Multi-Agent RL

The problem of over-smoothing has emerged as a fundamental issue for Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). While existing efforts primarily focus on enhancing the discriminability of node representations for node classification, they tend to overlook the over-smoothing at the graph level, significantly influencing the performance of graph classification. In this paper, we provide an explanation of the graph-level over-smoothing phenomenon, and propose a novel Adaptive Multi-Viewed Subgraph Convolutional Network (MultiNet) to address this challenge. Specifically, the MultiNet introduces a local subgraph convolution module that adaptively divides each input graph into multiple subgraph views. Then a number of subgraph-based view-specific convolution operations are applied to constrain the extent of node information propagation over the original global graph structure, not only mitigating the over-smoothing issue but also generating more discriminative local node representations. Moreover, we develop an alignment-based readout that establishes correspondences between nodes over different graphs, thereby effectively preserving the local node-level structure information and improving the discriminative ability of the resulting graph-level representations. Theoretical analysis and empirical studies show that the MultiNet mitigates the graph-level over-smoothing and achieves excellent performance for graph classification.

Noisy labels often compel models to overfit, especially in multi-label classification tasks. Existing methods for noisy multi-label learning (NML) primarily follow a discriminative paradigm, which relies on noise transition matrix estimation or small-loss strategies to correct noisy labels. However, they remain substantial optimization difficulties compared to noisy single-label learning. In this paper, we propose a Co-Occurrence-Aware Diffusion (CAD) model, which reformulates NML from a generative perspective. We treat features as conditions and multi-labels as diffusion targets, optimizing the diffusion model for multi-label learning with theoretical guarantees. Benefiting from the diffusion model's strength in capturing multi-object semantics and structured label matrix representation, we can effectively learn the posterior mapping from features to true multi-labels. To mitigate the interference of noisy labels in the forward process, we guide generation using pseudo-clean labels reconstructed from the latent neighborhood space, replacing original point-wise estimates with neighborhood-based proxies. In the reverse process, we further incorporate label co-occurrence constraints to enhance the model's awareness of incorrect generation directions, thereby promoting robust optimization. Extensive experiments on both synthetic (Pascal-VOC, MS-COCO) and real-world (NUS-WIDE) noisy datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

GeRaF is the first method to use neural implicit learning for near-range 3D geometry reconstruction from radio frequency (RF) signals. Unlike RGB or LiDAR-based methods, RF sensing can see through occlusion but suffers from low resolution and noise due to its lens-less imaging nature. While lenses in RGB imaging constrain sampling to 1D rays, RF signals propagate through the entire space, introducing significant noise and leading to cubic complexity in volumetric rendering. Moreover, RF signals interact with surfaces via specular reflections requiring fundamentally different modeling. To address these challenges, GeRaF (1) introduces filter-based rendering to suppress irrelevant signals, (2) implements a physics-based RF volumetric rendering pipeline, and (3) proposes a novel lens-less sampling and lens-less alpha blending strategy that makes full-space sampling feasible during training. By learning signed distance functions, reflectiveness, and signal power through MLPs and trainable parameters, GeRaF takes the first step towards reconstructing millimeter-level geometry from RF signals in real-world settings.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning in mixed-motive settings presents a fundamental challenge: agents must balance individual interests with collective goals, which are neither fully aligned nor strictly opposed. To address this, reward restructuring methods such as gifting and intrinsic motivation have been proposed. However, these approaches primarily focus on promoting cooperation by managing the trade-off between individual and collective returns, without explicitly addressing fairness with respect to agents’ task-specific rewards. In this paper, we propose an adaptive conflict-aware gradient adjustment method that promotes cooperation while ensuring fairness in individual rewards. The proposed method dynamically balances policy gradients derived from individual and collective objectives in situations where the two objectives are in conflict. By explicitly resolving such conflicts, our method improves collective performance while preserving fairness across agents. We provide theoretical results that guarantee monotonic non-decreasing improvement in both the collective and individual objectives and ensure fairness. Empirical results in sequential social dilemma environments demonstrate that our approach outperforms baselines in terms of social welfare, while maintaining fairness.

Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems are increasingly adopted for complex language processing tasks that require communication and coordination among agents. However, these systems often suffer substantial overhead from repeated reprocessing of overlapping contexts across agents. In typical pipelines, once an agent receives a message from its predecessor, the full context-including prior turns-must be reprocessed from scratch, leading to inefficient processing. While key-value (KV) caching is an effective solution for avoiding redundant computation in single-agent settings where prefixes remain unchanged, it cannot be directly reused in multi-agent scenarios due to diverging prefixes introduced by agent-specific context extensions. We identify that the core challenge lies in the offset variance of KV-caches across agents. To address this, we propose **KVCOMM**, a training-free framework that enables efficient prefilling in multi-agent inference by reusing KV-caches and aligning cache offsets of overlapping contexts under diverse prefix contexts. KVCOMM estimates and adjusts KV-caches for shared content by referencing a pool of cached examples—termed *anchors*—that store observed cache deviations under varying prefixes. The anchor pool is maintained and updated online, allowing dynamic adaptation to distinct user requests and context structures. KVCOMM achieves over 70% reuse rate across diverse multi- agent workloads, including retrieval-augmented generation, math reasoning, and collaborative coding tasks, all without quality degradation. Particularly, when each fully-connected agent receives 1K input tokens with 512 prefix tokens and 512 output tokens under a five-agent setting, KVCOMM achieves up to 7.8× speedup compared to the standard prefill pipeline, reducing TTFT from ∼430ms to ∼55ms. Code is available at https://github.com/FastMAS/KVCOMM.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities for social interaction and are increasingly being deployed in situations where they might engage with both human and artificial agents. These interactions represent a critical frontier for LLM-based agents, yet existing evaluation methods fail to measure how well these capabilities generalize to novel social situations. In this paper, we introduce a method for evaluating the ability of LLM-based agents to cooperate in zero-shot, mixed-motive environments using Concordia, a natural language multi-agent simulation environment. Our method measures general cooperative intelligence by testing an agent's ability to identify and exploit opportunities for mutual gain across diverse partners and contexts. We present empirical results from the NeurIPS 2024 Concordia Contest, where agents were evaluated on their ability to achieve mutual gains across a suite of diverse scenarios ranging from negotiation to collective action problems. Our findings reveal significant gaps between current agent capabilities and the robust generalization required for reliable cooperation, particularly in scenarios demanding persuasion and norm enforcement.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly bring deployed in agentic settings where they act as collaborators with humans. Therefore, it is increasingly important to be able to evaluate their abilities to collaborate effectively in multi-turn, multi-party tasks. In this paper, we build on the AI alignment and “safe interruptability” literature to offer novel theoretical insights on collaborative behavior between LLM-driven *collaborator agents* and an *intervention agent*. Our goal is to learn an ideal “partner-aware” collaborator that increases the group’s common-ground (CG)—alignment on task-relevant propositions—by intelligently collecting information provided in *interventions* by a partner agent.We show how LLM agents trained using standard RLHF and related approaches are naturally inclined to ignore possibly well-meaning interventions, which makes increasing group common ground non-trivial in this setting. We employ a two-player Modified-Action MDP to examine this suboptimal behavior of standard AI agents, and propose **Interruptible Collaborative Roleplayer (ICR)**—a novel “partner-aware” learning algorithm to train CG-optimal collaborators. Experiments on multiple collaborative task environments show that ICR, on average, is more capable of promoting successful CG convergence and exploring more diverse solutions in such tasks.

While large language models (LLMs) show considerable promise across various fields, they have notable limitations in handling multi-document question answering (Multi-doc QA) tasks. The first challenge is long-range dependency modeling, where LLMs struggle to focus on key information in long texts, which weakens important semantic connections. Second, most LLMs suffer from the ''lost-in-the-middle'' issue, where they have difficulty processing information in the middle of long inputs. Current solutions either truncate global dependencies or demand costly finetuning, ultimately lacking a universal and simple solution for these challenges. To resolve these limitations, we propose Dual-Stage Adaptive Sharpening (DSAS) containing two modules. (i) The Contextual Gate Weighting (CGW) module alleviates ''lost-in-the-middle'' by assessing paragraph relevance through layer-wise attention tracking and position-aware weighting. (ii) The Reciprocal Attention Suppression (RAS) module enhances focus on critical paragraphs by suppressing information exchange between key and irrelevant texts, thus mitigating the limitations in long-range dependency modeling. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate DSAS's efficacy across mainstream LLMs (Llama, Qwen, Mistral, and Deepseek), with an average F1-score improvement of 4.2% in Multi-doc QA tasks on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct. Ablation studies confirm the essential contributions of both the CGW and RAS modules. In addition, detailed discussions in the Appendix further validate the robustness and scalability of DSAS.

Multi-view clustering integrates the consistency and complementarity of different views to achieve unsupervised data grouping. Existing multi-view clustering methods primarily confront two challenges: i) they generally perform feature extraction in the feature domain, which is sensitive to noise and may neglect cluster-specific information that is indistinguishable in the original space; ii) current dynamic fusion methods adopt static strategies to learn weights, lacking capability to adjust strategies adaptively under complex scenarios according to variations in data distribution and view quality. To address these issues, we propose a large language model assisted dynamic agent for multi-view clustering (LLM-DAMVC), a novel framework that recasts multi-view clustering as a dynamic decision-making problem orchestrated by a large language model. Specifically, each view is equipped with complementary agents dedicated to feature extraction. A dual-domain contrastive module is introduced to optimize feature consistency and enhance cluster separability in both the feature domain and frequency domain. Additionally, an LLM-assisted view fusion mechanism provides a flexible fusion weight learning strategy that can be adaptively applied to complex scenarios and significantly different views. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.

Evolutionary multi-view classification (EMVC) methods have gained wide recognition due to their adaptive mechanisms. Fitness evaluation (FE), which aims to calculate the classification performance of each individual in the population and provide reliable performance ranking for subsequent operations, is a core step in such methods. Its accuracy directly determines the correctness of the evolutionary direction. However, when FE fails to correctly reflect the superiority-inferiority relationship among individuals, it will lead to confusion in individual performance ranking, which in turn misleads the evolutionary direction and results in trapping into local optima. This paper is the first to identify the aforementioned issue in the field of EMVC and call it as fitness evaluation bias (FEB). FEB may be caused by a variety of factors, and this paper approaches the issue from the perspective of view information content: existing methods generally adopt joint training strategies, which restrict the exploration of key information in views with low information content. This makes it difficult for multi-view model (MVM) to achieve optimal performance during convergence, which in turn leads to FE failing to accurately reflect individual performance rankings and ultimately triggering FEB. To address this issue, we propose an evolutionary multi-view classification via eliminating individual fitness bias (EFB-EMVC) method, which alleviates the FEB issue by introducing evolutionary navigators for each MVM, thereby providing more accurate individual ranking. Experimental results fully verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in alleviating the FEB problem, and the EMVC method equipped with this strategy exhibits more superior performance compared with the original EMVC method. (The code is available at https://github.com/LiShuailzn/Neurips-2025-EFB-EMVC)

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), as a thriving field, explores how multiple agents independently make decisions in a shared dynamic environment. Due to environmental uncertainties, policies in MARL must remain robust to tackle the sim-to-real gap. We focus on robust two-player zero-sum Markov games (TZMGs) in offline settings, specifically on tabular robust TZMGs (RTZMGs). We propose a model-based algorithm (*RTZ-VI-LCB*) for offline RTZMGs, which is optimistic robust value iteration combined with a data-driven Bernstein-style penalty term for robust value estimation. By accounting for distribution shifts in the historical dataset, the proposed algorithm establishes near-optimal sample complexity guarantees under partial coverage and environmental uncertainty. An information-theoretic lower bound is developed to confirm the tightness of our algorithm's sample complexity, which is optimal regarding both state and action spaces. To the best of our knowledge, RTZ-VI-LCB is the first to attain this optimality, sets a new benchmark for offline RTZMGs, and is validated experimentally.

The exponential growth of data-driven systems and AI technologies has intensified the demand for high-quality web-sourced datasets. While existing datasets have proven valuable, conventional web data collection approaches face significant limitations in terms of human effort and scalability. Current data collecting solutions fall into two categories: wrapper-based methods that struggle with adaptability and reproducibility, and large language model (LLM)-based approaches that incur substantial computational and financial costs. To address these challenges, we propose AutoData, a novel multi-agent system for Automated web Data collection, that requires minimal human intervention, i.e., only necessitating a natural language instruction specifying the desired dataset. In addition, AutoData is designed for a robust multi-agent architecture, featuring a novel oriented message hypergraph coordinated by a central task manager, to efficiently organize agents across research and development squads. Besides, we introduce a novel hypergraph cache system to advance the multi-agent collaboration process that enables efficient automated data collection and mitigates the token cost issues prevalent in existing LLM-based systems. Moreover, we introduce Instruct2DS, a new benchmark dataset supporting live data collection from web sources across three domains: academic, finance, and sports. Comprehensive evaluations over Instruct2DS and three existing benchmark datasets demonstrate AutoData's superior performance compared to baseline methods. Case studies on challenging tasks such as picture book collection and paper extraction from surveys further validate its applicability.

Moral judgment is integral to large language models' (LLMs) social reasoning. As multi-agent systems gain prominence, it becomes crucial to understand how LLMs function when collaborating compared to operating as individual agents. In human moral judgment, group deliberation leads to a Utilitarian Boost: a tendency to endorse norm violations that inflict harm but maximize benefits for the greatest number of people. We study whether a similar dynamic emerges in multi-agent LLM systems. We test six models on well-established sets of moral dilemmas across two conditions: (1) Solo, where models reason independently, and (2) Group, where they engage in multi-turn discussions in pairs or triads. In personal dilemmas, where agents decide whether to directly harm an individual for the benefit of others, all models rated moral violations as more acceptable when part of a group, demonstrating a Utilitarian Boost similar to that observed in humans. However, the mechanism for the boost in LLMs differed: While humans in groups become more utilitarian due to heightened sensitivity to decision outcomes, LLM groups showed diverse profiles, for example, reduced sensitivity to norms or enhanced impartiality. We report model differences in when and how strongly the boost manifests. We also discuss prompt and agent compositions that enhance or mitigate the effect. We end with a discussion of the implications for AI alignment, multi-agent design, and artificial moral reasoning. Code available at: https://github.com/baltaci-r/MoralAgents

Accurate temporal prediction is the bridge between comprehensive scene understanding and embodied artificial intelligence. However, predicting multiple fine-grained states of scene at multiple temporal scales is difficult for vision-language models. We formalize the Multi‐Scale Temporal Prediction (MSTP) task in general and surgical scene by decomposing multi‐scale into two orthogonal dimensions: the temporal scale, forecasting states of human and surgery at varying look‐ahead intervals, and the state scale, modeling a hierarchy of states in general and surgical scene. For instance in general scene, states of contacting relationship are finer-grained than states of spatial relationship. For instance in surgical scene, medium‐level steps are finer‐grained than high‐level phases yet remain constrained by their encompassing phase. To support this unified task, we introduce the first MSTP Benchmark, featuring synchronized annotations across multiple state scales and temporal scales. We further propose a novel method, Incremental Generation and Multi‐agent Collaboration (IG-MC), which integrates two key innovations. Firstly, we propose an plug-and-play incremental generation to keep high-quality temporal prediction that continuously synthesizes up-to-date visual previews at expanding temporal scales to inform multiple decision-making agents, ensuring decision content and generated visuals remain synchronized and preventing performance degradation as look‐ahead intervals lengthen. Secondly, we propose a decision‐driven multi‐agent collaboration framework for multiple states prediction, comprising generation, initiation, and multi‐state assessment agents that dynamically triggers and evaluates prediction cycles to balance global coherence and local fidelity. Extensive experiments on the MSTP Benchmark in general and surgical scene show that IG‐MC is a generalizable plug-and-play method for MSTP, demonstrating the effectiveness of incremental generation and the stability of decision‐driven multi‐agent collaboration.

Consistent pose‐driven character animation has achieved remarkable progress in single‐character scenarios. However, extending these advances to multi‐character settings is non‐trivial, especially when position swap is involved. Beyond mere scaling, the core challenge lies in enforcing correct Identity Correspondence (IC) between characters in reference and generated frames. To address this, we introduce EverybodyDance, a systematic solution targeting IC correctness in multi-character animation. EverybodyDance is built around the **Identity Matching Graph (IMG)**, which models characters in the generated and reference frames as two node sets in a weighted complete bipartite graph. Edge weights, computed via our proposed Mask–Query Attention (MQA), quantify the affinity between each pair of characters. Our key insight is to formalize IC correctness as a graph structural metric and to optimize it during training. We also propose a series of targeted strategies tailored for multi-character animation, including identity-embedded guidance, a multi-scale matching strategy, and pre-classified sampling, which work synergistically. Finally, to evaluate IC performance, we curate the **Identity Correspondence Evaluation** benchmark, dedicated to multi‐character IC correctness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EverybodyDance substantially outperforms state‐of‐the‐art baselines in both IC and visual fidelity.

Adaptive learning, which requires the in-depth understanding of students' learning processes and rational planning of learning resources, plays a crucial role in intelligent education. However, how to effectively model these two processes and seamlessly integrate them poses significant implementation challenges for adaptive learning. As core learning resources, exercises have the potential to diagnose students' knowledge states during the learning processes and provide personalized learning recommendations to strengthen students' knowledge, thereby serving as a bridge to boost student-oriented adaptive learning. Therefore, we introduce a novel task called Knowledge-aware Exercise Generative Recommendation (KEGR). It aims to dynamically infer students' knowledge states from their past exercise responses and customizably generate new exercises. To achieve KEGR, we propose an adaptive multi-agent cooperation framework, called ExeGen, inspired by the excellent reasoning and generative capabilities of LLM-based AI agents. Specifically, ExeGen coordinates four specialized agents for supervision, knowledge state perception, exercise generation, and quality refinement through an adaptive loop workflow pipeline. More importantly, we devise two enhancement mechanisms in ExeGen: 1) A human-simulated knowledge perception mechanism mimics students' cognitive processes and generates interpretable knowledge state descriptions via demonstration-based In-Context Learning (ICL). In this mechanism, a dual-matching strategy is further designed to retrieve highly relevant demonstrations for reliable ICL reasoning. 2) An exercise generation-adversarial mechanism collaboratively refines exercise generation leveraging a group of quality evaluation expert agents via iterative adversarial feedback. Finally, a comprehensive evaluation protocol is carefully designed to assess ExeGen. Extensive experiments on real-world educational datasets and a practical deployment in college education demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of ExeGen. The code is available at https://github.com/dsz532/exeGen.

Non-stationary multi-armed bandits (nsMAB) enable agents to adapt to changing environments by incorporating mechanisms to detect and respond to shifts in reward distributions, making them well-suited for dynamic settings. However, existing approaches typically assume that reward feedback is available at every round—an assumption that overlooks many real-world scenarios where feedback is limited. In this paper, we take a significant step forward by introducing a new model of *constrained feedback in non-stationary multi-armed bandits* (ConFee-nsMAB), where the availability of reward feedback is restricted. We propose the first prior-free algorithm—that is, one that does not require prior knowledge of the degree of non-stationarity—that achieves near-optimal dynamic regret in this setting. Specifically, our algorithm attains a dynamic regret of $\tilde {\mathcal{O}}({K^{1/3} V_T^{1/3} T }/{ B^{1/3}})$, where $T$ is the number of rounds, $K$ is the number of arms, $B$ is the query budget, and $V_T$ is the variation budget capturing the degree of non-stationarity.

The rapid progress of navigation, manipulation, and vision models has made mobile manipulators capable in many specialized tasks. However, the open-world mobile manipulation (OWMM) task remains a challenge due to the need for generalization to open-ended instructions and environments, as well as the systematic complexity to integrate high-level decision making with low-level robot control based on both global scene understanding and current agent state. To address this complexity, we propose a novel multi-modal agent architecture that maintains multi-view scene frames and agent states for decision-making and controls the robot by function calling. A second challenge is the hallucination from domain shift. To enhance the agent performance, we further introduce an agentic data synthesis pipeline for the OWMM task to adapt the VLM model to our task domain with instruction fine-tuning. We highlight our fine-tuned OWMM-VLM as the first dedicated foundation model for mobile manipulators with global scene understanding, robot state tracking, and multi-modal action generation in a unified model. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our model achieves SOTA performance compared to other foundation models including GPT-4o and strong zero-shot generalization in real world. The project page is at https://hhyhrhy.github.io/owmm-agent-project.

Spatio-temporal prediction plays a crucial role in intelligent transportation, weather forecasting, and urban planning. While integrating multi-modal data has shown potential for enhancing prediction accuracy, key challenges persist: (i) inadequate fusion of multi-modal information, (ii) confounding factors that obscure causal relations, and (iii) high computational complexity of prediction models. To address these challenges, we propose E$^2$-CSTP, an Effective and Efficient Causal multi-modal Spatio-Temporal Prediction framework. E$^2$-CSTP leverages cross-modal attention and gating mechanisms to effectively integrate multi-modal data. Building on this, we design a dual-branch causal inference approach: the primary branch focuses on spatio-temporal prediction, while the auxiliary branch mitigates bias by modeling additional modalities and applying causal interventions to uncover true causal dependencies. To improve model efficiency, we integrate GCN with the Mamba architecture for accelerated spatio-temporal encoding. Extensive experiments on 4 real-world datasets show that E$^2$-CSTP significantly outperforms 9 state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 9.66% improvements in accuracy as well as 17.37%-56.11% reductions in computational overhead.

This paper studies the *optimistic* variant of Fictitious Play for learning in two-player zero-sum games. While it is known that Optimistic FTRL -- a *regularized* algorithm with a bounded stepsize parameter -- obtains constant regret in this setting, we show for the first time that similar, optimal rates are also achievable *without* regularization: we prove for two-strategy games that Optimistic Fictitious Play (using *any* tiebreaking rule) obtains only *constant regret*, providing surprising new evidence on the ability of *non*-no-regret algorithms for fast learning in games. Our proof technique leverages a geometric view of Optimistic Fictitious Play in the dual space of payoff vectors, where we show a certain energy function of the iterates remains bounded over time. Additionally, we also prove a regret *lower bound* of $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ for *Alternating* Fictitious Play. In the unregularized regime, this separates the ability of optimism and alternation in achieving $o(\sqrt{T})$ regret.