions of agents while capturing high-resolution agent behavior using LLMs. We benchmark the utility of LLMs as ABM agents, exploring the trade-off between simulation scale and individual agency. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, we demonstrate how AgentTorch can simulate 8.4 million agents representing New York City, capturing the impact of isolation and employment behavior on health and economic outcomes. We compare the performance of different agent architectures based on heuristic and LLM agents in predicting disease waves and unemployment rates. Furthermore, we showcase AgentTorch's capabilities for retrospective, counterfactual, and prospective analyses, highlighting how adaptive agent behavior can help overcome the limitations of historical data in policy design. AgentTorch is an open-source project actively being used for policy-making and scientific discovery around the world. The framework is available here: github.com/AgentTorch/AgentTorch.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems have transformed various industries by autonomously generating content that mimics human creativity. However, concerns about their social and economic consequences arise with widespread adoption. This paper employs agent-based modeling (ABM) to explore these implications, predicting the impact of generative AI on societal frameworks. The ABM integrates individual, business, and governmental agents to simulate dynamics such as education, skills acquisition, AI adoption, and regulatory responses. This study enhances understanding of AI's complex interactions and provides insights for policymaking. The literature review underscores ABM's effectiveness in forecasting AI impacts, revealing AI adoption, employment, and regulation trends with potential policy implications. Future research will refine the model, assess long-term implications and ethical considerations, and deepen understanding of generative AI's societal effects.

For centuries, researchers have sought out ways to connect disparate areas of knowledge. While early scholars (Galileo, da Vinci, etc.) were experts across fields, specialization has taken hold later. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, we can now explore relationships across areas (e.g., mechanics-biology) or disparate domains (e.g., failure mechanics-art). To achieve this, we use a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM), here for a subset of knowledge in multiscale materials failure. The approach includes the use of a general-purpose LLM to distill question-answer pairs from raw sources followed by LLM fine-tuning. The resulting MechGPT LLM foundation model is used in a series of computational experiments to explore its capacity for knowledge retrieval, various language tasks, hypothesis generation, and connecting knowledge across disparate areas. While the model has some ability to recall knowledge from training, we find that LLMs are particularly useful to extract structural insights through Ontological Knowledge Graphs. These interpretable graph structures provide explanatory insights, frameworks for new research questions, and visual representations of knowledge that also can be used in retrieval-augmented generation. Three versions of MechGPT are discussed, featuring different sizes from 13 billion to 70 billion parameters, and reaching context lengths of more than 10,000 tokens. This provides ample capacity for sophisticated retrieval augmented strategies, as well as agent-based modeling where multiple LLMs interact collaboratively and/or adversarially, the incorporation of new data from the literature or web searches, as well as multimodality.

The advent of single-cell technology has significantly improved our understanding of cellular states and subpopulations in various tissues under normal and diseased conditions by employing data-driven approaches such as clustering and trajectory inference. However, these methods consider cells as independent data points of population distributions. With spatial transcriptomics, we can represent cellular organization, along with dynamic cell-cell interactions that lead to changes in cell state. Still, key computational advances are necessary to enable the data-driven learning of such complex interactive cellular dynamics. While agent-based modeling (ABM) provides a powerful framework, traditional approaches rely on handcrafted rules derived from domain knowledge rather than data-driven approaches. To address this, we introduce Spatio Temporal Agent-Based Graph Evolution Dynamics(STAGED) integrating ABM with deep learning to model intercellular communication, and its effect on the intracellular gene regulatory network. Using graph ODE networks (GDEs) with shared weights per cell type, our approach represents genes as vertices and interactions as directed edges, dynamically learning their strengths through a designed attention mechanism. Trained to match continuous trajectories of simulated as well as inferred trajectories from spatial transcriptomics data, the model captures both intercellular and intracellular interactions, enabling a more adaptive and accurate representation of cellular dynamics.

Contemporary approaches to agent-based modeling (ABM) of social systems have traditionally emphasized rule-based behaviors, limiting their ability to capture nuanced dynamics by moving beyond predefined rules and leveraging contextual understanding from LMs of human social interaction. This paper presents SALM (Social Agent LM Framework), a novel approach for integrating language models (LMs) into social network simulation that achieves unprecedented temporal stability in multi-agent scenarios. Our primary contributions include: (1) a hierarchical prompting architecture enabling stable simulation beyond 4,000 timesteps while reducing token usage by 73%, (2) an attention-based memory system achieving 80% cache hit rates (95% CI [78%, 82%]) with sub-linear memory growth of 9.5%, and (3) formal bounds on personality stability. Through extensive validation against SNAP ego networks, we demonstrate the first LLM-based framework capable of modeling long-term social phenomena while maintaining empirically validated behavioral fidelity.

We present the LLM Economist, a novel framework that uses agent-based modeling to design and assess economic policies in strategic environments with hierarchical decision-making. At the lower level, bounded rational worker agents -- instantiated as persona-conditioned prompts sampled from U.S. Census-calibrated income and demographic statistics -- choose labor supply to maximize text-based utility functions learned in-context. At the upper level, a planner agent employs in-context reinforcement learning to propose piecewise-linear marginal tax schedules anchored to the current U.S. federal brackets. This construction endows economic simulacra with three capabilities requisite for credible fiscal experimentation: (i) optimization of heterogeneous utilities, (ii) principled generation of large, demographically realistic agent populations, and (iii) mechanism design -- the ultimate nudging problem -- expressed entirely in natural language. Experiments with populations of up to one hundred interacting agents show that the planner converges near Stackelberg equilibria that improve aggregate social welfare relative to Saez solutions, while a periodic, persona-level voting procedure furthers these gains under decentralized governance. These results demonstrate that large language model-based agents can jointly model, simulate, and govern complex economic systems, providing a tractable test bed for policy evaluation at the societal scale to help build better civilizations.

The massive population election simulation aims to model the preferences of specific groups in particular election scenarios. It has garnered significant attention for its potential to forecast real-world social trends. Traditional agent-based modeling (ABM) methods are constrained by their ability to incorporate complex individual background information and provide interactive prediction results. In this paper, we introduce ElectionSim, an innovative election simulation framework based on large language models, designed to support accurate voter simulations and customized distributions, together with an interactive platform to dialogue with simulated voters. We present a million-level voter pool sampled from social media platforms to support accurate individual simulation. We also introduce PPE, a poll-based presidential election benchmark to assess the performance of our framework under the U.S. presidential election scenario. Through extensive experiments and analyses, we demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our framework in U.S. presidential election simulations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to enhance Agent-Based Modeling by better representing complex interdependent cybersecurity systems, improving cybersecurity threat modeling and risk management. However, evaluating LLMs in this context is crucial for legal compliance and effective application development. Existing LLM evaluation frameworks often overlook the human factor and cognitive computing capabilities essential for interdependent cybersecurity. To address this gap, I propose OllaBench, a novel evaluation framework that assesses LLMs' accuracy, wastefulness, and consistency in answering scenario-based information security compliance and non-compliance questions. OllaBench is built on a foundation of 24 cognitive behavioral theories and empirical evidence from 38 peer-reviewed papers. OllaBench was used to evaluate 21 LLMs, including both open-weight and commercial models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Meta and so on. The results reveal that while commercial LLMs have the highest overall accuracy scores, there is significant room for improvement. Smaller low-resolution open-weight LLMs are not far behind in performance, and there are significant differences in token efficiency and consistency among the evaluated models. OllaBench provides a user-friendly interface and supports a wide range of LLM platforms, making it a valuable tool for researchers and solution developers in the field of human-centric interdependent cybersecurity and beyond.

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.

The integration of tools in LLM-based agents overcame the difficulties of standalone LLMs and traditional agents' limited capabilities. However, the conjunction of these technologies and the proposed enhancements in several state-of-the-art works followed a non-unified software architecture resulting in a lack of modularity. Indeed, they focused mainly on functionalities and overlooked the definition of the component's boundaries within the agent. This caused terminological and architectural ambiguities between researchers which we addressed in this paper by proposing a unified framework that establishes a clear foundation for LLM-based agents' development from both functional and software architectural perspectives. Our framework, LLM-Agent-UMF (LLM-based Agent Unified Modeling Framework), clearly distinguishes between the different components of an agent, setting LLMs, and tools apart from a newly introduced element: the core-agent, playing the role of the central coordinator of the agent which comprises five modules: planning, memory, profile, action, and security, the latter often neglected in previous works. Differences in the internal structure of core-agents led us to classify them into a taxonomy of passive and active types. Based on this, we proposed different multi-core agent architectures combining unique characteristics of various individual agents. For evaluation purposes, we applied this framework to a selection of state-of-the-art agents, thereby demonstrating its alignment with their functionalities and clarifying the overlooked architectural aspects. Moreover, we thoroughly assessed four of our proposed architectures by integrating distinctive agents into hybrid active/passive core-agents' systems. This analysis provided clear insights into potential improvements and highlighted the challenges involved in the combination of specific agents.

MATSim (Multi-Agent Transport Simulation Toolkit) is an open source large-scale agent-based transportation planning project applied to various areas like road transport, public transport, freight transport, regional evacuation, etc. BEAM (Behavior, Energy, Autonomy, and Mobility) framework extends MATSim to enable powerful and scalable analysis of urban transportation systems. The agents from the BEAM simulation exhibit 'mode choice' behavior based on multinomial logit model. In our study, we consider eight mode choices viz. bike, car, walk, ride hail, driving to transit, walking to transit, ride hail to transit, and ride hail pooling. The 'alternative specific constants' for each mode choice are critical hyperparameters in a configuration file related to a particular scenario under experimentation. We use the 'Urbansim-10k' BEAM scenario (with 10,000 population size) for all our experiments. Since these hyperparameters affect the simulation in complex ways, manual calibration methods are time consuming. We present a parallel Bayesian optimization method with early stopping rule to achieve fast convergence for the given multi-in-multi-out problem to its optimal configurations. Our model is based on an open source HpBandSter package. This approach combines hierarchy of several 1D Kernel Density Estimators (KDE) with a cheap evaluator (Hyperband, a single multidimensional KDE). Our model has also incorporated extrapolation based early stopping rule. With our model, we could achieve a 25% L1 norm for a large-scale BEAM simulation in fully autonomous manner. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first of its kind applied to large-scale multi-agent transportation simulations. This work can be useful for surrogate modeling of scenarios with very large populations.

Large language models (LLMs) face challenges in solving complex mathematical problems that require comprehensive capacities to parse the statements, associate domain knowledge, perform compound logical reasoning, and integrate the intermediate rationales. Tackling all these problems once could be arduous for LLMs, thus leading to confusion in generation. In this work, we explore the potential of enhancing LLMs with agents by meticulous decomposition and modeling of mathematical reasoning process. Specifically, we propose a formal description of the mathematical solving and extend LLMs with an agent-based zero-shot framework named Planner-Reasoner-Executor-Reflector (PRER). We further provide and implement two MathAgents that define the logical forms and inherent relations via a pool of actions in different grains and orientations: MathAgent-M adapts its actions to LLMs, while MathAgent-H aligns with humankind. Experiments on miniF2F and MATH have demonstrated the effectiveness of PRER and proposed MathAgents, achieving an increase of 12.3%(53.9%66.2%) on the MiniF2F, 9.2% (49.8%59.0%) on MATH, and 13.2%(23.2%35.4%) for level-5 problems of MATH against GPT-4. Further analytical results provide more insightful perspectives on exploiting the behaviors of LLMs as agents.

Automatic creation of 3D scenes for immersive VR presence has been a significant research focus for decades. However, existing methods often rely on either high-poly mesh modeling with post-hoc simplification or massive 3D Gaussians, resulting in a complex pipeline or limited visual realism. In this paper, we demonstrate that such exhaustive modeling is unnecessary for achieving compelling immersive experience. We introduce ImmerseGen, a novel agent-guided framework for compact and photorealistic world modeling. ImmerseGen represents scenes as hierarchical compositions of lightweight geometric proxies, i.e., simplified terrain and billboard meshes, and generates photorealistic appearance by synthesizing RGBA textures onto these proxies. Specifically, we propose terrain-conditioned texturing for user-centric base world synthesis, and RGBA asset texturing for midground and foreground scenery. This reformulation offers several advantages: (i) it simplifies modeling by enabling agents to guide generative models in producing coherent textures that integrate seamlessly with the scene; (ii) it bypasses complex geometry creation and decimation by directly synthesizing photorealistic textures on proxies, preserving visual quality without degradation; (iii) it enables compact representations suitable for real-time rendering on mobile VR headsets. To automate scene creation from text prompts, we introduce VLM-based modeling agents enhanced with semantic grid-based analysis for improved spatial reasoning and accurate asset placement. ImmerseGen further enriches scenes with dynamic effects and ambient audio to support multisensory immersion. Experiments on scene generation and live VR showcases demonstrate that ImmerseGen achieves superior photorealism, spatial coherence and rendering efficiency compared to prior methods. Project webpage: https://immersegen.github.io.

Solving mechanics problems using numerical methods requires comprehensive intelligent capability of retrieving relevant knowledge and theory, constructing and executing codes, analyzing the results, a task that has thus far mainly been reserved for humans. While emerging AI methods can provide effective approaches to solve end-to-end problems, for instance via the use of deep surrogate models or various data analytics strategies, they often lack physical intuition since knowledge is baked into the parametric complement through training, offering less flexibility when it comes to incorporating mathematical or physical insights. By leveraging diverse capabilities of multiple dynamically interacting large language models (LLMs), we can overcome the limitations of conventional approaches and develop a new class of physics-inspired generative machine learning platform, here referred to as MechAgents. A set of AI agents can solve mechanics tasks, here demonstrated for elasticity problems, via autonomous collaborations. A two-agent team can effectively write, execute and self-correct code, in order to apply finite element methods to solve classical elasticity problems in various flavors (different boundary conditions, domain geometries, meshes, small/finite deformation and linear/hyper-elastic constitutive laws, and others). For more complex tasks, we construct a larger group of agents with enhanced division of labor among planning, formulating, coding, executing and criticizing the process and results. The agents mutually correct each other to improve the overall team-work performance in understanding, formulating and validating the solution. Our framework shows the potential of synergizing the intelligence of language models, the reliability of physics-based modeling, and the dynamic collaborations among diverse agents, opening novel avenues for automation of solving engineering problems.

Existing vision-language models (VLMs), whether generalists or specialists, remain constrained by their parameter scale, lack robust self-correction capabilities, and underperform in tasks involving long visual contexts and complex reasoning, resulting in suboptimal performance on document-based tasks. To address this, we propose MACT, a Multi-Agent Collaboration framework with Test-Time scaling, tailored for visual document understanding and visual question answering (VQA). It comprises four distinct small-scale agents, i.e., planning, execution, judgment, and answer agents, with clearly defined roles and effective collaboration. Notably, the judgment agent exclusively verifies correctness and redirects to prior agents for revisions, outperforming conventional correction strategies. To further expand the capability boundaries of the framework, we propose mixed reward modeling that balances agent-specific abilities and global collaboration, as well as agent-wise hybrid test-time scaling, which customizes different scaling strategies for each agent based on their functions. Evaluated on benchmarks spanning both document-based and non-document-based settings, our MACT shows superior performance with a smaller parameter scale without sacrificing the ability of general and mathematical tasks. Especially, it stands out in benchmarks involving long visual contexts and complicated reasoning. The three variants of MACT consistently hold the top three positions in average scores, leading in 13 of the 15 benchmarks. Code will be available at: https://github.com/YU-deep/MACT.git.

The study of social emergence has long been a central focus in social science. Traditional modeling approaches, such as rule-based Agent-Based Models (ABMs), struggle to capture the diversity and complexity of human behavior, particularly the irrational factors emphasized in behavioral economics. Recently, large language model (LLM) agents have gained traction as simulation tools for modeling human behavior in social science and role-playing applications. Studies suggest that LLMs can account for cognitive biases, emotional fluctuations, and other non-rational influences, enabling more realistic simulations of socio-economic dynamics. In this work, we introduce TwinMarket, a novel multi-agent framework that leverages LLMs to simulate socio-economic systems. Specifically, we examine how individual behaviors, through interactions and feedback mechanisms, give rise to collective dynamics and emergent phenomena. Through experiments in a simulated stock market environment, we demonstrate how individual actions can trigger group behaviors, leading to emergent outcomes such as financial bubbles and recessions. Our approach provides valuable insights into the complex interplay between individual decision-making and collective socio-economic patterns.

The objective of personalized medicine is to tailor interventions to an individual patient's unique characteristics. A key technology for this purpose involves medical digital twins, computational models of human biology that can be personalized and dynamically updated to incorporate patient-specific data collected over time. Certain aspects of human biology, such as the immune system, are not easily captured with physics-based models, such as differential equations. Instead, they are often multi-scale, stochastic, and hybrid. This poses a challenge to existing model-based control and optimization approaches that cannot be readily applied to such models. Recent advances in automatic differentiation and neural-network control methods hold promise in addressing complex control problems. However, the application of these approaches to biomedical systems is still in its early stages. This work introduces dynamics-informed neural-network controllers as an alternative approach to control of medical digital twins. As a first use case for this method, the focus is on agent-based models, a versatile and increasingly common modeling platform in biomedicine. The effectiveness of the proposed neural-network control method is illustrated and benchmarked against other methods with two widely-used agent-based model types. The relevance of the method introduced here extends beyond medical digital twins to other complex dynamical systems.

When one agent interacts with a multi-agent environment, it is challenging to deal with various opponents unseen before. Modeling the behaviors, goals, or beliefs of opponents could help the agent adjust its policy to adapt to different opponents. In addition, it is also important to consider opponents who are learning simultaneously or capable of reasoning. However, existing work usually tackles only one of the aforementioned types of opponents. In this paper, we propose model-based opponent modeling (MBOM), which employs the environment model to adapt to all kinds of opponents. MBOM simulates the recursive reasoning process in the environment model and imagines a set of improving opponent policies. To effectively and accurately represent the opponent policy, MBOM further mixes the imagined opponent policies according to the similarity with the real behaviors of opponents. Empirically, we show that MBOM achieves more effective adaptation than existing methods in a variety of tasks, respectively with different types of opponents, i.e., fixed policy, na\"ive learner, and reasoning learner.

Optimization problems are pervasive across various sectors, from manufacturing and distribution to healthcare. However, most such problems are still solved heuristically by hand rather than optimally by state-of-the-art solvers, as the expertise required to formulate and solve these problems limits the widespread adoption of optimization tools and techniques. We introduce OptiMUS, a Large Language Model (LLM)-based agent designed to formulate and solve MILP problems from their natural language descriptions. OptiMUS is capable of developing mathematical models, writing and debugging solver code, developing tests, and checking the validity of generated solutions. To benchmark our agent, we present NLP4LP, a novel dataset of linear programming (LP) and mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problems. Our experiments demonstrate that OptiMUS solves nearly twice as many problems as a basic LLM prompting strategy. OptiMUS code and NLP4LP dataset are available at https://github.com/teshnizi/OptiMUS{https://github.com/teshnizi/OptiMUS}

Optimization problems are pervasive in sectors from manufacturing and distribution to healthcare. However, most such problems are still solved heuristically by hand rather than optimally by state-of-the-art solvers because the expertise required to formulate and solve these problems limits the widespread adoption of optimization tools and techniques. This paper introduces OptiMUS, a Large Language Model (LLM)-based agent designed to formulate and solve (mixed integer) linear programming problems from their natural language descriptions. OptiMUS can develop mathematical models, write and debug solver code, evaluate the generated solutions, and improve its model and code based on these evaluations. OptiMUS utilizes a modular structure to process problems, allowing it to handle problems with long descriptions and complex data without long prompts. Experiments demonstrate that OptiMUS outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on easy datasets by more than 20% and on hard datasets (including a new dataset, NLP4LP, released with this paper that features long and complex problems) by more than 30%.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of text-generation tasks. However, LLMs still struggle with problems requiring multi-step decision-making and environmental feedback, such as online shopping, scientific reasoning, and mathematical problem-solving. Unlike pure text data, collecting large-scale decision-making data is challenging. Moreover, many powerful LLMs are only accessible through APIs, which hinders their fine-tuning for agent tasks due to cost and complexity. To address LLM agents' limitations, we propose a framework that can automatically learn a reward model from the environment without human annotations. This model can be used to evaluate the action trajectories of LLM agents and provide heuristics for task planning. Specifically, our approach involves employing one LLM-based agent to navigate an environment randomly, generating diverse action trajectories. Subsequently, a separate LLM is leveraged to assign a task intent and synthesize a negative response alongside the correct response for each trajectory. These triplets (task intent, positive response, and negative response) are then utilized as training data to optimize a reward model capable of scoring action trajectories. The effectiveness and generalizability of our framework are demonstrated through evaluations conducted on different agent benchmarks. In conclusion, our proposed framework represents a significant advancement in enhancing LLM agents' decision-making capabilities. By automating the learning of reward models, we overcome the challenges of data scarcity and API limitations, potentially revolutionizing the application of LLMs in complex and interactive environments. This research paves the way for more sophisticated AI agents capable of tackling a wide range of real-world problems requiring multi-step decision-making.

Existing game AI research mainly focuses on enhancing agents' abilities to win games, but this does not inherently make humans have a better experience when collaborating with these agents. For example, agents may dominate the collaboration and exhibit unintended or detrimental behaviors, leading to poor experiences for their human partners. In other words, most game AI agents are modeled in a "self-centered" manner. In this paper, we propose a "human-centered" modeling scheme for collaborative agents that aims to enhance the experience of humans. Specifically, we model the experience of humans as the goals they expect to achieve during the task. We expect that agents should learn to enhance the extent to which humans achieve these goals while maintaining agents' original abilities (e.g., winning games). To achieve this, we propose the Reinforcement Learning from Human Gain (RLHG) approach. The RLHG approach introduces a "baseline", which corresponds to the extent to which humans primitively achieve their goals, and encourages agents to learn behaviors that can effectively enhance humans in achieving their goals better. We evaluate the RLHG agent in the popular Multi-player Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game, Honor of Kings, by conducting real-world human-agent tests. Both objective performance and subjective preference results show that the RLHG agent provides participants better gaming experience.

PRefLexOR (Preference-based Recursive Language Modeling for Exploratory Optimization of Reasoning) combines preference optimization with concepts from Reinforcement Learning to enable models to self-teach through iterative reasoning improvements. We propose a recursive learning approach that engages the model in multi-step reasoning, revisiting, and refining intermediate steps before producing a final output in training and inference phases. Through multiple training stages, the model first learns to align its reasoning with accurate decision paths by optimizing the log odds between preferred and non-preferred responses. During this process, PRefLexOR builds a dynamic knowledge graph by generating questions from random text chunks and retrieval-augmentation to contextualize relevant details from the entire training corpus. In the second stage, preference optimization enhances model performance by using rejection sampling to fine-tune reasoning quality by continually producing in-situ training data while masking the reasoning steps. Recursive optimization within a thinking token framework introduces iterative feedback loops, where the model refines reasoning, achieving deeper coherence, consistency, and adaptability. Implemented in small language models with only 3 billion parameters, we should that even tiny models can iteratively teach themselves to reason with greater depth and reflectivity. Our implementation is straightforward and can be incorporated into any existing pretrained LLM. We focus our examples on applications in biological materials science and demonstrate the method in a variety of case studies that range from in-domain to cross-domain applications. Using reasoning strategies that include thinking and reflection modalities we build a multi-agent recursive self-improving inference approach to successively improve responses via repeated sampling in inference time.

Global climate models (GCMs) are the main tools for understanding and predicting climate change. However, due to limited numerical resolutions, these models suffer from major structural uncertainties; e.g., they cannot resolve critical processes such as small-scale eddies in atmospheric and oceanic turbulence. Thus, such small-scale processes have to be represented as a function of the resolved scales via closures (parametrization). The accuracy of these closures is particularly important for capturing climate extremes. Traditionally, such closures are based on heuristics and simplifying assumptions about the unresolved physics. Recently, supervised-learned closures, trained offline on high-fidelity data, have been shown to outperform the classical physics-based closures. However, this approach requires a significant amount of high-fidelity training data and can also lead to instabilities. Reinforcement learning is emerging as a potent alternative for developing such closures as it requires only low-order statistics and leads to stable closures. In Scientific Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (SMARL) computational elements serve a dual role of discretization points and learning agents. We leverage SMARL and fundamentals of turbulence physics to learn closures for prototypes of atmospheric and oceanic turbulence. The policy is trained using only the enstrophy spectrum, which is nearly invariant and can be estimated from a few high-fidelity samples (these few samples are far from enough for supervised/offline learning). We show that these closures lead to stable low-resolution simulations that, at a fraction of the cost, can reproduce the high-fidelity simulations' statistics, including the tails of the probability density functions. The results demonstrate the high potential of SMARL for closure modeling for GCMs, especially in the regime of scarce data and indirect observations.

Collaborative perception is dedicated to tackling the constraints of single-agent perception, such as occlusions, based on the multiple agents' multi-view sensor inputs. However, most existing works assume an ideal condition that all agents' multi-view cameras are continuously available. In reality, cameras may be highly noisy, obscured or even failed during the collaboration. In this work, we introduce a new robust camera-insensitivity problem: how to overcome the issues caused by the failed camera perspectives, while stabilizing high collaborative performance with low calibration cost? To address above problems, we propose RCDN, a Robust Camera-insensitivity collaborative perception with a novel Dynamic feature-based 3D Neural modeling mechanism. The key intuition of RCDN is to construct collaborative neural rendering field representations to recover failed perceptual messages sent by multiple agents. To better model collaborative neural rendering field, RCDN first establishes a geometry BEV feature based time-invariant static field with other agents via fast hash grid modeling. Based on the static background field, the proposed time-varying dynamic field can model corresponding motion vectors for foregrounds with appropriate positions. To validate RCDN, we create OPV2V-N, a new large-scale dataset with manual labelling under different camera failed scenarios. Extensive experiments conducted on OPV2V-N show that RCDN can be ported to other baselines and improve their robustness in extreme camera-insensitivity settings.

Learning how the world works is central to building AI agents that can adapt to complex environments. Traditional world models based on deep learning demand vast amounts of training data, and do not flexibly update their knowledge from sparse observations. Recent advances in program synthesis using Large Language Models (LLMs) give an alternate approach which learns world models represented as source code, supporting strong generalization from little data. To date, application of program-structured world models remains limited to natural language and grid-world domains. We introduce a novel program synthesis method for effectively modeling complex, non-gridworld domains by representing a world model as an exponentially-weighted product of programmatic experts (PoE-World) synthesized by LLMs. We show that this approach can learn complex, stochastic world models from just a few observations. We evaluate the learned world models by embedding them in a model-based planning agent, demonstrating efficient performance and generalization to unseen levels on Atari's Pong and Montezuma's Revenge. We release our code and display the learned world models and videos of the agent's gameplay at https://topwasu.github.io/poe-world.

Existing LLM-based agents have achieved strong performance on held-in tasks, but their generalizability to unseen tasks remains poor. Hence, some recent work focus on fine-tuning the policy model with more diverse tasks to improve the generalizability. In this work, we find that finetuning a reward model to guide the policy model is more robust than directly finetuning the policy model. Based on this finding, we propose AgentRM, a generalizable reward model, to guide the policy model for effective test-time search. We comprehensively investigate three approaches to construct the reward model, including explicit reward modeling, implicit reward modeling and LLM-as-a-judge. We then use AgentRM to guide the answer generation with Best-of-N sampling and step-level beam search. On four types of nine agent tasks, AgentRM enhances the base policy model by 8.8 points on average, surpassing the top general agent by 4.0. Moreover, it demonstrates weak-to-strong generalization, yielding greater improvement of 12.6 on LLaMA-3-70B policy model. As for the specializability, AgentRM can also boost a finetuned policy model and outperform the top specialized agent by 11.4 on three held-in tasks. Further analysis verifies its effectiveness in test-time scaling. Codes will be released to facilitate the research in this area.

We introduce TAPAS (Task-based Adaptation and Planning using AgentS), a multi-agent framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with symbolic planning to solve complex tasks without the need for manually defined environment models. TAPAS employs specialized LLM-based agents that collaboratively generate and adapt domain models, initial states, and goal specifications as needed using structured tool-calling mechanisms. Through this tool-based interaction, downstream agents can request modifications from upstream agents, enabling adaptation to novel attributes and constraints without manual domain redefinition. A ReAct (Reason+Act)-style execution agent, coupled with natural language plan translation, bridges the gap between dynamically generated plans and real-world robot capabilities. TAPAS demonstrates strong performance in benchmark planning domains and in the VirtualHome simulated real-world environment.

We study the emergence of agency from scratch by using Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents. In previous studies of LLM-based agents, each agent's characteristics, including personality and memory, have traditionally been predefined. We focused on how individuality, such as behavior, personality, and memory, can be differentiated from an undifferentiated state. The present LLM agents engage in cooperative communication within a group simulation, exchanging context-based messages in natural language. By analyzing this multi-agent simulation, we report valuable new insights into how social norms, cooperation, and personality traits can emerge spontaneously. This paper demonstrates that autonomously interacting LLM-powered agents generate hallucinations and hashtags to sustain communication, which, in turn, increases the diversity of words within their interactions. Each agent's emotions shift through communication, and as they form communities, the personalities of the agents emerge and evolve accordingly. This computational modeling approach and its findings will provide a new method for analyzing collective artificial intelligence.

Graphs are widely used for modeling relational data in real-world scenarios, such as social networks and urban computing. Existing LLM-based graph analysis approaches either integrate graph neural networks (GNNs) for specific machine learning tasks, limiting their transferability, or rely solely on LLMs' internal reasoning ability, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address these limitations, we take advantage of recent advances in LLM-based agents, which have shown capabilities of utilizing external knowledge or tools for problem solving. By simulating human problem-solving strategies such as analogy and collaboration, we propose a multi-agent system based on LLMs named GraphTeam, for graph analysis. GraphTeam consists of five LLM-based agents from three modules, and the agents with different specialities can collaborate with each other to address complex problems. Specifically, (1) input-output normalization module: the question agent extracts and refines four key arguments from the original question, facilitating the problem understanding, and the answer agent organizes the results to meet the output requirement; (2) external knowledge retrieval module: we first build a knowledge base consisting of relevant documentation and experience information, and then the search agent retrieves the most relevant entries for each question. (3) problem-solving module: given the retrieved information from search agent, the coding agent uses established algorithms via programming to generate solutions, and in case the coding agent does not work, the reasoning agent will directly compute the results without programming. Extensive experiments on six graph analysis benchmarks demonstrate that GraphTeam achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average 25.85% improvement over the best baseline in terms of accuracy. The code and data are available at https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/GraphTeam.

Autonomous vehicles operating in complex real-world environments require accurate predictions of interactive behaviors between traffic participants. This paper tackles the interaction prediction problem by formulating it with hierarchical game theory and proposing the GameFormer model for its implementation. The model incorporates a Transformer encoder, which effectively models the relationships between scene elements, alongside a novel hierarchical Transformer decoder structure. At each decoding level, the decoder utilizes the prediction outcomes from the previous level, in addition to the shared environmental context, to iteratively refine the interaction process. Moreover, we propose a learning process that regulates an agent's behavior at the current level to respond to other agents' behaviors from the preceding level. Through comprehensive experiments on large-scale real-world driving datasets, we demonstrate the state-of-the-art accuracy of our model on the Waymo interaction prediction task. Additionally, we validate the model's capacity to jointly reason about the motion plan of the ego agent and the behaviors of multiple agents in both open-loop and closed-loop planning tests, outperforming various baseline methods. Furthermore, we evaluate the efficacy of our model on the nuPlan planning benchmark, where it achieves leading performance.

In numerous artificial intelligence applications, the collaborative efforts of multiple intelligent agents are imperative for the successful attainment of target objectives. To enhance coordination among these agents, a distributed communication framework is often employed. However, indiscriminate information sharing among all agents can be resource-intensive, and the adoption of manually pre-defined communication architectures imposes constraints on inter-agent communication, thus limiting the potential for effective collaboration. Moreover, the communication framework often remains static during inference, which may result in sustained high resource consumption, as in most cases, only key decisions necessitate information sharing among agents. In this study, we introduce a novel approach wherein we conceptualize the communication architecture among agents as a learnable graph. We formulate this problem as the task of determining the communication graph while enabling the architecture parameters to update normally, thus necessitating a bi-level optimization process. Utilizing continuous relaxation of the graph representation and incorporating attention units, our proposed approach, CommFormer, efficiently optimizes the communication graph and concurrently refines architectural parameters through gradient descent in an end-to-end manner. Additionally, we introduce a temporal gating mechanism for each agent, enabling dynamic decisions on whether to receive shared information at a given time, based on current observations, thus improving decision-making efficiency. Extensive experiments on a variety of cooperative tasks substantiate the robustness of our model across diverse cooperative scenarios, where agents are able to develop more coordinated and sophisticated strategies regardless of changes in the number of agents.

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable potential in advancing scientific discovery. However, their capability in the fundamental yet crucial task of reproducing code from research papers, especially in the NLP domain, remains underexplored. This task includes unique complex reasoning challenges in the intellectual synthesis of abstract concepts and the comprehension of code repositories with interdependent files. Motivated by this gap, we present LMR-BENCH, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the capability of LLM agents on code reproduction from Language Modeling Research. It consists of 28 code reproduction tasks derived from 23 research papers published in top-tier NLP venues over the past five years, spanning nine fundamental categories. Models are provided with a research paper, a code repository containing one or more masked functions, and instructions for implementing these functions. We conduct extensive experiments in standard prompting and LLM agent settings with state-of-the-art LLMs, evaluating the accuracy of unit tests and performing LLM-based evaluation of code correctness. Experimental results reveal that even the most advanced models still exhibit persistent limitations in scientific reasoning and code synthesis, highlighting critical gaps in LLM agents' ability to autonomously reproduce scientific research

Energy in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is critical to network lifetime and data delivery. However, the primary impediment to the durability and dependability of these sensor nodes is their short battery life. Currently, power-saving algorithms such as clustering and routing algorithms have improved energy efficiency in standard protocols. This paper proposes a clustering-based routing approach for creating an adaptive, energy-efficient mechanism. Our system employs a multi-step clustering strategy to select dynamic cluster heads (CH) with optimal energy distribution. We use Game Theory (GT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to optimize resource utilization. Modeling the network as a multi-agent RL problem using GT principles allows for self-clustering while optimizing sensor lifetime and energy balance. The proposed AI-powered CH-Finding algorithm improves network efficiency by preventing premature energy depletion in specific nodes while also ensuring uniform energy usage across the network. Our solution enables controlled power consumption, resulting in a deterministic network lifetime. This predictability lowers maintenance costs by reducing the need for node replacement. Furthermore, our proposed method prevents sensor nodes from disconnecting from the network by designating the sensor with the highest charge as an intermediary and using single-hop routing. This approach improves the energy efficiency and stability of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) deployments.

Predicting the future motion of dynamic agents is of paramount importance to ensuring safety and assessing risks in motion planning for autonomous robots. In this study, we propose a two-stage motion prediction method, called R-Pred, designed to effectively utilize both scene and interaction context using a cascade of the initial trajectory proposal and trajectory refinement networks. The initial trajectory proposal network produces M trajectory proposals corresponding to the M modes of the future trajectory distribution. The trajectory refinement network enhances each of the M proposals using 1) tube-query scene attention (TQSA) and 2) proposal-level interaction attention (PIA) mechanisms. TQSA uses tube-queries to aggregate local scene context features pooled from proximity around trajectory proposals of interest. PIA further enhances the trajectory proposals by modeling inter-agent interactions using a group of trajectory proposals selected by their distances from neighboring agents. Our experiments conducted on Argoverse and nuScenes datasets demonstrate that the proposed refinement network provides significant performance improvements compared to the single-stage baseline and that R-Pred achieves state-of-the-art performance in some categories of the benchmarks.

Large language models (LLMs) have made dialogue one of the central modes of human-machine interaction, leading to the accumulation of vast amounts of conversation logs and increasing demand for dialogue generation. A conversational life-cycle spans from the Prelude through the Interlocution to the Epilogue, encompassing various elements. Despite the existence of numerous dialogue-related studies, there is a lack of benchmarks that encompass comprehensive dialogue elements, hindering precise modeling and systematic evaluation. To bridge this gap, we introduce an innovative research task Dialogue Element MOdeling, including Element Awareness and Dialogue Agent Interaction, and propose a novel benchmark, DEMO, designed for a comprehensive dialogue modeling and assessment. Inspired by imitation learning, we further build the agent which possesses the adept ability to model dialogue elements based on the DEMO benchmark. Extensive experiments indicate that existing LLMs still exhibit considerable potential for enhancement, and our DEMO agent has superior performance in both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks.

We aim to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for embodied decision making. While a significant body of work has been leveraging LLMs for decision making in embodied environments, we still lack a systematic understanding of their performance because they are usually applied in different domains, for different purposes, and built based on different inputs and outputs. Furthermore, existing evaluations tend to rely solely on a final success rate, making it difficult to pinpoint what ability is missing in LLMs and where the problem lies, which in turn blocks embodied agents from leveraging LLMs effectively and selectively. To address these limitations, we propose a generalized interface (Embodied Agent Interface) that supports the formalization of various types of tasks and input-output specifications of LLM-based modules. Specifically, it allows us to unify 1) a broad set of embodied decision-making tasks involving both state and temporally extended goals, 2) four commonly-used LLM-based modules for decision making: goal interpretation, subgoal decomposition, action sequencing, and transition modeling, and 3) a collection of fine-grained metrics which break down evaluation into various types of errors, such as hallucination errors, affordance errors, various types of planning errors, etc. Overall, our benchmark offers a comprehensive assessment of LLMs' performance for different subtasks, pinpointing the strengths and weaknesses in LLM-powered embodied AI systems, and providing insights for effective and selective use of LLMs in embodied decision making.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly propelled the development of Conversational Recommendation Agents (CRAs). However, these agents often generate short-sighted responses that fail to sustain user guidance and meet expectations. Although preference optimization has proven effective in aligning LLMs with user expectations, it remains costly and performs poorly in multi-turn dialogue. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel multi-turn preference optimization (MTPO) paradigm ECPO, which leverages Expectation Confirmation Theory to explicitly model the evolution of user satisfaction throughout multi-turn dialogues, uncovering the underlying causes of dissatisfaction. These causes can be utilized to support targeted optimization of unsatisfactory responses, thereby achieving turn-level preference optimization. ECPO ingeniously eliminates the significant sampling overhead of existing MTPO methods while ensuring the optimization process drives meaningful improvements. To support ECPO, we introduce an LLM-based user simulator, AILO, to simulate user feedback and perform expectation confirmation during conversational recommendations. Experimental results show that ECPO significantly enhances CRA's interaction capabilities, delivering notable improvements in both efficiency and effectiveness over existing MTPO methods.

Reliable multi-agent trajectory prediction is crucial for the safe planning and control of autonomous systems. Compared with single-agent cases, the major challenge in simultaneously processing multiple agents lies in modeling complex social interactions caused by various driving intentions and road conditions. Previous methods typically leverage graph-based message propagation or attention mechanism to encapsulate such interactions in the format of marginal probabilistic distributions. However, it is inherently sub-optimal. In this paper, we propose IPCC-TP, a novel relevance-aware module based on Incremental Pearson Correlation Coefficient to improve multi-agent interaction modeling. IPCC-TP learns pairwise joint Gaussian Distributions through the tightly-coupled estimation of the means and covariances according to interactive incremental movements. Our module can be conveniently embedded into existing multi-agent prediction methods to extend original motion distribution decoders. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse 2 datasets demonstrate that IPCC-TP improves the performance of baselines by a large margin.

End-to-end paradigm has emerged as a promising approach to autonomous driving. However, existing single-agent end-to-end pipelines are often constrained by occlusion and limited perception range, resulting in hazardous driving. Furthermore, their black-box nature prevents the interpretability of the driving behavior, leading to an untrustworthiness system. To address these limitations, we introduce Risk Map as Middleware (RiskMM) and propose an interpretable cooperative end-to-end driving framework. The risk map learns directly from the driving data and provides an interpretable spatiotemporal representation of the scenario from the upstream perception and the interactions between the ego vehicle and the surrounding environment for downstream planning. RiskMM first constructs a multi-agent spatiotemporal representation with unified Transformer-based architecture, then derives risk-aware representations by modeling interactions among surrounding environments with attention. These representations are subsequently fed into a learning-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) module. The MPC planner inherently accommodates physical constraints and different vehicle types and can provide interpretation by aligning learned parameters with explicit MPC elements. Evaluations conducted on the real-world V2XPnP-Seq dataset confirm that RiskMM achieves superior and robust performance in risk-aware trajectory planning, significantly enhancing the interpretability of the cooperative end-to-end driving framework. The codebase will be released to facilitate future research in this field.

Existing efforts in building Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents largely rely on the training paradigm of supervised fine-tuning on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, this approach not only demands extensive amounts of training data but also struggles to effectively understand GUI screenshots and generalize to unseen interfaces. The issue significantly limits its application in real-world scenarios, especially for high-level tasks. Inspired by Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) in large reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeek-R1), which efficiently enhances the problem-solving capabilities of large language models in real-world settings, we propose \name, the first reinforcement learning framework designed to enhance the GUI capabilities of LVLMs in high-level real-world task scenarios, through unified action space rule modeling. By leveraging a small amount of carefully curated high-quality data across multiple platforms (including Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android, and Web) and employing policy optimization algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to update the model, \name achieves superior performance using only 0.02\% of the data (3K vs. 13M) compared to previous state-of-the-art methods like OS-Atlas across eight benchmarks spanning three different platforms (mobile, desktop, and web). These results demonstrate the immense potential of reinforcement learning based on unified action space rule modeling in improving the execution capabilities of LVLMs for real-world GUI agent tasks.

The ability to predict future visual observations conditioned on past observations and motor commands can enable embodied agents to plan solutions to a variety of tasks in complex environments. This work shows that we can create good video prediction models by pre-training transformers via masked visual modeling. Our approach, named MaskViT, is based on two simple design decisions. First, for memory and training efficiency, we use two types of window attention: spatial and spatiotemporal. Second, during training, we mask a variable percentage of tokens instead of a fixed mask ratio. For inference, MaskViT generates all tokens via iterative refinement where we incrementally decrease the masking ratio following a mask scheduling function. On several datasets we demonstrate that MaskViT outperforms prior works in video prediction, is parameter efficient, and can generate high-resolution videos (256x256). Further, we demonstrate the benefits of inference speedup (up to 512x) due to iterative decoding by using MaskViT for planning on a real robot. Our work suggests that we can endow embodied agents with powerful predictive models by leveraging the general framework of masked visual modeling with minimal domain knowledge.

With the rapid rise of large language models (LLMs), phone automation has undergone transformative changes. This paper systematically reviews LLM-driven phone GUI agents, highlighting their evolution from script-based automation to intelligent, adaptive systems. We first contextualize key challenges, (i) limited generality, (ii) high maintenance overhead, and (iii) weak intent comprehension, and show how LLMs address these issues through advanced language understanding, multimodal perception, and robust decision-making. We then propose a taxonomy covering fundamental agent frameworks (single-agent, multi-agent, plan-then-act), modeling approaches (prompt engineering, training-based), and essential datasets and benchmarks. Furthermore, we detail task-specific architectures, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning strategies that bridge user intent and GUI operations. Finally, we discuss open challenges such as dataset diversity, on-device deployment efficiency, user-centric adaptation, and security concerns, offering forward-looking insights into this rapidly evolving field. By providing a structured overview and identifying pressing research gaps, this paper serves as a definitive reference for researchers and practitioners seeking to harness LLMs in designing scalable, user-friendly phone GUI agents.

A key theme in the past decade has been that when large neural networks and large datasets combine they can produce remarkable results. In deep reinforcement learning (RL), this paradigm is commonly made possible through experience replay, whereby a dataset of past experiences is used to train a policy or value function. However, unlike in supervised or self-supervised learning, an RL agent has to collect its own data, which is often limited. Thus, it is challenging to reap the benefits of deep learning, and even small neural networks can overfit at the start of training. In this work, we leverage the tremendous recent progress in generative modeling and propose Synthetic Experience Replay (SynthER), a diffusion-based approach to flexibly upsample an agent's collected experience. We show that SynthER is an effective method for training RL agents across offline and online settings, in both proprioceptive and pixel-based environments. In offline settings, we observe drastic improvements when upsampling small offline datasets and see that additional synthetic data also allows us to effectively train larger networks. Furthermore, SynthER enables online agents to train with a much higher update-to-data ratio than before, leading to a significant increase in sample efficiency, without any algorithmic changes. We believe that synthetic training data could open the door to realizing the full potential of deep learning for replay-based RL algorithms from limited data. Finally, we open-source our code at https://github.com/conglu1997/SynthER.

We present a novel Transformer-based multi-agent system for simulating the judicial rulings of the 2010-2016 Supreme Court of the United States. We train nine separate models with the respective authored opinions of each supreme justice active ca. 2015 and test the resulting system on 96 real-world cases. We find our system predicts the decisions of the real-world Supreme Court with better-than-random accuracy. We further find a correlation between model accuracy with respect to individual justices and their alignment between legal conservatism & liberalism. Our methods and results hold significance for researchers interested in using language models to simulate politically-charged discourse between multiple agents.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly deployed in real-world applications such as "digital assistants, autonomous customer service, and decision-support systems", where their ability to "interact in multi-turn, tool-augmented environments" makes them indispensable. However, ensuring the safety of these agents remains a significant challenge due to the diverse and complex risks arising from dynamic user interactions, external tool usage, and the potential for unintended harmful behaviors. To address this critical issue, we propose AutoSafe, the first framework that systematically enhances agent safety through fully automated synthetic data generation. Concretely, 1) we introduce an open and extensible threat model, OTS, which formalizes how unsafe behaviors emerge from the interplay of user instructions, interaction contexts, and agent actions. This enables precise modeling of safety risks across diverse scenarios. 2) we develop a fully automated data generation pipeline that simulates unsafe user behaviors, applies self-reflective reasoning to generate safe responses, and constructs a large-scale, diverse, and high-quality safety training dataset-eliminating the need for hazardous real-world data collection. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we design comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world safety benchmarks. Results demonstrate that AutoSafe boosts safety scores by 45% on average and achieves a 28.91% improvement on real-world tasks, validating the generalization ability of our learned safety strategies. These results highlight the practical advancement and scalability of AutoSafe in building safer LLM-based agents for real-world deployment. We have released the project page at https://auto-safe.github.io/.

Traditional sociological research often relies on human participation, which, though effective, is expensive, challenging to scale, and with ethical concerns. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) highlight their potential to simulate human behavior, enabling the replication of individual responses and facilitating studies on many interdisciplinary studies. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of this field, illustrating the recent progress in simulation driven by LLM-empowered agents. We categorize the simulations into three types: (1) Individual Simulation, which mimics specific individuals or demographic groups; (2) Scenario Simulation, where multiple agents collaborate to achieve goals within specific contexts; and (3) Society Simulation, which models interactions within agent societies to reflect the complexity and variety of real-world dynamics. These simulations follow a progression, ranging from detailed individual modeling to large-scale societal phenomena. We provide a detailed discussion of each simulation type, including the architecture or key components of the simulation, the classification of objectives or scenarios and the evaluation method. Afterward, we summarize commonly used datasets and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the trends across these three types of simulation. A repository for the related sources is at {https://github.com/FudanDISC/SocialAgent}.

Task-oriented dialogue systems often face difficulties when user utterances seem semantically complete but lack necessary structural information for appropriate system action. This arises because users frequently do not fully understand their own needs, while systems require precise intent definitions. Current LLM-based agents cannot effectively distinguish between linguistically complete and contextually triggerable expressions, lacking frameworks for collaborative intent formation. We present STORM, a framework modeling asymmetric information dynamics through conversations between UserLLM (full internal access) and AgentLLM (observable behavior only). STORM produces annotated corpora capturing expression trajectories and latent cognitive transitions, enabling systematic analysis of collaborative understanding development. Our contributions include: (1) formalizing asymmetric information processing in dialogue systems; (2) modeling intent formation tracking collaborative understanding evolution; and (3) evaluation metrics measuring internal cognitive improvements alongside task performance. Experiments across four language models reveal that moderate uncertainty (40-60%) can outperform complete transparency in certain scenarios, with model-specific patterns suggesting reconsideration of optimal information completeness in human-AI collaboration. These findings contribute to understanding asymmetric reasoning dynamics and inform uncertainty-calibrated dialogue system design.

Human behavior simulation of AI agents necessitates the agents to possess a quality of believability, which is crucial as it facilitates users in establishing trust toward the agents and streamlines the fulfillment of the agents' goal. While recent advancements in Large Language Model (LLM) based agents have improved human behavior simulation, challenges inherent to LLMs (e.g., long context modeling) can undermine their believability. Consequently, evaluating AI agent believability becomes imperative. Unfortunately, prior research often neglects the negative impacts of LLM deficiencies. To address these gaps, we introduce two metrics for assessing LLM-based agent believability: consistency, and robustness, together with a benchmark, SimulateBench, with which, we evaluate the consistency and robustness of agents implemented with popular LLMs. We find that agents (i) struggle to accurately depict character information when presented with lengthy profile inputs; (ii) exhibit vulnerability to profile perturbations; and (iii) are significantly affected by certain key factors that impact their overall believability. Code and SimulateBench are public at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/GPTMan.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) Agents have emerged as a transformative paradigm in human-computer interaction, evolving from rule-based automation scripts to sophisticated AI-driven systems capable of understanding and executing complex interface operations. This survey provides a comprehensive examination of the rapidly advancing field of LLM-based GUI Agents, systematically analyzing their architectural foundations, technical components, and evaluation methodologies. We identify and analyze four fundamental components that constitute modern GUI Agents: (1) perception systems that integrate text-based parsing with multimodal understanding for comprehensive interface comprehension; (2) exploration mechanisms that construct and maintain knowledge bases through internal modeling, historical experience, and external information retrieval; (3) planning frameworks that leverage advanced reasoning methodologies for task decomposition and execution; and (4) interaction systems that manage action generation with robust safety controls. Through rigorous analysis of these components, we reveal how recent advances in large language models and multimodal learning have revolutionized GUI automation across desktop, mobile, and web platforms. We critically examine current evaluation frameworks, highlighting methodological limitations in existing benchmarks while proposing directions for standardization. This survey also identifies key technical challenges, including accurate element localization, effective knowledge retrieval, long-horizon planning, and safety-aware execution control, while outlining promising research directions for enhancing GUI Agents' capabilities. Our systematic review provides researchers and practitioners with a thorough understanding of the field's current state and offers insights into future developments in intelligent interface automation.

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents typically learn tabula rasa, without prior knowledge of the world. However, if initialized with knowledge of high-level subgoals and transitions between subgoals, RL agents could utilize this Abstract World Model (AWM) for planning and exploration. We propose using few-shot large language models (LLMs) to hypothesize an AWM, that will be verified through world experience, to improve sample efficiency of RL agents. Our DECKARD agent applies LLM-guided exploration to item crafting in Minecraft in two phases: (1) the Dream phase where the agent uses an LLM to decompose a task into a sequence of subgoals, the hypothesized AWM; and (2) the Wake phase where the agent learns a modular policy for each subgoal and verifies or corrects the hypothesized AWM. Our method of hypothesizing an AWM with LLMs and then verifying the AWM based on agent experience not only increases sample efficiency over contemporary methods by an order of magnitude but is also robust to and corrects errors in the LLM, successfully blending noisy internet-scale information from LLMs with knowledge grounded in environment dynamics.

Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs) aim to simulate characters for realistic and engaging human-computer interactions. However, traditional reward models often struggle with scalability and adapting to subjective conversational preferences. We propose ChARM, a Character-based Act-adaptive Reward Model, addressing these challenges through two innovations: (1) an act-adaptive margin that significantly enhances learning efficiency and generalizability, and (2) a self-evolution mechanism leveraging large-scale unlabeled data to improve training coverage. Additionally, we introduce RoleplayPref, the first large-scale preference dataset specifically for RPLAs, featuring 1,108 characters, 13 subcategories, and 16,888 bilingual dialogues, alongside RoleplayEval, a dedicated evaluation benchmark. Experimental results show a 13% improvement over the conventional Bradley-Terry model in preference rankings. Furthermore, applying ChARM-generated rewards to preference learning techniques (e.g., direct preference optimization) achieves state-of-the-art results on CharacterEval and RoleplayEval. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/calubkk/ChARM.

Despite broad interest in modeling spoken dialogue agents, most approaches are inherently "half-duplex" -- restricted to turn-based interaction with responses requiring explicit prompting by the user or implicit tracking of interruption or silence events. Human dialogue, by contrast, is "full-duplex" allowing for rich synchronicity in the form of quick and dynamic turn-taking, overlapping speech, and backchanneling. Technically, the challenge of achieving full-duplex dialogue with LLMs lies in modeling synchrony as pre-trained LLMs do not have a sense of "time". To bridge this gap, we propose Synchronous LLMs for full-duplex spoken dialogue modeling. We design a novel mechanism to integrate time information into Llama3-8b so that they run synchronously with the real-world clock. We also introduce a training recipe that uses 212k hours of synthetic spoken dialogue data generated from text dialogue data to create a model that generates meaningful and natural spoken dialogue, with just 2k hours of real-world spoken dialogue data. Synchronous LLMs outperform state-of-the-art in dialogue meaningfulness while maintaining naturalness. Finally, we demonstrate the model's ability to participate in full-duplex dialogue by simulating interaction between two agents trained on different datasets, while considering Internet-scale latencies of up to 240 ms. Webpage: https://syncllm.cs.washington.edu/.

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) is an approach that enables RL agents to learn from preference, which is particularly useful when formulating a reward function is challenging. Existing PbRL methods generally involve a two-step procedure: they first learn a reward model based on given preference data and then employ off-the-shelf reinforcement learning algorithms using the learned reward model. However, obtaining an accurate reward model solely from preference information, especially when the preference is from human teachers, can be difficult. Instead, we propose a PbRL algorithm that directly learns from preference without requiring any reward modeling. To achieve this, we adopt a contrastive learning framework to design a novel policy scoring metric that assigns a high score to policies that align with the given preferences. We apply our algorithm to offline RL tasks with actual human preference labels and show that our algorithm outperforms or is on par with the existing PbRL methods. Notably, on high-dimensional control tasks, our algorithm surpasses offline RL methods that learn with ground-truth reward information. Finally, we show that our algorithm can be successfully applied to fine-tune large language models.

Generating full-body human gestures based on speech signals remains challenges on quality and speed. Existing approaches model different body regions such as body, legs and hands separately, which fail to capture the spatial interactions between them and result in unnatural and disjointed movements. Additionally, their autoregressive/diffusion-based pipelines show slow generation speed due to dozens of inference steps. To address these two challenges, we propose GestureLSM, a flow-matching-based approach for Co-Speech Gesture Generation with spatial-temporal modeling. Our method i) explicitly model the interaction of tokenized body regions through spatial and temporal attention, for generating coherent full-body gestures. ii) introduce the flow matching to enable more efficient sampling by explicitly modeling the latent velocity space. To overcome the suboptimal performance of flow matching baseline, we propose latent shortcut learning and beta distribution time stamp sampling during training to enhance gesture synthesis quality and accelerate inference. Combining the spatial-temporal modeling and improved flow matching-based framework, GestureLSM achieves state-of-the-art performance on BEAT2 while significantly reducing inference time compared to existing methods, highlighting its potential for enhancing digital humans and embodied agents in real-world applications. Project Page: https://andypinxinliu.github.io/GestureLSM

Existing computer-use agents primarily focus on general-purpose desktop automation tasks, with limited exploration of their application in highly specialized domains. In particular, the 3D building modeling process in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector involves open-ended design tasks and complex interaction patterns within Building Information Modeling (BIM) authoring software, which has yet to be thoroughly addressed by current studies. In this paper, we propose BIMgent, an agentic framework powered by multimodal large language models (LLMs), designed to enable autonomous building model authoring via graphical user interface (GUI) operations. BIMgent automates the architectural building modeling process, including multimodal input for conceptual design, planning of software-specific workflows, and efficient execution of the authoring GUI actions. We evaluate BIMgent on real-world building modeling tasks, including both text-based conceptual design generation and reconstruction from existing building design. The design quality achieved by BIMgent was found to be reasonable. Its operations achieved a 32% success rate, whereas all baseline models failed to complete the tasks (0% success rate). Results demonstrate that BIMgent effectively reduces manual workload while preserving design intent, highlighting its potential for practical deployment in real-world architectural modeling scenarios. Project page: https://tumcms.github.io/BIMgent.github.io/

Language agents have demonstrated promising capabilities in automating web-based tasks, though their current reactive approaches still underperform largely compared to humans. While incorporating advanced planning algorithms, particularly tree search methods, could enhance these agents' performance, implementing tree search directly on live websites poses significant safety risks and practical constraints due to irreversible actions such as confirming a purchase. In this paper, we introduce a novel paradigm that augments language agents with model-based planning, pioneering the innovative use of large language models (LLMs) as world models in complex web environments. Our method, WebDreamer, builds on the key insight that LLMs inherently encode comprehensive knowledge about website structures and functionalities. Specifically, WebDreamer uses LLMs to simulate outcomes for each candidate action (e.g., "what would happen if I click this button?") using natural language descriptions, and then evaluates these imagined outcomes to determine the optimal action at each step. Empirical results on two representative web agent benchmarks with online interaction -- VisualWebArena and Mind2Web-live -- demonstrate that WebDreamer achieves substantial improvements over reactive baselines. By establishing the viability of LLMs as world models in web environments, this work lays the groundwork for a paradigm shift in automated web interaction. More broadly, our findings open exciting new avenues for future research into 1) optimizing LLMs specifically for world modeling in complex, dynamic environments, and 2) model-based speculative planning for language agents.

Embodied AI agents that search for objects in large environments such as households often need to make efficient decisions by predicting object locations based on partial information. We pose this as a new type of link prediction problem: link prediction on partially observable dynamic graphs. Our graph is a representation of a scene in which rooms and objects are nodes, and their relationships are encoded in the edges; only parts of the changing graph are known to the agent at each timestep. This partial observability poses a challenge to existing link prediction approaches, which we address. We propose a novel state representation -- Scene Graph Memory (SGM) -- with captures the agent's accumulated set of observations, as well as a neural net architecture called a Node Edge Predictor (NEP) that extracts information from the SGM to search efficiently. We evaluate our method in the Dynamic House Simulator, a new benchmark that creates diverse dynamic graphs following the semantic patterns typically seen at homes, and show that NEP can be trained to predict the locations of objects in a variety of environments with diverse object movement dynamics, outperforming baselines both in terms of new scene adaptability and overall accuracy. The codebase and more can be found at https://www.scenegraphmemory.com.

Collaborative tasks often begin with partial task knowledge and incomplete initial plans from each partner. To complete these tasks, agents need to engage in situated communication with their partners and coordinate their partial plans towards a complete plan to achieve a joint task goal. While such collaboration seems effortless in a human-human team, it is highly challenging for human-AI collaboration. To address this limitation, this paper takes a step towards collaborative plan acquisition, where humans and agents strive to learn and communicate with each other to acquire a complete plan for joint tasks. Specifically, we formulate a novel problem for agents to predict the missing task knowledge for themselves and for their partners based on rich perceptual and dialogue history. We extend a situated dialogue benchmark for symmetric collaborative tasks in a 3D blocks world and investigate computational strategies for plan acquisition. Our empirical results suggest that predicting the partner's missing knowledge is a more viable approach than predicting one's own. We show that explicit modeling of the partner's dialogue moves and mental states produces improved and more stable results than without. These results provide insight for future AI agents that can predict what knowledge their partner is missing and, therefore, can proactively communicate such information to help their partner acquire such missing knowledge toward a common understanding of joint tasks.

A longstanding goal of artificial general intelligence is highly capable generalists that can learn from diverse experiences and generalize to unseen tasks. The language and vision communities have seen remarkable progress toward this trend by scaling up transformer-based models trained on massive datasets, while reinforcement learning (RL) agents still suffer from poor generalization capacity under such paradigms. To tackle this challenge, we propose Meta Decision Transformer (Meta-DT), which leverages the sequential modeling ability of the transformer architecture and robust task representation learning via world model disentanglement to achieve efficient generalization in offline meta-RL. We pretrain a context-aware world model to learn a compact task representation, and inject it as a contextual condition to the causal transformer to guide task-oriented sequence generation. Then, we subtly utilize history trajectories generated by the meta-policy as a self-guided prompt to exploit the architectural inductive bias. We select the trajectory segment that yields the largest prediction error on the pretrained world model to construct the prompt, aiming to encode task-specific information complementary to the world model maximally. Notably, the proposed framework eliminates the requirement of any expert demonstration or domain knowledge at test time. Experimental results on MuJoCo and Meta-World benchmarks across various dataset types show that Meta-DT exhibits superior few and zero-shot generalization capacity compared to strong baselines while being more practical with fewer prerequisites. Our code is available at https://github.com/NJU-RL/Meta-DT.

Predicting the motion of multiple traffic participants has always been one of the most challenging tasks in autonomous driving. The recently proposed occupancy flow field prediction method has shown to be a more effective and scalable representation compared to general trajectory prediction methods. However, in complex multi-agent traffic scenarios, it remains difficult to model the interactions among various factors and the dependencies among prediction outputs at different time steps. In view of this, we propose a transformer-based hierarchical feature guided network (HGNET), which can efficiently extract features of agents and map information from visual and vectorized inputs, modeling multimodal interaction relationships. Second, we design the Feature-Guided Attention (FGAT) module to leverage the potential guiding effects between different prediction targets, thereby improving prediction accuracy. Additionally, to enhance the temporal consistency and causal relationships of the predictions, we propose a Time Series Memory framework to learn the conditional distribution models of the prediction outputs at future time steps from multivariate time series. The results demonstrate that our model exhibits competitive performance, which ranks 3rd in the 2024 Waymo Occupancy and Flow Prediction Challenge.