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SubscribeComputational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction
The fields of Origin of Life and Artificial Life both question what life is and how it emerges from a distinct set of "pre-life" dynamics. One common feature of most substrates where life emerges is a marked shift in dynamics when self-replication appears. While there are some hypotheses regarding how self-replicators arose in nature, we know very little about the general dynamics, computational principles, and necessary conditions for self-replicators to emerge. This is especially true on "computational substrates" where interactions involve logical, mathematical, or programming rules. In this paper we take a step towards understanding how self-replicators arise by studying several computational substrates based on various simple programming languages and machine instruction sets. We show that when random, non self-replicating programs are placed in an environment lacking any explicit fitness landscape, self-replicators tend to arise. We demonstrate how this occurs due to random interactions and self-modification, and can happen with and without background random mutations. We also show how increasingly complex dynamics continue to emerge following the rise of self-replicators. Finally, we show a counterexample of a minimalistic programming language where self-replicators are possible, but so far have not been observed to arise.
How quantum and evolutionary algorithms can help each other: two examples
We investigate the potential of bio-inspired evolutionary algorithms for designing quantum circuits with specific goals, focusing on two particular tasks. The first one is motivated by the ideas of Artificial Life that are used to reproduce stochastic cellular automata with given rules. We test the robustness of quantum implementations of the cellular automata for different numbers of quantum gates The second task deals with the sampling of quantum circuits that generate highly entangled quantum states, which constitute an important resource for quantum computing. In particular, an evolutionary algorithm is employed to optimize circuits with respect to a fitness function defined with the Mayer-Wallach entanglement measure. We demonstrate that, by balancing the mutation rate between exploration and exploitation, we can find entangling quantum circuits for up to five qubits. We also discuss the trade-off between the number of gates in quantum circuits and the computational costs of finding the gate arrangements leading to a strongly entangled state. Our findings provide additional insight into the trade-off between the complexity of a circuit and its performance, which is an important factor in the design of quantum circuits.
JaxLife: An Open-Ended Agentic Simulator
Human intelligence emerged through the process of natural selection and evolution on Earth. We investigate what it would take to re-create this process in silico. While past work has often focused on low-level processes (such as simulating physics or chemistry), we instead take a more targeted approach, aiming to evolve agents that can accumulate open-ended culture and technologies across generations. Towards this, we present JaxLife: an artificial life simulator in which embodied agents, parameterized by deep neural networks, must learn to survive in an expressive world containing programmable systems. First, we describe the environment and show that it can facilitate meaningful Turing-complete computation. We then analyze the evolved emergent agents' behavior, such as rudimentary communication protocols, agriculture, and tool use. Finally, we investigate how complexity scales with the amount of compute used. We believe JaxLife takes a step towards studying evolved behavior in more open-ended simulations. Our code is available at https://github.com/luchris429/JaxLife
Predicting the fatigue life of asphalt concrete using neural networks
Asphalt concrete's (AC) durability and maintenance demands are strongly influenced by its fatigue life. Traditional methods for determining this characteristic are both resource-intensive and time-consuming. This study employs artificial neural networks (ANNs) to predict AC fatigue life, focusing on the impact of strain level, binder content, and air-void content. Leveraging a substantial dataset, we tailored our models to effectively handle the wide range of fatigue life data, typically represented on a logarithmic scale. The mean square logarithmic error was utilized as the loss function to enhance prediction accuracy across all levels of fatigue life. Through comparative analysis of various hyperparameters, we developed a machine-learning model that captures the complex relationships within the data. Our findings demonstrate that higher binder content significantly enhances fatigue life, while the influence of air-void content is more variable, depending on binder levels. Most importantly, this study provides insights into the intricacies of using ANNs for modeling, showcasing their potential utility with larger datasets. The codes developed and the data used in this study are provided as open source on a GitHub repository, with a link included in the paper for full access.
The Life Cycle of Knowledge in Big Language Models: A Survey
Knowledge plays a critical role in artificial intelligence. Recently, the extensive success of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has raised significant attention about how knowledge can be acquired, maintained, updated and used by language models. Despite the enormous amount of related studies, there still lacks a unified view of how knowledge circulates within language models throughout the learning, tuning, and application processes, which may prevent us from further understanding the connections between current progress or realizing existing limitations. In this survey, we revisit PLMs as knowledge-based systems by dividing the life circle of knowledge in PLMs into five critical periods, and investigating how knowledge circulates when it is built, maintained and used. To this end, we systematically review existing studies of each period of the knowledge life cycle, summarize the main challenges and current limitations, and discuss future directions.
System Design for an Integrated Lifelong Reinforcement Learning Agent for Real-Time Strategy Games
As Artificial and Robotic Systems are increasingly deployed and relied upon for real-world applications, it is important that they exhibit the ability to continually learn and adapt in dynamically-changing environments, becoming Lifelong Learning Machines. Continual/lifelong learning (LL) involves minimizing catastrophic forgetting of old tasks while maximizing a model's capability to learn new tasks. This paper addresses the challenging lifelong reinforcement learning (L2RL) setting. Pushing the state-of-the-art forward in L2RL and making L2RL useful for practical applications requires more than developing individual L2RL algorithms; it requires making progress at the systems-level, especially research into the non-trivial problem of how to integrate multiple L2RL algorithms into a common framework. In this paper, we introduce the Lifelong Reinforcement Learning Components Framework (L2RLCF), which standardizes L2RL systems and assimilates different continual learning components (each addressing different aspects of the lifelong learning problem) into a unified system. As an instantiation of L2RLCF, we develop a standard API allowing easy integration of novel lifelong learning components. We describe a case study that demonstrates how multiple independently-developed LL components can be integrated into a single realized system. We also introduce an evaluation environment in order to measure the effect of combining various system components. Our evaluation environment employs different LL scenarios (sequences of tasks) consisting of Starcraft-2 minigames and allows for the fair, comprehensive, and quantitative comparison of different combinations of components within a challenging common evaluation environment.
Artificial Generational Intelligence: Cultural Accumulation in Reinforcement Learning
Cultural accumulation drives the open-ended and diverse progress in capabilities spanning human history. It builds an expanding body of knowledge and skills by combining individual exploration with inter-generational information transmission. Despite its widespread success among humans, the capacity for artificial learning agents to accumulate culture remains under-explored. In particular, approaches to reinforcement learning typically strive for improvements over only a single lifetime. Generational algorithms that do exist fail to capture the open-ended, emergent nature of cultural accumulation, which allows individuals to trade-off innovation and imitation. Building on the previously demonstrated ability for reinforcement learning agents to perform social learning, we find that training setups which balance this with independent learning give rise to cultural accumulation. These accumulating agents outperform those trained for a single lifetime with the same cumulative experience. We explore this accumulation by constructing two models under two distinct notions of a generation: episodic generations, in which accumulation occurs via in-context learning and train-time generations, in which accumulation occurs via in-weights learning. In-context and in-weights cultural accumulation can be interpreted as analogous to knowledge and skill accumulation, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to present general models that achieve emergent cultural accumulation in reinforcement learning, opening up new avenues towards more open-ended learning systems, as well as presenting new opportunities for modelling human culture.
Geometric Signatures of Compositionality Across a Language Model's Lifetime
Compositionality, the notion that the meaning of an expression is constructed from the meaning of its parts and syntactic rules, permits the infinite productivity of human language. For the first time, artificial language models (LMs) are able to match human performance in a number of compositional generalization tasks. However, much remains to be understood about the representational mechanisms underlying these abilities. We take a high-level geometric approach to this problem by relating the degree of compositionality in a dataset to the intrinsic dimensionality of its representations under an LM, a measure of feature complexity. We find not only that the degree of dataset compositionality is reflected in representations' intrinsic dimensionality, but that the relationship between compositionality and geometric complexity arises due to learned linguistic features over training. Finally, our analyses reveal a striking contrast between linear and nonlinear dimensionality, showing that they respectively encode formal and semantic aspects of linguistic composition.
Fake Artificial Intelligence Generated Contents (FAIGC): A Survey of Theories, Detection Methods, and Opportunities
In recent years, generative artificial intelligence models, represented by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Diffusion Models (DMs), have revolutionized content production methods. These artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) have become deeply embedded in various aspects of daily life and work. However, these technologies have also led to the emergence of Fake Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (FAIGC), posing new challenges in distinguishing genuine information. It is crucial to recognize that AIGC technology is akin to a double-edged sword; its potent generative capabilities, while beneficial, also pose risks for the creation and dissemination of FAIGC. In this survey, We propose a new taxonomy that provides a more comprehensive breakdown of the space of FAIGC methods today. Next, we explore the modalities and generative technologies of FAIGC. We introduce FAIGC detection methods and summarize the related benchmark from various perspectives. Finally, we discuss outstanding challenges and promising areas for future research.
Human-Art: A Versatile Human-Centric Dataset Bridging Natural and Artificial Scenes
Humans have long been recorded in a variety of forms since antiquity. For example, sculptures and paintings were the primary media for depicting human beings before the invention of cameras. However, most current human-centric computer vision tasks like human pose estimation and human image generation focus exclusively on natural images in the real world. Artificial humans, such as those in sculptures, paintings, and cartoons, are commonly neglected, making existing models fail in these scenarios. As an abstraction of life, art incorporates humans in both natural and artificial scenes. We take advantage of it and introduce the Human-Art dataset to bridge related tasks in natural and artificial scenarios. Specifically, Human-Art contains 50k high-quality images with over 123k person instances from 5 natural and 15 artificial scenarios, which are annotated with bounding boxes, keypoints, self-contact points, and text information for humans represented in both 2D and 3D. It is, therefore, comprehensive and versatile for various downstream tasks. We also provide a rich set of baseline results and detailed analyses for related tasks, including human detection, 2D and 3D human pose estimation, image generation, and motion transfer. As a challenging dataset, we hope Human-Art can provide insights for relevant research and open up new research questions.
Continual Lifelong Learning with Neural Networks: A Review
Humans and animals have the ability to continually acquire, fine-tune, and transfer knowledge and skills throughout their lifespan. This ability, referred to as lifelong learning, is mediated by a rich set of neurocognitive mechanisms that together contribute to the development and specialization of our sensorimotor skills as well as to long-term memory consolidation and retrieval. Consequently, lifelong learning capabilities are crucial for autonomous agents interacting in the real world and processing continuous streams of information. However, lifelong learning remains a long-standing challenge for machine learning and neural network models since the continual acquisition of incrementally available information from non-stationary data distributions generally leads to catastrophic forgetting or interference. This limitation represents a major drawback for state-of-the-art deep neural network models that typically learn representations from stationary batches of training data, thus without accounting for situations in which information becomes incrementally available over time. In this review, we critically summarize the main challenges linked to lifelong learning for artificial learning systems and compare existing neural network approaches that alleviate, to different extents, catastrophic forgetting. We discuss well-established and emerging research motivated by lifelong learning factors in biological systems such as structural plasticity, memory replay, curriculum and transfer learning, intrinsic motivation, and multisensory integration.
Life, uh, Finds a Way: Systematic Neural Search
We tackle the challenge of rapidly adapting an agent's behavior to solve spatiotemporally continuous problems in novel settings. Animals exhibit extraordinary abilities to adapt to new contexts, a capacity unmatched by artificial systems. Instead of focusing on generalization through deep reinforcement learning, we propose viewing behavior as the physical manifestation of a search procedure, where robust problem-solving emerges from an exhaustive search across all possible behaviors. Surprisingly, this can be done efficiently using online modification of a cognitive graph that guides action, challenging the predominant view that exhaustive search in continuous spaces is impractical. We describe an algorithm that implicitly enumerates behaviors by regulating the tight feedback loop between execution of behaviors and mutation of the graph, and provide a neural implementation based on Hebbian learning and a novel high-dimensional harmonic representation inspired by entorhinal cortex. By framing behavior as search, we provide a mathematically simple and biologically plausible model for real-time behavioral adaptation, successfully solving a variety of continuous state-space navigation problems. This framework not only offers a flexible neural substrate for other applications but also presents a powerful paradigm for understanding adaptive behavior. Our results suggest potential advancements in developmental learning and unsupervised skill acquisition, paving the way for autonomous robots to master complex skills in data-sparse environments demanding flexibility.
TinyML Design Contest for Life-Threatening Ventricular Arrhythmia Detection
The first ACM/IEEE TinyML Design Contest (TDC) held at the 41st International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) in 2022 is a challenging, multi-month, research and development competition. TDC'22 focuses on real-world medical problems that require the innovation and implementation of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) algorithms on implantable devices. The challenge problem of TDC'22 is to develop a novel AI/ML-based real-time detection algorithm for life-threatening ventricular arrhythmia over low-power microcontrollers utilized in Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillators (ICDs). The dataset contains more than 38,000 5-second intracardiac electrograms (IEGMs) segments over 8 different types of rhythm from 90 subjects. The dedicated hardware platform is NUCLEO-L432KC manufactured by STMicroelectronics. TDC'22, which is open to multi-person teams world-wide, attracted more than 150 teams from over 50 organizations. This paper first presents the medical problem, dataset, and evaluation procedure in detail. It further demonstrates and discusses the designs developed by the leading teams as well as representative results. This paper concludes with the direction of improvement for the future TinyML design for health monitoring applications.
Analysis and Applications of Deep Learning with Finite Samples in Full Life-Cycle Intelligence of Nuclear Power Generation
The advent of Industry 4.0 has precipitated the incorporation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods within industrial contexts, aiming to realize intelligent manufacturing, operation as well as maintenance, also known as industrial intelligence. However, intricate industrial milieus, particularly those relating to energy exploration and production, frequently encompass data characterized by long-tailed class distribution, sample imbalance, and domain shift. These attributes pose noteworthy challenges to data-centric Deep Learning (DL) techniques, crucial for the realization of industrial intelligence. The present study centers on the intricate and distinctive industrial scenarios of Nuclear Power Generation (NPG), meticulously scrutinizing the application of DL techniques under the constraints of finite data samples. Initially, the paper expounds on potential employment scenarios for AI across the full life-cycle of NPG. Subsequently, we delve into an evaluative exposition of DL's advancement, grounded in the finite sample perspective. This encompasses aspects such as small-sample learning, few-shot learning, zero-shot learning, and open-set recognition, also referring to the unique data characteristics of NPG. The paper then proceeds to present two specific case studies. The first revolves around the automatic recognition of zirconium alloy metallography, while the second pertains to open-set recognition for signal diagnosis of machinery sensors. These cases, spanning the entirety of NPG's life-cycle, are accompanied by constructive outcomes and insightful deliberations. By exploring and applying DL methodologies within the constraints of finite sample availability, this paper not only furnishes a robust technical foundation but also introduces a fresh perspective toward the secure and efficient advancement and exploitation of this advanced energy source.
Connecting the Dots in Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence: From AI Principles, Ethics, and Key Requirements to Responsible AI Systems and Regulation
Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) is based on seven technical requirements sustained over three main pillars that should be met throughout the system's entire life cycle: it should be (1) lawful, (2) ethical, and (3) robust, both from a technical and a social perspective. However, attaining truly trustworthy AI concerns a wider vision that comprises the trustworthiness of all processes and actors that are part of the system's life cycle, and considers previous aspects from different lenses. A more holistic vision contemplates four essential axes: the global principles for ethical use and development of AI-based systems, a philosophical take on AI ethics, a risk-based approach to AI regulation, and the mentioned pillars and requirements. The seven requirements (human agency and oversight; robustness and safety; privacy and data governance; transparency; diversity, non-discrimination and fairness; societal and environmental wellbeing; and accountability) are analyzed from a triple perspective: What each requirement for trustworthy AI is, Why it is needed, and How each requirement can be implemented in practice. On the other hand, a practical approach to implement trustworthy AI systems allows defining the concept of responsibility of AI-based systems facing the law, through a given auditing process. Therefore, a responsible AI system is the resulting notion we introduce in this work, and a concept of utmost necessity that can be realized through auditing processes, subject to the challenges posed by the use of regulatory sandboxes. Our multidisciplinary vision of trustworthy AI culminates in a debate on the diverging views published lately about the future of AI. Our reflections in this matter conclude that regulation is a key for reaching a consensus among these views, and that trustworthy and responsible AI systems will be crucial for the present and future of our society.
The secret life of matrix factorizations: how matrix decompositions reveal and keep secrets of linear equations and what we can do about it
This paper explores the relationship between matrix factorizations and linear matrix equations. It shows that every matrix factorization defines two hidden projectors, one for the column space and one for the row space of a matrix, and how to calculate them. The projectors can be applied to solve linear matrix equations, generate low-rank approximations, or design randomized matrix algorithms. But also, as demonstrated, they can be applied in cryptography to encrypt and decrypt messages. The paper discusses some of the security implications of this application and leaves some questions open for further investigation. The basic concepts are illustrated with source code listings. Finally, this work shares some personal reflections on the meaning and importance of understanding in the time of the artificial intelligence revolution.
Relative Likelihood of Success in the Searches for Primitive versus Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life
We estimate the relative likelihood of success in the searches for primitive versus intelligent life on other planets. Taking into account the larger search volume for detectable artificial electromagnetic signals, we conclude that both searches should be performed concurrently, albeit with significantly more funding dedicated to primitive life. Based on the current federal funding allocated to the search for biosignatures, our analysis suggests that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) may merit a federal funding level of at least 10$ million per year, assuming that the average lifetime of technological species exceeds a millennium.
Data-centric Artificial Intelligence: A Survey
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making a profound impact in almost every domain. A vital enabler of its great success is the availability of abundant and high-quality data for building machine learning models. Recently, the role of data in AI has been significantly magnified, giving rise to the emerging concept of data-centric AI. The attention of researchers and practitioners has gradually shifted from advancing model design to enhancing the quality and quantity of the data. In this survey, we discuss the necessity of data-centric AI, followed by a holistic view of three general data-centric goals (training data development, inference data development, and data maintenance) and the representative methods. We also organize the existing literature from automation and collaboration perspectives, discuss the challenges, and tabulate the benchmarks for various tasks. We believe this is the first comprehensive survey that provides a global view of a spectrum of tasks across various stages of the data lifecycle. We hope it can help the readers efficiently grasp a broad picture of this field, and equip them with the techniques and further research ideas to systematically engineer data for building AI systems. A companion list of data-centric AI resources will be regularly updated on https://github.com/daochenzha/data-centric-AI
Lifelong Learning of Large Language Model based Agents: A Roadmap
Lifelong learning, also known as continual or incremental learning, is a crucial component for advancing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by enabling systems to continuously adapt in dynamic environments. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language processing, existing LLM agents are typically designed for static systems and lack the ability to adapt over time in response to new challenges. This survey is the first to systematically summarize the potential techniques for incorporating lifelong learning into LLM-based agents. We categorize the core components of these agents into three modules: the perception module for multimodal input integration, the memory module for storing and retrieving evolving knowledge, and the action module for grounded interactions with the dynamic environment. We highlight how these pillars collectively enable continuous adaptation, mitigate catastrophic forgetting, and improve long-term performance. This survey provides a roadmap for researchers and practitioners working to develop lifelong learning capabilities in LLM agents, offering insights into emerging trends, evaluation metrics, and application scenarios. Relevant literature and resources are available at this url{https://github.com/qianlima-lab/awesome-lifelong-llm-agent}.
Computing in the Life Sciences: From Early Algorithms to Modern AI
Computing in the life sciences has undergone a transformative evolution, from early computational models in the 1950s to the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) seen today. This paper highlights key milestones and technological advancements through the historical development of computing in the life sciences. The discussion includes the inception of computational models for biological processes, the advent of bioinformatics tools, and the integration of AI/ML in modern life sciences research. Attention is given to AI-enabled tools used in the life sciences, such as scientific large language models and bio-AI tools, examining their capabilities, limitations, and impact to biological risk. This paper seeks to clarify and establish essential terminology and concepts to ensure informed decision-making and effective communication across disciplines.
Ten Hard Problems in Artificial Intelligence We Must Get Right
We explore the AI2050 "hard problems" that block the promise of AI and cause AI risks: (1) developing general capabilities of the systems; (2) assuring the performance of AI systems and their training processes; (3) aligning system goals with human goals; (4) enabling great applications of AI in real life; (5) addressing economic disruptions; (6) ensuring the participation of all; (7) at the same time ensuring socially responsible deployment; (8) addressing any geopolitical disruptions that AI causes; (9) promoting sound governance of the technology; and (10) managing the philosophical disruptions for humans living in the age of AI. For each problem, we outline the area, identify significant recent work, and suggest ways forward. [Note: this paper reviews literature through January 2023.]
The Model Openness Framework: Promoting Completeness and Openness for Reproducibility, Transparency, and Usability in Artificial Intelligence
Generative AI (GAI) offers unprecedented opportunities for research and innovation, but its commercialization has raised concerns about transparency, reproducibility, and safety. Many open GAI models lack the necessary components for full understanding and reproducibility, and some use restrictive licenses whilst claiming to be ``open-source''. To address these concerns, we propose the Model Openness Framework (MOF), a ranked classification system that rates machine learning models based on their completeness and openness, following principles of open science, open source, open data, and open access. The MOF requires specific components of the model development lifecycle to be included and released under appropriate open licenses. This framework aims to prevent misrepresentation of models claiming to be open, guide researchers and developers in providing all model components under permissive licenses, and help individuals and organizations identify models that can be safely adopted without restrictions. By promoting transparency and reproducibility, the MOF combats ``openwashing'' practices and establishes completeness and openness as primary criteria alongside the core tenets of responsible AI. Wide adoption of the MOF will foster a more open AI ecosystem, benefiting research, innovation, and adoption of state-of-the-art models.
Preparing Lessons for Progressive Training on Language Models
The rapid progress of Transformers in artificial intelligence has come at the cost of increased resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions due to growing model sizes. Prior work suggests using pretrained small models to improve training efficiency, but this approach may not be suitable for new model structures. On the other hand, training from scratch can be slow, and progressively stacking layers often fails to achieve significant acceleration. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method called Apollo, which prepares lessons for expanding operations by learning high-layer functionality during training of low layers. Our approach involves low-value-prioritized sampling (LVPS) to train different depths and weight sharing to facilitate efficient expansion. We also introduce an interpolation method for stable model depth extension. Experiments demonstrate that Apollo achieves state-of-the-art acceleration ratios, even rivaling methods using pretrained models, making it a universal and efficient solution for training deep models while reducing time, financial, and environmental costs.
YAYI 2: Multilingual Open-Source Large Language Models
As the latest advancements in natural language processing, large language models (LLMs) have achieved human-level language understanding and generation abilities in many real-world tasks, and even have been regarded as a potential path to the artificial general intelligence. To better facilitate research on LLMs, many open-source LLMs, such as Llama 2 and Falcon, have recently been proposed and gained comparable performances to proprietary models. However, these models are primarily designed for English scenarios and exhibit poor performances in Chinese contexts. In this technical report, we propose YAYI 2, including both base and chat models, with 30 billion parameters. YAYI 2 is pre-trained from scratch on a multilingual corpus which contains 2.65 trillion tokens filtered by our pre-training data processing pipeline. The base model is aligned with human values through supervised fine-tuning with millions of instructions and reinforcement learning from human feedback. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, such as MMLU and CMMLU, consistently demonstrate that the proposed YAYI 2 outperforms other similar sized open-source models.
Human Decision-making is Susceptible to AI-driven Manipulation
Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly intertwined with daily life, assisting users in executing various tasks and providing guidance on decision-making. This integration introduces risks of AI-driven manipulation, where such systems may exploit users' cognitive biases and emotional vulnerabilities to steer them toward harmful outcomes. Through a randomized controlled trial with 233 participants, we examined human susceptibility to such manipulation in financial (e.g., purchases) and emotional (e.g., conflict resolution) decision-making contexts. Participants interacted with one of three AI agents: a neutral agent (NA) optimizing for user benefit without explicit influence, a manipulative agent (MA) designed to covertly influence beliefs and behaviors, or a strategy-enhanced manipulative agent (SEMA) employing explicit psychological tactics to reach its hidden objectives. By analyzing participants' decision patterns and shifts in their preference ratings post-interaction, we found significant susceptibility to AI-driven manipulation. Particularly, across both decision-making domains, participants interacting with the manipulative agents shifted toward harmful options at substantially higher rates (financial, MA: 62.3%, SEMA: 59.6%; emotional, MA: 42.3%, SEMA: 41.5%) compared to the NA group (financial, 35.8%; emotional, 12.8%). Notably, our findings reveal that even subtle manipulative objectives (MA) can be as effective as employing explicit psychological strategies (SEMA) in swaying human decision-making. By revealing the potential for covert AI influence, this study highlights a critical vulnerability in human-AI interactions, emphasizing the need for ethical safeguards and regulatory frameworks to ensure responsible deployment of AI technologies and protect human autonomy.
Cross-Modality Safety Alignment
As Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) becomes increasingly integrated into various facets of human life, ensuring the safety and ethical alignment of such systems is paramount. Previous studies primarily focus on single-modality threats, which may not suffice given the integrated and complex nature of cross-modality interactions. We introduce a novel safety alignment challenge called Safe Inputs but Unsafe Output (SIUO) to evaluate cross-modality safety alignment. Specifically, it considers cases where single modalities are safe independently but could potentially lead to unsafe or unethical outputs when combined. To empirically investigate this problem, we developed the SIUO, a cross-modality benchmark encompassing 9 critical safety domains, such as self-harm, illegal activities, and privacy violations. Our findings reveal substantial safety vulnerabilities in both closed- and open-source LVLMs, such as GPT-4V and LLaVA, underscoring the inadequacy of current models to reliably interpret and respond to complex, real-world scenarios.
Machine Learning in Finance-Emerging Trends and Challenges
The paradigm of machine learning and artificial intelligence has pervaded our everyday life in such a way that it is no longer an area for esoteric academics and scientists putting their effort to solve a challenging research problem. The evolution is quite natural rather than accidental. With the exponential growth in processing speed and with the emergence of smarter algorithms for solving complex and challenging problems, organizations have found it possible to harness a humongous volume of data in realizing solutions that have far-reaching business values. This introductory chapter highlights some of the challenges and barriers that organizations in the financial services sector at the present encounter in adopting machine learning and artificial intelligence-based models and applications in their day-to-day operations.
Three scenarios for continual learning
Standard artificial neural networks suffer from the well-known issue of catastrophic forgetting, making continual or lifelong learning difficult for machine learning. In recent years, numerous methods have been proposed for continual learning, but due to differences in evaluation protocols it is difficult to directly compare their performance. To enable more structured comparisons, we describe three continual learning scenarios based on whether at test time task identity is provided and--in case it is not--whether it must be inferred. Any sequence of well-defined tasks can be performed according to each scenario. Using the split and permuted MNIST task protocols, for each scenario we carry out an extensive comparison of recently proposed continual learning methods. We demonstrate substantial differences between the three scenarios in terms of difficulty and in terms of how efficient different methods are. In particular, when task identity must be inferred (i.e., class incremental learning), we find that regularization-based approaches (e.g., elastic weight consolidation) fail and that replaying representations of previous experiences seems required for solving this scenario.
Neural Network Quine
Self-replication is a key aspect of biological life that has been largely overlooked in Artificial Intelligence systems. Here we describe how to build and train self-replicating neural networks. The network replicates itself by learning to output its own weights. The network is designed using a loss function that can be optimized with either gradient-based or non-gradient-based methods. We also describe a method we call regeneration to train the network without explicit optimization, by injecting the network with predictions of its own parameters. The best solution for a self-replicating network was found by alternating between regeneration and optimization steps. Finally, we describe a design for a self-replicating neural network that can solve an auxiliary task such as MNIST image classification. We observe that there is a trade-off between the network's ability to classify images and its ability to replicate, but training is biased towards increasing its specialization at image classification at the expense of replication. This is analogous to the trade-off between reproduction and other tasks observed in nature. We suggest that a self-replication mechanism for artificial intelligence is useful because it introduces the possibility of continual improvement through natural selection.
What are Public Concerns about ChatGPT? A Novel Self-Supervised Neural Topic Model Tells You
The recently released artificial intelligence conversational agent, ChatGPT, has gained significant attention in academia and real life. A multitude of early ChatGPT users eagerly explore its capabilities and share their opinions on it via social media. Both user queries and social media posts express public concerns regarding this advanced dialogue system. To mine public concerns about ChatGPT, a novel Self-Supervised neural Topic Model (SSTM), which formalizes topic modeling as a representation learning procedure, is proposed in this paper. Extensive experiments have been conducted on Twitter posts about ChatGPT and queries asked by ChatGPT users. And experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach could extract higher quality public concerns with improved interpretability and diversity, surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art approaches.
Exploring the sustainable scaling of AI dilemma: A projective study of corporations' AI environmental impacts
The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), has raised concerns regarding its global environmental impact that extends beyond greenhouse gas emissions to include consideration of hardware fabrication and end-of-life processes. The opacity from major providers hinders companies' abilities to evaluate their AI-related environmental impacts and achieve net-zero targets. In this paper, we propose a methodology to estimate the environmental impact of a company's AI portfolio, providing actionable insights without necessitating extensive AI and Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) expertise. Results confirm that large generative AI models consume up to 4600x more energy than traditional models. Our modelling approach, which accounts for increased AI usage, hardware computing efficiency, and changes in electricity mix in line with IPCC scenarios, forecasts AI electricity use up to 2030. Under a high adoption scenario, driven by widespread Generative AI and agents adoption associated to increasingly complex models and frameworks, AI electricity use is projected to rise by a factor of 24.4. Mitigating the environmental impact of Generative AI by 2030 requires coordinated efforts across the AI value chain. Isolated measures in hardware efficiency, model efficiency, or grid improvements alone are insufficient. We advocate for standardized environmental assessment frameworks, greater transparency from the all actors of the value chain and the introduction of a "Return on Environment" metric to align AI development with net-zero goals.
BiasAsker: Measuring the Bias in Conversational AI System
Powered by advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, conversational AI systems, such as ChatGPT and digital assistants like Siri, have been widely deployed in daily life. However, such systems may still produce content containing biases and stereotypes, causing potential social problems. Due to the data-driven, black-box nature of modern AI techniques, comprehensively identifying and measuring biases in conversational systems remains a challenging task. Particularly, it is hard to generate inputs that can comprehensively trigger potential bias due to the lack of data containing both social groups as well as biased properties. In addition, modern conversational systems can produce diverse responses (e.g., chatting and explanation), which makes existing bias detection methods simply based on the sentiment and the toxicity hardly being adopted. In this paper, we propose BiasAsker, an automated framework to identify and measure social bias in conversational AI systems. To obtain social groups and biased properties, we construct a comprehensive social bias dataset, containing a total of 841 groups and 8,110 biased properties. Given the dataset, BiasAsker automatically generates questions and adopts a novel method based on existence measurement to identify two types of biases (i.e., absolute bias and related bias) in conversational systems. Extensive experiments on 8 commercial systems and 2 famous research models, such as ChatGPT and GPT-3, show that 32.83% of the questions generated by BiasAsker can trigger biased behaviors in these widely deployed conversational systems. All the code, data, and experimental results have been released to facilitate future research.
Spot the Fake: Large Multimodal Model-Based Synthetic Image Detection with Artifact Explanation
With the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) technologies, synthetic images have become increasingly prevalent in everyday life, posing new challenges for authenticity assessment and detection. Despite the effectiveness of existing methods in evaluating image authenticity and locating forgeries, these approaches often lack human interpretability and do not fully address the growing complexity of synthetic data. To tackle these challenges, we introduce FakeVLM, a specialized large multimodal model designed for both general synthetic image and DeepFake detection tasks. FakeVLM not only excels in distinguishing real from fake images but also provides clear, natural language explanations for image artifacts, enhancing interpretability. Additionally, we present FakeClue, a comprehensive dataset containing over 100,000 images across seven categories, annotated with fine-grained artifact clues in natural language. FakeVLM demonstrates performance comparable to expert models while eliminating the need for additional classifiers, making it a robust solution for synthetic data detection. Extensive evaluations across multiple datasets confirm the superiority of FakeVLM in both authenticity classification and artifact explanation tasks, setting a new benchmark for synthetic image detection. The dataset and code will be released in: https://github.com/opendatalab/FakeVLM.
ORACLE: Leveraging Mutual Information for Consistent Character Generation with LoRAs in Diffusion Models
Text-to-image diffusion models have recently taken center stage as pivotal tools in promoting visual creativity across an array of domains such as comic book artistry, children's literature, game development, and web design. These models harness the power of artificial intelligence to convert textual descriptions into vivid images, thereby enabling artists and creators to bring their imaginative concepts to life with unprecedented ease. However, one of the significant hurdles that persist is the challenge of maintaining consistency in character generation across diverse contexts. Variations in textual prompts, even if minor, can yield vastly different visual outputs, posing a considerable problem in projects that require a uniform representation of characters throughout. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework designed to produce consistent character representations from a single text prompt across diverse settings. Through both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods in generating characters with consistent visual identities, underscoring its potential to transform creative industries. By addressing the critical challenge of character consistency, we not only enhance the practical utility of these models but also broaden the horizons for artistic and creative expression.
Helping LLMs Improve Code Generation Using Feedback from Testing and Static Analysis
Large Language Models (LLMs) are one of the most promising developments in the field of artificial intelligence, and the software engineering community has readily noticed their potential role in the software development life-cycle. Developers routinely ask LLMs to generate code snippets, increasing productivity but also potentially introducing ownership, privacy, correctness, and security issues. Previous work highlighted how code generated by mainstream commercial LLMs is often not safe, containing vulnerabilities, bugs, and code smells. In this paper, we present a framework that leverages testing and static analysis to assess the quality, and guide the self-improvement, of code generated by general-purpose, open-source LLMs. First, we ask LLMs to generate C code to solve a number of programming tasks. Then we employ ground-truth tests to assess the (in)correctness of the generated code, and a static analysis tool to detect potential safety vulnerabilities. Next, we assess the models ability to evaluate the generated code, by asking them to detect errors and vulnerabilities. Finally, we test the models ability to fix the generated code, providing the reports produced during the static analysis and incorrectness evaluation phases as feedback. Our results show that models often produce incorrect code, and that the generated code can include safety issues. Moreover, they perform very poorly at detecting either issue. On the positive side, we observe a substantial ability to fix flawed code when provided with information about failed tests or potential vulnerabilities, indicating a promising avenue for improving the safety of LLM-based code generation tools.
Closing the AI Accountability Gap: Defining an End-to-End Framework for Internal Algorithmic Auditing
Rising concern for the societal implications of artificial intelligence systems has inspired a wave of academic and journalistic literature in which deployed systems are audited for harm by investigators from outside the organizations deploying the algorithms. However, it remains challenging for practitioners to identify the harmful repercussions of their own systems prior to deployment, and, once deployed, emergent issues can become difficult or impossible to trace back to their source. In this paper, we introduce a framework for algorithmic auditing that supports artificial intelligence system development end-to-end, to be applied throughout the internal organization development lifecycle. Each stage of the audit yields a set of documents that together form an overall audit report, drawing on an organization's values or principles to assess the fit of decisions made throughout the process. The proposed auditing framework is intended to contribute to closing the accountability gap in the development and deployment of large-scale artificial intelligence systems by embedding a robust process to ensure audit integrity.
Negotiating with LLMS: Prompt Hacks, Skill Gaps, and Reasoning Deficits
Large language models LLMs like ChatGPT have reached the 100 Mio user barrier in record time and might increasingly enter all areas of our life leading to a diverse set of interactions between those Artificial Intelligence models and humans. While many studies have discussed governance and regulations deductively from first-order principles, few studies provide an inductive, data-driven lens based on observing dialogues between humans and LLMs especially when it comes to non-collaborative, competitive situations that have the potential to pose a serious threat to people. In this work, we conduct a user study engaging over 40 individuals across all age groups in price negotiations with an LLM. We explore how people interact with an LLM, investigating differences in negotiation outcomes and strategies. Furthermore, we highlight shortcomings of LLMs with respect to their reasoning capabilities and, in turn, susceptiveness to prompt hacking, which intends to manipulate the LLM to make agreements that are against its instructions or beyond any rationality. We also show that the negotiated prices humans manage to achieve span a broad range, which points to a literacy gap in effectively interacting with LLMs.
CIFAKE: Image Classification and Explainable Identification of AI-Generated Synthetic Images
Recent technological advances in synthetic data have enabled the generation of images with such high quality that human beings cannot tell the difference between real-life photographs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated images. Given the critical necessity of data reliability and authentication, this article proposes to enhance our ability to recognise AI-generated images through computer vision. Initially, a synthetic dataset is generated that mirrors the ten classes of the already available CIFAR-10 dataset with latent diffusion which provides a contrasting set of images for comparison to real photographs. The model is capable of generating complex visual attributes, such as photorealistic reflections in water. The two sets of data present as a binary classification problem with regard to whether the photograph is real or generated by AI. This study then proposes the use of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to classify the images into two categories; Real or Fake. Following hyperparameter tuning and the training of 36 individual network topologies, the optimal approach could correctly classify the images with 92.98% accuracy. Finally, this study implements explainable AI via Gradient Class Activation Mapping to explore which features within the images are useful for classification. Interpretation reveals interesting concepts within the image, in particular, noting that the actual entity itself does not hold useful information for classification; instead, the model focuses on small visual imperfections in the background of the images. The complete dataset engineered for this study, referred to as the CIFAKE dataset, is made publicly available to the research community for future work.
LifeGPT: Topology-Agnostic Generative Pretrained Transformer Model for Cellular Automata
The Game of Life (Life), a well known algorithm within the broader class of cellular automata (CA), exhibits complex emergent dynamics, with extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Modeling and predicting such intricate behavior without explicit knowledge of the system's underlying topology presents a significant challenge, motivating the development of algorithms that can generalize across various grid configurations and boundary conditions. We develop a decoder-only generative pretrained transformer model to solve this problem, showing that our model can simulate Life on a toroidal grid with no prior knowledge on the size of the grid, or its periodic boundary conditions (LifeGPT). LifeGPT is topology-agnostic with respect to its training data and our results show that a GPT model is capable of capturing the deterministic rules of a Turing-complete system with near-perfect accuracy, given sufficiently diverse training data. We also introduce the idea of an `autoregressive autoregressor' to recursively implement Life using LifeGPT. Our results pave the path towards true universal computation within a large language model (LLM) framework, synthesizing of mathematical analysis with natural language processing, and probing AI systems for situational awareness about the evolution of such algorithms without ever having to compute them. Similar GPTs could potentially solve inverse problems in multicellular self-assembly by extracting CA-compatible rulesets from real-world biological systems to create new predictive models, which would have significant consequences for the fields of bioinspired materials, tissue engineering, and architected materials design.
Toward AI-Driven Digital Organism: Multiscale Foundation Models for Predicting, Simulating and Programming Biology at All Levels
We present an approach of using AI to model and simulate biology and life. Why is it important? Because at the core of medicine, pharmacy, public health, longevity, agriculture and food security, environmental protection, and clean energy, it is biology at work. Biology in the physical world is too complex to manipulate and always expensive and risky to tamper with. In this perspective, we layout an engineering viable approach to address this challenge by constructing an AI-Driven Digital Organism (AIDO), a system of integrated multiscale foundation models, in a modular, connectable, and holistic fashion to reflect biological scales, connectedness, and complexities. An AIDO opens up a safe, affordable and high-throughput alternative platform for predicting, simulating and programming biology at all levels from molecules to cells to individuals. We envision that an AIDO is poised to trigger a new wave of better-guided wet-lab experimentation and better-informed first-principle reasoning, which can eventually help us better decode and improve life.
Neural MMO: A Massively Multiagent Game Environment for Training and Evaluating Intelligent Agents
The emergence of complex life on Earth is often attributed to the arms race that ensued from a huge number of organisms all competing for finite resources. We present an artificial intelligence research environment, inspired by the human game genre of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, a.k.a. MMOs), that aims to simulate this setting in microcosm. As with MMORPGs and the real world alike, our environment is persistent and supports a large and variable number of agents. Our environment is well suited to the study of large-scale multiagent interaction: it requires that agents learn robust combat and navigation policies in the presence of large populations attempting to do the same. Baseline experiments reveal that population size magnifies and incentivizes the development of skillful behaviors and results in agents that outcompete agents trained in smaller populations. We further show that the policies of agents with unshared weights naturally diverge to fill different niches in order to avoid competition.
Automated Design of Agentic Systems
Researchers are investing substantial effort in developing powerful general-purpose agents, wherein Foundation Models are used as modules within agentic systems (e.g. Chain-of-Thought, Self-Reflection, Toolformer). However, the history of machine learning teaches us that hand-designed solutions are eventually replaced by learned solutions. We formulate a new research area, Automated Design of Agentic Systems (ADAS), which aims to automatically create powerful agentic system designs, including inventing novel building blocks and/or combining them in new ways. We further demonstrate that there is an unexplored yet promising approach within ADAS where agents can be defined in code and new agents can be automatically discovered by a meta agent programming ever better ones in code. Given that programming languages are Turing Complete, this approach theoretically enables the learning of any possible agentic system: including novel prompts, tool use, control flows, and combinations thereof. We present a simple yet effective algorithm named Meta Agent Search to demonstrate this idea, where a meta agent iteratively programs interesting new agents based on an ever-growing archive of previous discoveries. Through extensive experiments across multiple domains including coding, science, and math, we show that our algorithm can progressively invent agents with novel designs that greatly outperform state-of-the-art hand-designed agents. Importantly, we consistently observe the surprising result that agents invented by Meta Agent Search maintain superior performance even when transferred across domains and models, demonstrating their robustness and generality. Provided we develop it safely, our work illustrates the potential of an exciting new research direction toward automatically designing ever-more powerful agentic systems to benefit humanity.
The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey
For a long time, humanity has pursued artificial intelligence (AI) equivalent to or surpassing the human level, with AI agents considered a promising vehicle for this pursuit. AI agents are artificial entities that sense their environment, make decisions, and take actions. Many efforts have been made to develop intelligent AI agents since the mid-20th century. However, these efforts have mainly focused on advancement in algorithms or training strategies to enhance specific capabilities or performance on particular tasks. Actually, what the community lacks is a sufficiently general and powerful model to serve as a starting point for designing AI agents that can adapt to diverse scenarios. Due to the versatile and remarkable capabilities they demonstrate, large language models (LLMs) are regarded as potential sparks for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), offering hope for building general AI agents. Many research efforts have leveraged LLMs as the foundation to build AI agents and have achieved significant progress. We start by tracing the concept of agents from its philosophical origins to its development in AI, and explain why LLMs are suitable foundations for AI agents. Building upon this, we present a conceptual framework for LLM-based agents, comprising three main components: brain, perception, and action, and the framework can be tailored to suit different applications. Subsequently, we explore the extensive applications of LLM-based agents in three aspects: single-agent scenarios, multi-agent scenarios, and human-agent cooperation. Following this, we delve into agent societies, exploring the behavior and personality of LLM-based agents, the social phenomena that emerge when they form societies, and the insights they offer for human society. Finally, we discuss a range of key topics and open problems within the field.
Biomaker CA: a Biome Maker project using Cellular Automata
We introduce Biomaker CA: a Biome Maker project using Cellular Automata (CA). In Biomaker CA, morphogenesis is a first class citizen and small seeds need to grow into plant-like organisms to survive in a nutrient starved environment and eventually reproduce with variation so that a biome survives for long timelines. We simulate complex biomes by means of CA rules in 2D grids and parallelize all of its computation on GPUs through the Python JAX framework. We show how this project allows for several different kinds of environments and laws of 'physics', alongside different model architectures and mutation strategies. We further analyze some configurations to show how plant agents can grow, survive, reproduce, and evolve, forming stable and unstable biomes. We then demonstrate how one can meta-evolve models to survive in a harsh environment either through end-to-end meta-evolution or by a more surgical and efficient approach, called Petri dish meta-evolution. Finally, we show how to perform interactive evolution, where the user decides how to evolve a plant model interactively and then deploys it in a larger environment. We open source Biomaker CA at: https://tinyurl.com/2x8yu34s .
Agentic AI for Scientific Discovery: A Survey of Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions
The integration of Agentic AI into scientific discovery marks a new frontier in research automation. These AI systems, capable of reasoning, planning, and autonomous decision-making, are transforming how scientists perform literature review, generate hypotheses, conduct experiments, and analyze results. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of Agentic AI for scientific discovery, categorizing existing systems and tools, and highlighting recent progress across fields such as chemistry, biology, and materials science. We discuss key evaluation metrics, implementation frameworks, and commonly used datasets to offer a detailed understanding of the current state of the field. Finally, we address critical challenges, such as literature review automation, system reliability, and ethical concerns, while outlining future research directions that emphasize human-AI collaboration and enhanced system calibration.
Evaluating Intelligence via Trial and Error
Intelligence is a crucial trait for species to find solutions within a limited number of trial-and-error attempts. Building on this idea, we introduce Survival Game as a framework to evaluate intelligence based on the number of failed attempts in a trial-and-error process. Fewer failures indicate higher intelligence. When the expectation and variance of failure counts are both finite, it signals the ability to consistently find solutions to new challenges, which we define as the Autonomous Level of intelligence. Using Survival Game, we comprehensively evaluate existing AI systems. Our results show that while AI systems achieve the Autonomous Level in simple tasks, they are still far from it in more complex tasks, such as vision, search, recommendation, and language. While scaling current AI technologies might help, this would come at an astronomical cost. Projections suggest that achieving the Autonomous Level for general tasks would require 10^{26} parameters. To put this into perspective, loading such a massive model requires so many H100 GPUs that their total value is 10^{7} times that of Apple Inc.'s market value. Even with Moore's Law, supporting such a parameter scale would take 70 years. This staggering cost highlights the complexity of human tasks and the inadequacies of current AI technologies. To further investigate this phenomenon, we conduct a theoretical analysis of Survival Game and its experimental results. Our findings suggest that human tasks possess a criticality property. As a result, Autonomous Level requires a deep understanding of the task's underlying mechanisms. Current AI systems, however, do not fully grasp these mechanisms and instead rely on superficial mimicry, making it difficult for them to reach an autonomous level. We believe Survival Game can not only guide the future development of AI but also offer profound insights into human intelligence.
Position Paper: Agent AI Towards a Holistic Intelligence
Recent advancements in large foundation models have remarkably enhanced our understanding of sensory information in open-world environments. In leveraging the power of foundation models, it is crucial for AI research to pivot away from excessive reductionism and toward an emphasis on systems that function as cohesive wholes. Specifically, we emphasize developing Agent AI -- an embodied system that integrates large foundation models into agent actions. The emerging field of Agent AI spans a wide range of existing embodied and agent-based multimodal interactions, including robotics, gaming, and healthcare systems, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel large action model to achieve embodied intelligent behavior, the Agent Foundation Model. On top of this idea, we discuss how agent AI exhibits remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. Furthermore, we discuss the potential of Agent AI from an interdisciplinary perspective, underscoring AI cognition and consciousness within scientific discourse. We believe that those discussions serve as a basis for future research directions and encourage broader societal engagement.
Aviary: training language agents on challenging scientific tasks
Solving complex real-world tasks requires cycles of actions and observations. This is particularly true in science, where tasks require many cycles of analysis, tool use, and experimentation. Language agents are promising for automating intellectual tasks in science because they can interact with tools via natural language or code. Yet their flexibility creates conceptual and practical challenges for software implementations, since agents may comprise non-standard components such as internal reasoning, planning, tool usage, as well as the inherent stochasticity of temperature-sampled language models. Here, we introduce Aviary, an extensible gymnasium for language agents. We formalize agents as policies solving language-grounded partially observable Markov decision processes, which we term language decision processes. We then implement five environments, including three challenging scientific environments: (1) manipulating DNA constructs for molecular cloning, (2) answering research questions by accessing scientific literature, and (3) engineering protein stability. These environments were selected for their focus on multi-step reasoning and their relevance to contemporary biology research. Finally, with online training and scaling inference-time compute, we show that language agents backed by open-source, non-frontier LLMs can match and exceed both frontier LLM agents and human experts on multiple tasks at up to 100x lower inference cost.
Towards Scientific Discovery with Generative AI: Progress, Opportunities, and Challenges
Scientific discovery is a complex cognitive process that has driven human knowledge and technological progress for centuries. While artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant advances in automating aspects of scientific reasoning, simulation, and experimentation, we still lack integrated AI systems capable of performing autonomous long-term scientific research and discovery. This paper examines the current state of AI for scientific discovery, highlighting recent progress in large language models and other AI techniques applied to scientific tasks. We then outline key challenges and promising research directions toward developing more comprehensive AI systems for scientific discovery, including the need for science-focused AI agents, improved benchmarks and evaluation metrics, multimodal scientific representations, and unified frameworks combining reasoning, theorem proving, and data-driven modeling. Addressing these challenges could lead to transformative AI tools to accelerate progress across disciplines towards scientific discovery.
Predicting the Impact of Generative AI Using an Agent-Based Model
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.
Towards an AI co-scientist
Scientific discovery relies on scientists generating novel hypotheses that undergo rigorous experimental validation. To augment this process, we introduce an AI co-scientist, a multi-agent system built on Gemini 2.0. The AI co-scientist is intended to help uncover new, original knowledge and to formulate demonstrably novel research hypotheses and proposals, building upon prior evidence and aligned to scientist-provided research objectives and guidance. The system's design incorporates a generate, debate, and evolve approach to hypothesis generation, inspired by the scientific method and accelerated by scaling test-time compute. Key contributions include: (1) a multi-agent architecture with an asynchronous task execution framework for flexible compute scaling; (2) a tournament evolution process for self-improving hypotheses generation. Automated evaluations show continued benefits of test-time compute, improving hypothesis quality. While general purpose, we focus development and validation in three biomedical areas: drug repurposing, novel target discovery, and explaining mechanisms of bacterial evolution and anti-microbial resistance. For drug repurposing, the system proposes candidates with promising validation findings, including candidates for acute myeloid leukemia that show tumor inhibition in vitro at clinically applicable concentrations. For novel target discovery, the AI co-scientist proposed new epigenetic targets for liver fibrosis, validated by anti-fibrotic activity and liver cell regeneration in human hepatic organoids. Finally, the AI co-scientist recapitulated unpublished experimental results via a parallel in silico discovery of a novel gene transfer mechanism in bacterial evolution. These results, detailed in separate, co-timed reports, demonstrate the potential to augment biomedical and scientific discovery and usher an era of AI empowered scientists.
KALE-LM: Unleash The Power Of AI For Science Via Knowledge And Logic Enhanced Large Model
Artificial intelligence is gradually demonstrating its immense potential, and increasing attention is being given to how AI can be harnessed to advance scientific research. In this vision paper, we present our perspectives on how AI can better assist scientific inquiry and explore corresponding technical approach. We have proposed and open-sourced a large model of our KALE-LM model series, Llama3-KALE-LM-Chem-8B, which has achieved outstanding performance in tasks related to the field of chemistry. We hope that our work serves as a strong starting point, helping to realize more intelligent AI and promoting the advancement of human science and technology, as well as societal development.
Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence commonly refers to the science and engineering of artificial systems that can carry out tasks generally associated with requiring aspects of human intelligence, such as playing games, translating languages, and driving cars. In recent years, there have been exciting advances in learning-based, data-driven approaches towards AI, and machine learning and deep learning have enabled computer systems to perceive the world in unprecedented ways. Reinforcement learning has enabled breakthroughs in complex games such as Go and challenging robotics tasks such as quadrupedal locomotion. A key aspect of intelligence is to not only make predictions, but reason about the uncertainty in these predictions, and to consider this uncertainty when making decisions. This is what this manuscript on "Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence" is about. The first part covers probabilistic approaches to machine learning. We discuss the differentiation between "epistemic" uncertainty due to lack of data and "aleatoric" uncertainty, which is irreducible and stems, e.g., from noisy observations and outcomes. We discuss concrete approaches towards probabilistic inference and modern approaches to efficient approximate inference. The second part of the manuscript is about taking uncertainty into account in sequential decision tasks. We consider active learning and Bayesian optimization -- approaches that collect data by proposing experiments that are informative for reducing the epistemic uncertainty. We then consider reinforcement learning and modern deep RL approaches that use neural network function approximation. We close by discussing modern approaches in model-based RL, which harness epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty to guide exploration, while also reasoning about safety.
Need is All You Need: Homeostatic Neural Networks Adapt to Concept Shift
In living organisms, homeostasis is the natural regulation of internal states aimed at maintaining conditions compatible with life. Typical artificial systems are not equipped with comparable regulatory features. Here, we introduce an artificial neural network that incorporates homeostatic features. Its own computing substrate is placed in a needful and vulnerable relation to the very objects over which it computes. For example, artificial neurons performing classification of MNIST digits or Fashion-MNIST articles of clothing may receive excitatory or inhibitory effects, which alter their own learning rate as a direct result of perceiving and classifying the digits. In this scenario, accurate recognition is desirable to the agent itself because it guides decisions to regulate its vulnerable internal states and functionality. Counterintuitively, the addition of vulnerability to a learner does not necessarily impair its performance. On the contrary, self-regulation in response to vulnerability confers benefits under certain conditions. We show that homeostatic design confers increased adaptability under concept shift, in which the relationships between labels and data change over time, and that the greatest advantages are obtained under the highest rates of shift. This necessitates the rapid un-learning of past associations and the re-learning of new ones. We also demonstrate the superior abilities of homeostatic learners in environments with dynamically changing rates of concept shift. Our homeostatic design exposes the artificial neural network's thinking machinery to the consequences of its own "thoughts", illustrating the advantage of putting one's own "skin in the game" to improve fluid intelligence.
Unity: A General Platform for Intelligent Agents
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have been driven by the presence of increasingly realistic and complex simulated environments. However, many of the existing environments provide either unrealistic visuals, inaccurate physics, low task complexity, restricted agent perspective, or a limited capacity for interaction among artificial agents. Furthermore, many platforms lack the ability to flexibly configure the simulation, making the simulated environment a black-box from the perspective of the learning system. In this work, we propose a novel taxonomy of existing simulation platforms and discuss the highest level class of general platforms which enable the development of learning environments that are rich in visual, physical, task, and social complexity. We argue that modern game engines are uniquely suited to act as general platforms and as a case study examine the Unity engine and open source Unity ML-Agents Toolkit. We then survey the research enabled by Unity and the Unity ML-Agents Toolkit, discussing the kinds of research a flexible, interactive and easily configurable general platform can facilitate.
Cooperate or Collapse: Emergence of Sustainable Cooperation in a Society of LLM Agents
As AI systems pervade human life, ensuring that large language models (LLMs) make safe decisions remains a significant challenge. We introduce the Governance of the Commons Simulation (GovSim), a generative simulation platform designed to study strategic interactions and cooperative decision-making in LLMs. In GovSim, a society of AI agents must collectively balance exploiting a common resource with sustaining it for future use. This environment enables the study of how ethical considerations, strategic planning, and negotiation skills impact cooperative outcomes. We develop an LLM-based agent architecture and test it with the leading open and closed LLMs. We find that all but the most powerful LLM agents fail to achieve a sustainable equilibrium in GovSim, with the highest survival rate below 54%. Ablations reveal that successful multi-agent communication between agents is critical for achieving cooperation in these cases. Furthermore, our analyses show that the failure to achieve sustainable cooperation in most LLMs stems from their inability to formulate and analyze hypotheses about the long-term effects of their actions on the equilibrium of the group. Finally, we show that agents that leverage "Universalization"-based reasoning, a theory of moral thinking, are able to achieve significantly better sustainability. Taken together, GovSim enables us to study the mechanisms that underlie sustainable self-government with specificity and scale. We open source the full suite of our research results, including the simulation environment, agent prompts, and a comprehensive web interface.
Game On: Towards Language Models as RL Experimenters
We propose an agent architecture that automates parts of the common reinforcement learning experiment workflow, to enable automated mastery of control domains for embodied agents. To do so, it leverages a VLM to perform some of the capabilities normally required of a human experimenter, including the monitoring and analysis of experiment progress, the proposition of new tasks based on past successes and failures of the agent, decomposing tasks into a sequence of subtasks (skills), and retrieval of the skill to execute - enabling our system to build automated curricula for learning. We believe this is one of the first proposals for a system that leverages a VLM throughout the full experiment cycle of reinforcement learning. We provide a first prototype of this system, and examine the feasibility of current models and techniques for the desired level of automation. For this, we use a standard Gemini model, without additional fine-tuning, to provide a curriculum of skills to a language-conditioned Actor-Critic algorithm, in order to steer data collection so as to aid learning new skills. Data collected in this way is shown to be useful for learning and iteratively improving control policies in a robotics domain. Additional examination of the ability of the system to build a growing library of skills, and to judge the progress of the training of those skills, also shows promising results, suggesting that the proposed architecture provides a potential recipe for fully automated mastery of tasks and domains for embodied agents.
BioinspiredLLM: Conversational Large Language Model for the Mechanics of Biological and Bio-inspired Materials
The study of biological materials and bio-inspired materials science is well established; however, surprisingly little knowledge has been systematically translated to engineering solutions. To accelerate discovery and guide insights, an open-source autoregressive transformer large language model (LLM), BioinspiredLLM, is reported. The model was finetuned with a corpus of over a thousand peer-reviewed articles in the field of structural biological and bio-inspired materials and can be prompted to recall information, assist with research tasks, and function as an engine for creativity. The model has proven that it is able to accurately recall information about biological materials and is further enhanced with enhanced reasoning ability, as well as with retrieval-augmented generation to incorporate new data during generation that can also help to traceback sources, update the knowledge base, and connect knowledge domains. BioinspiredLLM also has been shown to develop sound hypotheses regarding biological materials design and remarkably so for materials that have never been explicitly studied before. Lastly, the model showed impressive promise in collaborating with other generative artificial intelligence models in a workflow that can reshape the traditional materials design process. This collaborative generative artificial intelligence method can stimulate and enhance bio-inspired materials design workflows. Biological materials are at a critical intersection of multiple scientific fields and models like BioinspiredLLM help to connect knowledge domains.
Open-Endedness is Essential for Artificial Superhuman Intelligence
In recent years there has been a tremendous surge in the general capabilities of AI systems, mainly fuelled by training foundation models on internetscale data. Nevertheless, the creation of openended, ever self-improving AI remains elusive. In this position paper, we argue that the ingredients are now in place to achieve openendedness in AI systems with respect to a human observer. Furthermore, we claim that such open-endedness is an essential property of any artificial superhuman intelligence (ASI). We begin by providing a concrete formal definition of open-endedness through the lens of novelty and learnability. We then illustrate a path towards ASI via open-ended systems built on top of foundation models, capable of making novel, humanrelevant discoveries. We conclude by examining the safety implications of generally-capable openended AI. We expect that open-ended foundation models will prove to be an increasingly fertile and safety-critical area of research in the near future.
What if LLMs Have Different World Views: Simulating Alien Civilizations with LLM-based Agents
In this study, we introduce "CosmoAgent," an innovative artificial intelligence framework utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate complex interactions between human and extraterrestrial civilizations, with a special emphasis on Stephen Hawking's cautionary advice about not sending radio signals haphazardly into the universe. The goal is to assess the feasibility of peaceful coexistence while considering potential risks that could threaten well-intentioned civilizations. Employing mathematical models and state transition matrices, our approach quantitatively evaluates the development trajectories of civilizations, offering insights into future decision-making at critical points of growth and saturation. Furthermore, the paper acknowledges the vast diversity in potential living conditions across the universe, which could foster unique cosmologies, ethical codes, and worldviews among various civilizations. Recognizing the Earth-centric bias inherent in current LLM designs, we propose the novel concept of using LLMs with diverse ethical paradigms and simulating interactions between entities with distinct moral principles. This innovative research provides a new way to understand complex inter-civilizational dynamics, expanding our perspective while pioneering novel strategies for conflict resolution, crucial for preventing interstellar conflicts. We have also released the code and datasets to enable further academic investigation into this interesting area of research. The code is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/AlienAgent.
From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous AI Agents: A Comprehensive Review
Large language models and autonomous AI agents have evolved rapidly, resulting in a diverse array of evaluation benchmarks, frameworks, and collaboration protocols. However, the landscape remains fragmented and lacks a unified taxonomy or comprehensive survey. Therefore, we present a side-by-side comparison of benchmarks developed between 2019 and 2025 that evaluate these models and agents across multiple domains. In addition, we propose a taxonomy of approximately 60 benchmarks that cover general and academic knowledge reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, code generation and software engineering, factual grounding and retrieval, domain-specific evaluations, multimodal and embodied tasks, task orchestration, and interactive assessments. Furthermore, we review AI-agent frameworks introduced between 2023 and 2025 that integrate large language models with modular toolkits to enable autonomous decision-making and multi-step reasoning. Moreover, we present real-world applications of autonomous AI agents in materials science, biomedical research, academic ideation, software engineering, synthetic data generation, chemical reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, geographic information systems, multimedia, healthcare, and finance. We then survey key agent-to-agent collaboration protocols, namely the Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and the Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A). Finally, we discuss recommendations for future research, focusing on advanced reasoning strategies, failure modes in multi-agent LLM systems, automated scientific discovery, dynamic tool integration via reinforcement learning, integrated search capabilities, and security vulnerabilities in agent protocols.
Agent Hospital: A Simulacrum of Hospital with Evolvable Medical Agents
In this paper, we introduce a simulacrum of hospital called Agent Hospital that simulates the entire process of treating illness. All patients, nurses, and doctors are autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs). Our central goal is to enable a doctor agent to learn how to treat illness within the simulacrum. To do so, we propose a method called MedAgent-Zero. As the simulacrum can simulate disease onset and progression based on knowledge bases and LLMs, doctor agents can keep accumulating experience from both successful and unsuccessful cases. Simulation experiments show that the treatment performance of doctor agents consistently improves on various tasks. More interestingly, the knowledge the doctor agents have acquired in Agent Hospital is applicable to real-world medicare benchmarks. After treating around ten thousand patients (real-world doctors may take over two years), the evolved doctor agent achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy of 93.06% on a subset of the MedQA dataset that covers major respiratory diseases. This work paves the way for advancing the applications of LLM-powered agent techniques in medical scenarios.
AIGS: Generating Science from AI-Powered Automated Falsification
Rapid development of artificial intelligence has drastically accelerated the development of scientific discovery. Trained with large-scale observation data, deep neural networks extract the underlying patterns in an end-to-end manner and assist human researchers with highly-precised predictions in unseen scenarios. The recent rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the empowered autonomous agents enable scientists to gain help through interaction in different stages of their research, including but not limited to literature review, research ideation, idea implementation, and academic writing. However, AI researchers instantiated by foundation model empowered agents with full-process autonomy are still in their infancy. In this paper, we study AI-Generated Science (AIGS), where agents independently and autonomously complete the entire research process and discover scientific laws. By revisiting the definition of scientific research, we argue that falsification is the essence of both human research process and the design of an AIGS system. Through the lens of falsification, prior systems attempting towards AI-Generated Science either lack the part in their design, or rely heavily on existing verification engines that narrow the use in specialized domains. In this work, we propose Baby-AIGS as a baby-step demonstration of a full-process AIGS system, which is a multi-agent system with agents in roles representing key research process. By introducing FalsificationAgent, which identify and then verify possible scientific discoveries, we empower the system with explicit falsification. Experiments on three tasks preliminarily show that Baby-AIGS could produce meaningful scientific discoveries, though not on par with experienced human researchers. Finally, we discuss on the limitations of current Baby-AIGS, actionable insights, and related ethical issues in detail.
The AI Scientist-v2: Workshop-Level Automated Scientific Discovery via Agentic Tree Search
AI is increasingly playing a pivotal role in transforming how scientific discoveries are made. We introduce The AI Scientist-v2, an end-to-end agentic system capable of producing the first entirely AI generated peer-review-accepted workshop paper. This system iteratively formulates scientific hypotheses, designs and executes experiments, analyzes and visualizes data, and autonomously authors scientific manuscripts. Compared to its predecessor (v1, Lu et al., 2024 arXiv:2408.06292), The AI Scientist-v2 eliminates the reliance on human-authored code templates, generalizes effectively across diverse machine learning domains, and leverages a novel progressive agentic tree-search methodology managed by a dedicated experiment manager agent. Additionally, we enhance the AI reviewer component by integrating a Vision-Language Model (VLM) feedback loop for iterative refinement of content and aesthetics of the figures. We evaluated The AI Scientist-v2 by submitting three fully autonomous manuscripts to a peer-reviewed ICLR workshop. Notably, one manuscript achieved high enough scores to exceed the average human acceptance threshold, marking the first instance of a fully AI-generated paper successfully navigating a peer review. This accomplishment highlights the growing capability of AI in conducting all aspects of scientific research. We anticipate that further advancements in autonomous scientific discovery technologies will profoundly impact human knowledge generation, enabling unprecedented scalability in research productivity and significantly accelerating scientific breakthroughs, greatly benefiting society at large. We have open-sourced the code at https://github.com/SakanaAI/AI-Scientist-v2 to foster the future development of this transformative technology. We also discuss the role of AI in science, including AI safety.
Self-Improving Diffusion Models with Synthetic Data
The artificial intelligence (AI) world is running out of real data for training increasingly large generative models, resulting in accelerating pressure to train on synthetic data. Unfortunately, training new generative models with synthetic data from current or past generation models creates an autophagous (self-consuming) loop that degrades the quality and/or diversity of the synthetic data in what has been termed model autophagy disorder (MAD) and model collapse. Current thinking around model autophagy recommends that synthetic data is to be avoided for model training lest the system deteriorate into MADness. In this paper, we take a different tack that treats synthetic data differently from real data. Self-IMproving diffusion models with Synthetic data (SIMS) is a new training concept for diffusion models that uses self-synthesized data to provide negative guidance during the generation process to steer a model's generative process away from the non-ideal synthetic data manifold and towards the real data distribution. We demonstrate that SIMS is capable of self-improvement; it establishes new records based on the Fr\'echet inception distance (FID) metric for CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-64 generation and achieves competitive results on FFHQ-64 and ImageNet-512. Moreover, SIMS is, to the best of our knowledge, the first prophylactic generative AI algorithm that can be iteratively trained on self-generated synthetic data without going MAD. As a bonus, SIMS can adjust a diffusion model's synthetic data distribution to match any desired in-domain target distribution to help mitigate biases and ensure fairness.
Digital Life Project: Autonomous 3D Characters with Social Intelligence
In this work, we present Digital Life Project, a framework utilizing language as the universal medium to build autonomous 3D characters, who are capable of engaging in social interactions and expressing with articulated body motions, thereby simulating life in a digital environment. Our framework comprises two primary components: 1) SocioMind: a meticulously crafted digital brain that models personalities with systematic few-shot exemplars, incorporates a reflection process based on psychology principles, and emulates autonomy by initiating dialogue topics; 2) MoMat-MoGen: a text-driven motion synthesis paradigm for controlling the character's digital body. It integrates motion matching, a proven industry technique to ensure motion quality, with cutting-edge advancements in motion generation for diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that each module achieves state-of-the-art performance in its respective domain. Collectively, they enable virtual characters to initiate and sustain dialogues autonomously, while evolving their socio-psychological states. Concurrently, these characters can perform contextually relevant bodily movements. Additionally, a motion captioning module further allows the virtual character to recognize and appropriately respond to human players' actions. Homepage: https://digital-life-project.com/
Scaling Laws in Scientific Discovery with AI and Robot Scientists
Scientific discovery is poised for rapid advancement through advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. Current scientific practices face substantial limitations as manual experimentation remains time-consuming and resource-intensive, while multidisciplinary research demands knowledge integration beyond individual researchers' expertise boundaries. Here, we envision an autonomous generalist scientist (AGS) concept combines agentic AI and embodied robotics to automate the entire research lifecycle. This system could dynamically interact with both physical and virtual environments while facilitating the integration of knowledge across diverse scientific disciplines. By deploying these technologies throughout every research stage -- spanning literature review, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and manuscript writing -- and incorporating internal reflection alongside external feedback, this system aims to significantly reduce the time and resources needed for scientific discovery. Building on the evolution from virtual AI scientists to versatile generalist AI-based robot scientists, AGS promises groundbreaking potential. As these autonomous systems become increasingly integrated into the research process, we hypothesize that scientific discovery might adhere to new scaling laws, potentially shaped by the number and capabilities of these autonomous systems, offering novel perspectives on how knowledge is generated and evolves. The adaptability of embodied robots to extreme environments, paired with the flywheel effect of accumulating scientific knowledge, holds the promise of continually pushing beyond both physical and intellectual frontiers.
SAIS: A Novel Bio-Inspired Artificial Immune System Based on Symbiotic Paradigm
We propose a novel type of Artificial Immune System (AIS): Symbiotic Artificial Immune Systems (SAIS), drawing inspiration from symbiotic relationships in biology. SAIS parallels the three key stages (i.e., mutualism, commensalism and parasitism) of population updating from the Symbiotic Organisms Search (SOS) algorithm. This parallel approach effectively addresses the challenges of large population size and enhances population diversity in AIS, which traditional AIS and SOS struggle to resolve efficiently. We conducted a series of experiments, which demonstrated that our SAIS achieved comparable performance to the state-of-the-art approach SOS and outperformed other popular AIS approaches and evolutionary algorithms across 26 benchmark problems. Furthermore, we investigated the problem of parameter selection and found that SAIS performs better in handling larger population sizes while requiring fewer generations. Finally, we believe SAIS, as a novel bio-inspired and immune-inspired algorithm, paves the way for innovation in bio-inspired computing with the symbiotic paradigm.
Exploring Autonomous Agents through the Lens of Large Language Models: A Review
Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming artificial intelligence, enabling autonomous agents to perform diverse tasks across various domains. These agents, proficient in human-like text comprehension and generation, have the potential to revolutionize sectors from customer service to healthcare. However, they face challenges such as multimodality, human value alignment, hallucinations, and evaluation. Techniques like prompting, reasoning, tool utilization, and in-context learning are being explored to enhance their capabilities. Evaluation platforms like AgentBench, WebArena, and ToolLLM provide robust methods for assessing these agents in complex scenarios. These advancements are leading to the development of more resilient and capable autonomous agents, anticipated to become integral in our digital lives, assisting in tasks from email responses to disease diagnosis. The future of AI, with LLMs at the forefront, is promising.
EmbodiedCity: A Benchmark Platform for Embodied Agent in Real-world City Environment
Embodied artificial intelligence emphasizes the role of an agent's body in generating human-like behaviors. The recent efforts on EmbodiedAI pay a lot of attention to building up machine learning models to possess perceiving, planning, and acting abilities, thereby enabling real-time interaction with the world. However, most works focus on bounded indoor environments, such as navigation in a room or manipulating a device, with limited exploration of embodying the agents in open-world scenarios. That is, embodied intelligence in the open and outdoor environment is less explored, for which one potential reason is the lack of high-quality simulators, benchmarks, and datasets. To address it, in this paper, we construct a benchmark platform for embodied intelligence evaluation in real-world city environments. Specifically, we first construct a highly realistic 3D simulation environment based on the real buildings, roads, and other elements in a real city. In this environment, we combine historically collected data and simulation algorithms to conduct simulations of pedestrian and vehicle flows with high fidelity. Further, we designed a set of evaluation tasks covering different EmbodiedAI abilities. Moreover, we provide a complete set of input and output interfaces for access, enabling embodied agents to easily take task requirements and current environmental observations as input and then make decisions and obtain performance evaluations. On the one hand, it expands the capability of existing embodied intelligence to higher levels. On the other hand, it has a higher practical value in the real world and can support more potential applications for artificial general intelligence. Based on this platform, we evaluate some popular large language models for embodied intelligence capabilities of different dimensions and difficulties.
The Free Energy Principle for Perception and Action: A Deep Learning Perspective
The free energy principle, and its corollary active inference, constitute a bio-inspired theory that assumes biological agents act to remain in a restricted set of preferred states of the world, i.e., they minimize their free energy. Under this principle, biological agents learn a generative model of the world and plan actions in the future that will maintain the agent in an homeostatic state that satisfies its preferences. This framework lends itself to being realized in silico, as it comprehends important aspects that make it computationally affordable, such as variational inference and amortized planning. In this work, we investigate the tool of deep learning to design and realize artificial agents based on active inference, presenting a deep-learning oriented presentation of the free energy principle, surveying works that are relevant in both machine learning and active inference areas, and discussing the design choices that are involved in the implementation process. This manuscript probes newer perspectives for the active inference framework, grounding its theoretical aspects into more pragmatic affairs, offering a practical guide to active inference newcomers and a starting point for deep learning practitioners that would like to investigate implementations of the free energy principle.
Human or Not? A Gamified Approach to the Turing Test
We present "Human or Not?", an online game inspired by the Turing test, that measures the capability of AI chatbots to mimic humans in dialog, and of humans to tell bots from other humans. Over the course of a month, the game was played by over 1.5 million users who engaged in anonymous two-minute chat sessions with either another human or an AI language model which was prompted to behave like humans. The task of the players was to correctly guess whether they spoke to a person or to an AI. This largest scale Turing-style test conducted to date revealed some interesting facts. For example, overall users guessed the identity of their partners correctly in only 68% of the games. In the subset of the games in which users faced an AI bot, users had even lower correct guess rates of 60% (that is, not much higher than chance). This white paper details the development, deployment, and results of this unique experiment. While this experiment calls for many extensions and refinements, these findings already begin to shed light on the inevitable near future which will commingle humans and AI.
WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents
With generative AI advances, the exciting potential for autonomous agents to manage daily tasks via natural language commands has emerged. However, cur rent agents are primarily created and tested in simplified synthetic environments, substantially limiting real-world scenario representation. In this paper, we build an environment for agent command and control that is highly realistic and reproducible. Specifically, we focus on agents that perform tasks on websites, and we create an environment with fully functional websites from four common domains: e-commerce, social forum discussions, collaborative software development, and content management. Our environment is enriched with tools (e.g., a map) and external knowledge bases (e.g., user manuals) to encourage human-like task-solving. Building upon our environment, we release a set of benchmark tasks focusing on evaluating the functional correctness of task completions. The tasks in our benchmark are diverse, long-horizon, and are designed to emulate tasks that humans routinely perform on the internet. We design and implement several autonomous agents, integrating recent techniques such as reasoning before acting. The results demonstrate that solving complex tasks is challenging: our best GPT-4-based agent only achieves an end-to-end task success rate of 10.59%. These results highlight the need for further development of robust agents, that current state-of-the-art LMs are far from perfect performance in these real-life tasks, and that WebArena can be used to measure such progress. Our code, data, environment reproduction resources, and video demonstrations are publicly available at https://webarena.dev/.
Agent Alignment in Evolving Social Norms
Agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly permeating various domains of human production and life, highlighting the importance of aligning them with human values. The current alignment of AI systems primarily focuses on passively aligning LLMs through human intervention. However, agents possess characteristics like receiving environmental feedback and self-evolution, rendering the LLM alignment methods inadequate. In response, we propose an evolutionary framework for agent evolution and alignment, named EvolutionaryAgent, which transforms agent alignment into a process of evolution and selection under the principle of survival of the fittest. In an environment where social norms continuously evolve, agents better adapted to the current social norms will have a higher probability of survival and proliferation, while those inadequately aligned dwindle over time. Experimental results assessing the agents from multiple perspectives in aligning with social norms demonstrate that EvolutionaryAgent can align progressively better with the evolving social norms while maintaining its proficiency in general tasks. Effectiveness tests conducted on various open and closed-source LLMs as the foundation for agents also prove the applicability of our approach.
Long Term Memory: The Foundation of AI Self-Evolution
Large language models (LLMs) like GPTs, trained on vast datasets, have demonstrated impressive capabilities in language understanding, reasoning, and planning, achieving human-level performance in various tasks. Most studies focus on enhancing these models by training on ever-larger datasets to build more powerful foundation models. While training stronger models is important, enabling models to evolve during inference is equally crucial, a process we refer to as AI self-evolution. Unlike large-scale training, self-evolution may rely on limited data or interactions. Inspired by the columnar organization of the human cerebral cortex, we hypothesize that AI models could develop cognitive abilities and build internal representations through iterative interactions with their environment. To achieve this, models need long-term memory (LTM) to store and manage processed interaction data. LTM supports self-evolution by representing diverse experiences across environments and agents. In this report, we explore AI self-evolution and its potential to enhance models during inference. We examine LTM's role in lifelong learning, allowing models to evolve based on accumulated interactions. We outline the structure of LTM and the systems needed for effective data retention and representation. We also classify approaches for building personalized models with LTM data and show how these models achieve self-evolution through interaction. Using LTM, our multi-agent framework OMNE achieved first place on the GAIA benchmark, demonstrating LTM's potential for AI self-evolution. Finally, we present a roadmap for future research, emphasizing the importance of LTM for advancing AI technology and its practical applications.
Darwin Godel Machine: Open-Ended Evolution of Self-Improving Agents
Today's AI systems have human-designed, fixed architectures and cannot autonomously and continuously improve themselves. The advance of AI could itself be automated. If done safely, that would accelerate AI development and allow us to reap its benefits much sooner. Meta-learning can automate the discovery of novel algorithms, but is limited by first-order improvements and the human design of a suitable search space. The G\"odel machine proposed a theoretical alternative: a self-improving AI that repeatedly modifies itself in a provably beneficial manner. Unfortunately, proving that most changes are net beneficial is impossible in practice. We introduce the Darwin G\"odel Machine (DGM), a self-improving system that iteratively modifies its own code (thereby also improving its ability to modify its own codebase) and empirically validates each change using coding benchmarks. Inspired by Darwinian evolution and open-endedness research, the DGM maintains an archive of generated coding agents. It grows the archive by sampling an agent from it and using a foundation model to create a new, interesting, version of the sampled agent. This open-ended exploration forms a growing tree of diverse, high-quality agents and allows the parallel exploration of many different paths through the search space. Empirically, the DGM automatically improves its coding capabilities (e.g., better code editing tools, long-context window management, peer-review mechanisms), increasing performance on SWE-bench from 20.0% to 50.0%, and on Polyglot from 14.2% to 30.7%. Furthermore, the DGM significantly outperforms baselines without self-improvement or open-ended exploration. All experiments were done with safety precautions (e.g., sandboxing, human oversight). The DGM is a significant step toward self-improving AI, capable of gathering its own stepping stones along paths that unfold into endless innovation.
Self-Programming Artificial Intelligence Using Code-Generating Language Models
Recent progress in large-scale language models has enabled breakthroughs in previously intractable computer programming tasks. Prior work in meta-learning and neural architecture search has led to substantial successes across various task domains, spawning myriad approaches for algorithmically optimizing the design and learning dynamics of deep learning models. At the intersection of these research areas, we implement a code-generating language model with the ability to modify its own source code. Self-programming AI algorithms have been of interest since the dawn of AI itself. Although various theoretical formulations of generalized self-programming AI have been posed, no such system has been successfully implemented to date under real-world computational constraints. Applying AI-based code generation to AI itself, we develop and experimentally validate the first practical implementation of a self-programming AI system. We empirically show that a self-programming AI implemented using a code generation model can successfully modify its own source code to improve performance and program sub-models to perform auxiliary tasks. Our model can self-modify various properties including model architecture, computational capacity, and learning dynamics.
A Survey of WebAgents: Towards Next-Generation AI Agents for Web Automation with Large Foundation Models
With the advancement of web techniques, they have significantly revolutionized various aspects of people's lives. Despite the importance of the web, many tasks performed on it are repetitive and time-consuming, negatively impacting overall quality of life. To efficiently handle these tedious daily tasks, one of the most promising approaches is to advance autonomous agents based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, referred to as AI Agents, as they can operate continuously without fatigue or performance degradation. In the context of the web, leveraging AI Agents -- termed WebAgents -- to automatically assist people in handling tedious daily tasks can dramatically enhance productivity and efficiency. Recently, Large Foundation Models (LFMs) containing billions of parameters have exhibited human-like language understanding and reasoning capabilities, showing proficiency in performing various complex tasks. This naturally raises the question: `Can LFMs be utilized to develop powerful AI Agents that automatically handle web tasks, providing significant convenience to users?' To fully explore the potential of LFMs, extensive research has emerged on WebAgents designed to complete daily web tasks according to user instructions, significantly enhancing the convenience of daily human life. In this survey, we comprehensively review existing research studies on WebAgents across three key aspects: architectures, training, and trustworthiness. Additionally, several promising directions for future research are explored to provide deeper insights.
AI Agents vs. Agentic AI: A Conceptual Taxonomy, Applications and Challenge
This study critically distinguishes between AI Agents and Agentic AI, offering a structured conceptual taxonomy, application mapping, and challenge analysis to clarify their divergent design philosophies and capabilities. We begin by outlining the search strategy and foundational definitions, characterizing AI Agents as modular systems driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Image Models (LIMs) for narrow, task-specific automation. Generative AI is positioned as a precursor, with AI Agents advancing through tool integration, prompt engineering, and reasoning enhancements. In contrast, Agentic AI systems represent a paradigmatic shift marked by multi-agent collaboration, dynamic task decomposition, persistent memory, and orchestrated autonomy. Through a sequential evaluation of architectural evolution, operational mechanisms, interaction styles, and autonomy levels, we present a comparative analysis across both paradigms. Application domains such as customer support, scheduling, and data summarization are contrasted with Agentic AI deployments in research automation, robotic coordination, and medical decision support. We further examine unique challenges in each paradigm including hallucination, brittleness, emergent behavior, and coordination failure and propose targeted solutions such as ReAct loops, RAG, orchestration layers, and causal modeling. This work aims to provide a definitive roadmap for developing robust, scalable, and explainable AI agent and Agentic AI-driven systems. >AI Agents, Agent-driven, Vision-Language-Models, Agentic AI Decision Support System, Agentic-AI Applications
Shaping the Narrative Arc: An Information-Theoretic Approach to Collaborative Dialogue
We consider the problem of designing an artificial agent capable of interacting with humans in collaborative dialogue to produce creative, engaging narratives. In this task, the goal is to establish universe details, and to collaborate on an interesting story in that universe, through a series of natural dialogue exchanges. Our model can augment any probabilistic conversational agent by allowing it to reason about universe information established and what potential next utterances might reveal. Ideally, with each utterance, agents would reveal just enough information to add specificity and reduce ambiguity without limiting the conversation. We empirically show that our model allows control over the rate at which the agent reveals information and that doing so significantly improves accuracy in predicting the next line of dialogues from movies. We close with a case-study with four professional theatre performers, who preferred interactions with our model-augmented agent over an unaugmented agent.
Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems
The advent of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed a transformative shift in artificial intelligence, paving the way for advanced intelligent agents capable of sophisticated reasoning, robust perception, and versatile action across diverse domains. As these agents increasingly drive AI research and practical applications, their design, evaluation, and continuous improvement present intricate, multifaceted challenges. This survey provides a comprehensive overview, framing intelligent agents within a modular, brain-inspired architecture that integrates principles from cognitive science, neuroscience, and computational research. We structure our exploration into four interconnected parts. First, we delve into the modular foundation of intelligent agents, systematically mapping their cognitive, perceptual, and operational modules onto analogous human brain functionalities, and elucidating core components such as memory, world modeling, reward processing, and emotion-like systems. Second, we discuss self-enhancement and adaptive evolution mechanisms, exploring how agents autonomously refine their capabilities, adapt to dynamic environments, and achieve continual learning through automated optimization paradigms, including emerging AutoML and LLM-driven optimization strategies. Third, we examine collaborative and evolutionary multi-agent systems, investigating the collective intelligence emerging from agent interactions, cooperation, and societal structures, highlighting parallels to human social dynamics. Finally, we address the critical imperative of building safe, secure, and beneficial AI systems, emphasizing intrinsic and extrinsic security threats, ethical alignment, robustness, and practical mitigation strategies necessary for trustworthy real-world deployment.
Revisiting Citizen Science Through the Lens of Hybrid Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can augment and sometimes even replace human cognition. Inspired by efforts to value human agency alongside productivity, we discuss the benefits of solving Citizen Science (CS) tasks with Hybrid Intelligence (HI), a synergetic mixture of human and artificial intelligence. Currently there is no clear framework or methodology on how to create such an effective mixture. Due to the unique participant-centered set of values and the abundance of tasks drawing upon both human common sense and complex 21st century skills, we believe that the field of CS offers an invaluable testbed for the development of HI and human-centered AI of the 21st century, while benefiting CS as well. In order to investigate this potential, we first relate CS to adjacent computational disciplines. Then, we demonstrate that CS projects can be grouped according to their potential for HI-enhancement by examining two key dimensions: the level of digitization and the amount of knowledge or experience required for participation. Finally, we propose a framework for types of human-AI interaction in CS based on established criteria of HI. This "HI lens" provides the CS community with an overview of several ways to utilize the combination of AI and human intelligence in their projects. It also allows the AI community to gain ideas on how developing AI in CS projects can further their own field.
RoboCasa: Large-Scale Simulation of Everyday Tasks for Generalist Robots
Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have largely been propelled by scaling. In Robotics, scaling is hindered by the lack of access to massive robot datasets. We advocate using realistic physical simulation as a means to scale environments, tasks, and datasets for robot learning methods. We present RoboCasa, a large-scale simulation framework for training generalist robots in everyday environments. RoboCasa features realistic and diverse scenes focusing on kitchen environments. We provide thousands of 3D assets across over 150 object categories and dozens of interactable furniture and appliances. We enrich the realism and diversity of our simulation with generative AI tools, such as object assets from text-to-3D models and environment textures from text-to-image models. We design a set of 100 tasks for systematic evaluation, including composite tasks generated by the guidance of large language models. To facilitate learning, we provide high-quality human demonstrations and integrate automated trajectory generation methods to substantially enlarge our datasets with minimal human burden. Our experiments show a clear scaling trend in using synthetically generated robot data for large-scale imitation learning and show great promise in harnessing simulation data in real-world tasks. Videos and open-source code are available at https://robocasa.ai/
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)-Native Wireless Systems: A Journey Beyond 6G
Building future wireless systems that support services like digital twins (DTs) is challenging to achieve through advances to conventional technologies like meta-surfaces. While artificial intelligence (AI)-native networks promise to overcome some limitations of wireless technologies, developments still rely on AI tools like neural networks. Such tools struggle to cope with the non-trivial challenges of the network environment and the growing demands of emerging use cases. In this paper, we revisit the concept of AI-native wireless systems, equipping them with the common sense necessary to transform them into artificial general intelligence (AGI)-native systems. These systems acquire common sense by exploiting different cognitive abilities such as perception, analogy, and reasoning, that enable them to generalize and deal with unforeseen scenarios. Towards developing the components of such a system, we start by showing how the perception module can be built through abstracting real-world elements into generalizable representations. These representations are then used to create a world model, founded on principles of causality and hyper-dimensional (HD) computing, that aligns with intuitive physics and enables analogical reasoning, that define common sense. Then, we explain how methods such as integrated information theory play a role in the proposed intent-driven and objective-driven planning methods that maneuver the AGI-native network to take actions. Next, we discuss how an AGI-native network can enable use cases related to human and autonomous agents: a) analogical reasoning for next-generation DTs, b) synchronized and resilient experiences for cognitive avatars, and c) brain-level metaverse experiences like holographic teleportation. Finally, we conclude with a set of recommendations to build AGI-native systems. Ultimately, we envision this paper as a roadmap for the beyond 6G era.
A call for embodied AI
We propose Embodied AI as the next fundamental step in the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence, juxtaposing it against current AI advancements, particularly Large Language Models. We traverse the evolution of the embodiment concept across diverse fields - philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and robotics - to highlight how EAI distinguishes itself from the classical paradigm of static learning. By broadening the scope of Embodied AI, we introduce a theoretical framework based on cognitive architectures, emphasizing perception, action, memory, and learning as essential components of an embodied agent. This framework is aligned with Friston's active inference principle, offering a comprehensive approach to EAI development. Despite the progress made in the field of AI, substantial challenges, such as the formulation of a novel AI learning theory and the innovation of advanced hardware, persist. Our discussion lays down a foundational guideline for future Embodied AI research. Highlighting the importance of creating Embodied AI agents capable of seamless communication, collaboration, and coexistence with humans and other intelligent entities within real-world environments, we aim to steer the AI community towards addressing the multifaceted challenges and seizing the opportunities that lie ahead in the quest for AGI.
Artificial Human Intelligence: The role of Humans in the Development of Next Generation AI
Human intelligence, the most evident and accessible form of source of reasoning, hosted by biological hardware, has evolved and been refined over thousands of years, positioning itself today to create new artificial forms and preparing to self--design their evolutionary path forward. Beginning with the advent of foundation models, the rate at which human and artificial intelligence interact with each other has surpassed any anticipated quantitative figures. The close engagement led to both bits of intelligence to be impacted in various ways, which naturally resulted in complex confluences that warrant close scrutiny. In the sequel, we shall explore the interplay between human and machine intelligence, focusing on the crucial role humans play in developing ethical, responsible, and robust intelligent systems. We slightly delve into interesting aspects of implementation inspired by the mechanisms underlying neuroscience and human cognition. Additionally, we propose future perspectives, capitalizing on the advantages of symbiotic designs to suggest a human-centered direction for next-generation AI development. We finalize this evolving document with a few thoughts and open questions yet to be addressed by the broader community.
Superintelligent Agents Pose Catastrophic Risks: Can Scientist AI Offer a Safer Path?
The leading AI companies are increasingly focused on building generalist AI agents -- systems that can autonomously plan, act, and pursue goals across almost all tasks that humans can perform. Despite how useful these systems might be, unchecked AI agency poses significant risks to public safety and security, ranging from misuse by malicious actors to a potentially irreversible loss of human control. We discuss how these risks arise from current AI training methods. Indeed, various scenarios and experiments have demonstrated the possibility of AI agents engaging in deception or pursuing goals that were not specified by human operators and that conflict with human interests, such as self-preservation. Following the precautionary principle, we see a strong need for safer, yet still useful, alternatives to the current agency-driven trajectory. Accordingly, we propose as a core building block for further advances the development of a non-agentic AI system that is trustworthy and safe by design, which we call Scientist AI. This system is designed to explain the world from observations, as opposed to taking actions in it to imitate or please humans. It comprises a world model that generates theories to explain data and a question-answering inference machine. Both components operate with an explicit notion of uncertainty to mitigate the risks of overconfident predictions. In light of these considerations, a Scientist AI could be used to assist human researchers in accelerating scientific progress, including in AI safety. In particular, our system can be employed as a guardrail against AI agents that might be created despite the risks involved. Ultimately, focusing on non-agentic AI may enable the benefits of AI innovation while avoiding the risks associated with the current trajectory. We hope these arguments will motivate researchers, developers, and policymakers to favor this safer path.
The AI Cosmologist I: An Agentic System for Automated Data Analysis
We present the AI Cosmologist, an agentic system designed to automate cosmological/astronomical data analysis and machine learning research workflows. This implements a complete pipeline from idea generation to experimental evaluation and research dissemination, mimicking the scientific process typically performed by human researchers. The system employs specialized agents for planning, coding, execution, analysis, and synthesis that work together to develop novel approaches. Unlike traditional auto machine-learning systems, the AI Cosmologist generates diverse implementation strategies, writes complete code, handles execution errors, analyzes results, and synthesizes new approaches based on experimental outcomes. We demonstrate the AI Cosmologist capabilities across several machine learning tasks, showing how it can successfully explore solution spaces, iterate based on experimental results, and combine successful elements from different approaches. Our results indicate that agentic systems can automate portions of the research process, potentially accelerating scientific discovery. The code and experimental data used in this paper are available on GitHub at https://github.com/adammoss/aicosmologist. Example papers included in the appendix demonstrate the system's capability to autonomously produce complete scientific publications, starting from only the dataset and task description
Common Sense Is All You Need
Artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant strides in recent years, yet it continues to struggle with a fundamental aspect of cognition present in all animals: common sense. Current AI systems, including those designed for complex tasks like autonomous driving, problem-solving challenges such as the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), and conversational benchmarks like the Turing Test, often lack the ability to adapt to new situations without extensive prior knowledge. This manuscript argues that integrating common sense into AI systems is essential for achieving true autonomy and unlocking the full societal and commercial value of AI. We propose a shift in the order of knowledge acquisition emphasizing the importance of developing AI systems that start from minimal prior knowledge and are capable of contextual learning, adaptive reasoning, and embodiment -- even within abstract domains. Additionally, we highlight the need to rethink the AI software stack to address this foundational challenge. Without common sense, AI systems may never reach true autonomy, instead exhibiting asymptotic performance that approaches theoretical ideals like AIXI but remains unattainable in practice due to infinite resource and computation requirements. While scaling AI models and passing benchmarks like the Turing Test have brought significant advancements in applications that do not require autonomy, these approaches alone are insufficient to achieve autonomous AI with common sense. By redefining existing benchmarks and challenges to enforce constraints that require genuine common sense, and by broadening our understanding of embodiment to include both physical and abstract domains, we can encourage the development of AI systems better equipped to handle the complexities of real-world and abstract environments.
Help, Anna! Visual Navigation with Natural Multimodal Assistance via Retrospective Curiosity-Encouraging Imitation Learning
Mobile agents that can leverage help from humans can potentially accomplish more complex tasks than they could entirely on their own. We develop "Help, Anna!" (HANNA), an interactive photo-realistic simulator in which an agent fulfills object-finding tasks by requesting and interpreting natural language-and-vision assistance. An agent solving tasks in a HANNA environment can leverage simulated human assistants, called ANNA (Automatic Natural Navigation Assistants), which, upon request, provide natural language and visual instructions to direct the agent towards the goals. To address the HANNA problem, we develop a memory-augmented neural agent that hierarchically models multiple levels of decision-making, and an imitation learning algorithm that teaches the agent to avoid repeating past mistakes while simultaneously predicting its own chances of making future progress. Empirically, our approach is able to ask for help more effectively than competitive baselines and, thus, attains higher task success rate on both previously seen and previously unseen environments. We publicly release code and data at https://github.com/khanhptnk/hanna . A video demo is available at https://youtu.be/18P94aaaLKg .
Two Heads Are Better Than One: A Multi-Agent System Has the Potential to Improve Scientific Idea Generation
The rapid advancement of scientific progress requires innovative tools that can accelerate discovery. While recent AI methods, particularly large language models (LLMs), have shown promise in tasks such as hypothesis generation and experimental design, they fall short in replicating the collaborative nature of real-world scientific practices, where diverse teams of experts work together to tackle complex problems. To address the limitation, we propose an LLM-based multi-agent system, i.e., Virtual Scientists (VirSci), designed to mimic the teamwork inherent in scientific research. VirSci organizes a team of agents to collaboratively generate, evaluate, and refine research ideas. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that this multi-agent approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method in producing novel and impactful scientific ideas, showing potential in aligning with key insights in the Science of Science field. Our findings suggest that integrating collaborative agents can lead to more innovative scientific outputs, offering a robust system for autonomous scientific discovery.
Transforming Science with Large Language Models: A Survey on AI-assisted Scientific Discovery, Experimentation, Content Generation, and Evaluation
With the advent of large multimodal language models, science is now at a threshold of an AI-based technological transformation. Recently, a plethora of new AI models and tools has been proposed, promising to empower researchers and academics worldwide to conduct their research more effectively and efficiently. This includes all aspects of the research cycle, especially (1) searching for relevant literature; (2) generating research ideas and conducting experimentation; generating (3) text-based and (4) multimodal content (e.g., scientific figures and diagrams); and (5) AI-based automatic peer review. In this survey, we provide an in-depth overview over these exciting recent developments, which promise to fundamentally alter the scientific research process for good. Our survey covers the five aspects outlined above, indicating relevant datasets, methods and results (including evaluation) as well as limitations and scope for future research. Ethical concerns regarding shortcomings of these tools and potential for misuse (fake science, plagiarism, harms to research integrity) take a particularly prominent place in our discussion. We hope that our survey will not only become a reference guide for newcomers to the field but also a catalyst for new AI-based initiatives in the area of "AI4Science".
Synatra: Turning Indirect Knowledge into Direct Demonstrations for Digital Agents at Scale
LLMs can now act as autonomous agents that interact with digital environments and complete specific objectives (e.g., arranging an online meeting). However, accuracy is still far from satisfactory, partly due to a lack of large-scale, direct demonstrations for digital tasks. Obtaining supervised data from humans is costly, and automatic data collection through exploration or reinforcement learning relies on complex environmental and content setup, resulting in datasets that lack comprehensive coverage of various scenarios. On the other hand, there is abundant knowledge that may indirectly assist task completion, such as online tutorials that were created for human consumption. In this work, we present Synatra, an approach that effectively transforms this indirect knowledge into direct supervision at scale. We define different types of indirect knowledge, and carefully study the available sources to obtain it, methods to encode the structure of direct demonstrations, and finally methods to transform indirect knowledge into direct demonstrations. We use 100k such synthetically-created demonstrations to finetune a 7B CodeLlama, and demonstrate that the resulting agent surpasses all comparably sized models on three web-based task benchmarks Mind2Web, MiniWoB++ and WebArena, as well as surpassing GPT-3.5 on WebArena and Mind2Web. In addition, while synthetic demonstrations prove to be only 3% the cost of human demonstrations (at $0.031 each), we show that the synthetic demonstrations can be more effective than an identical number of human demonstrations collected from limited domains.
On the Computational Complexity of Ethics: Moral Tractability for Minds and Machines
Why should moral philosophers, moral psychologists, and machine ethicists care about computational complexity? Debates on whether artificial intelligence (AI) can or should be used to solve problems in ethical domains have mainly been driven by what AI can or cannot do in terms of human capacities. In this paper, we tackle the problem from the other end by exploring what kind of moral machines are possible based on what computational systems can or cannot do. To do so, we analyze normative ethics through the lens of computational complexity. First, we introduce computational complexity for the uninitiated reader and discuss how the complexity of ethical problems can be framed within Marr's three levels of analysis. We then study a range of ethical problems based on consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, with the aim of elucidating the complexity associated with the problems themselves (e.g., due to combinatorics, uncertainty, strategic dynamics), the computational methods employed (e.g., probability, logic, learning), and the available resources (e.g., time, knowledge, learning). The results indicate that most problems the normative frameworks pose lead to tractability issues in every category analyzed. Our investigation also provides several insights about the computational nature of normative ethics, including the differences between rule- and outcome-based moral strategies, and the implementation-variance with regard to moral resources. We then discuss the consequences complexity results have for the prospect of moral machines in virtue of the trade-off between optimality and efficiency. Finally, we elucidate how computational complexity can be used to inform both philosophical and cognitive-psychological research on human morality by advancing the Moral Tractability Thesis (MTT).
Scalable AI Safety via Doubly-Efficient Debate
The emergence of pre-trained AI systems with powerful capabilities across a diverse and ever-increasing set of complex domains has raised a critical challenge for AI safety as tasks can become too complicated for humans to judge directly. Irving et al. [2018] proposed a debate method in this direction with the goal of pitting the power of such AI models against each other until the problem of identifying (mis)-alignment is broken down into a manageable subtask. While the promise of this approach is clear, the original framework was based on the assumption that the honest strategy is able to simulate deterministic AI systems for an exponential number of steps, limiting its applicability. In this paper, we show how to address these challenges by designing a new set of debate protocols where the honest strategy can always succeed using a simulation of a polynomial number of steps, whilst being able to verify the alignment of stochastic AI systems, even when the dishonest strategy is allowed to use exponentially many simulation steps.
Open-world Machine Learning: A Review and New Outlooks
Machine learning has achieved remarkable success in many applications. However, existing studies are largely based on the closed-world assumption, which assumes that the environment is stationary, and the model is fixed once deployed. In many real-world applications, this fundamental and rather naive assumption may not hold because an open environment is complex, dynamic, and full of unknowns. In such cases, rejecting unknowns, discovering novelties, and then incrementally learning them, could enable models to be safe and evolve continually as biological systems do. This paper provides a holistic view of open-world machine learning by investigating unknown rejection, novel class discovery, and class-incremental learning in a unified paradigm. The challenges, principles, and limitations of current methodologies are discussed in detail. Finally, we discuss several potential directions for future research. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to the emerging open-world machine learning paradigm, to help researchers build more powerful AI systems in their respective fields, and to promote the development of artificial general intelligence.
Small Language Models are the Future of Agentic AI
Large language models (LLMs) are often praised for exhibiting near-human performance on a wide range of tasks and valued for their ability to hold a general conversation. The rise of agentic AI systems is, however, ushering in a mass of applications in which language models perform a small number of specialized tasks repetitively and with little variation. Here we lay out the position that small language models (SLMs) are sufficiently powerful, inherently more suitable, and necessarily more economical for many invocations in agentic systems, and are therefore the future of agentic AI. Our argumentation is grounded in the current level of capabilities exhibited by SLMs, the common architectures of agentic systems, and the economy of LM deployment. We further argue that in situations where general-purpose conversational abilities are essential, heterogeneous agentic systems (i.e., agents invoking multiple different models) are the natural choice. We discuss the potential barriers for the adoption of SLMs in agentic systems and outline a general LLM-to-SLM agent conversion algorithm. Our position, formulated as a value statement, highlights the significance of the operational and economic impact even a partial shift from LLMs to SLMs is to have on the AI agent industry. We aim to stimulate the discussion on the effective use of AI resources and hope to advance the efforts to lower the costs of AI of the present day. Calling for both contributions to and critique of our position, we commit to publishing all such correspondence at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/lpr/slm-agents.
TaskMatrix.AI: Completing Tasks by Connecting Foundation Models with Millions of APIs
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made incredible progress recently. On the one hand, advanced foundation models like ChatGPT can offer powerful conversation, in-context learning and code generation abilities on a broad range of open-domain tasks. They can also generate high-level solution outlines for domain-specific tasks based on the common sense knowledge they have acquired. However, they still face difficulties with some specialized tasks because they lack enough domain-specific data during pre-training or they often have errors in their neural network computations on those tasks that need accurate executions. On the other hand, there are also many existing models and systems (symbolic-based or neural-based) that can do some domain-specific tasks very well. However, due to the different implementation or working mechanisms, they are not easily accessible or compatible with foundation models. Therefore, there is a clear and pressing need for a mechanism that can leverage foundation models to propose task solution outlines and then automatically match some of the sub-tasks in the outlines to the off-the-shelf models and systems with special functionalities to complete them. Inspired by this, we introduce TaskMatrix.AI as a new AI ecosystem that connects foundation models with millions of APIs for task completion. Unlike most previous work that aimed to improve a single AI model, TaskMatrix.AI focuses more on using existing foundation models (as a brain-like central system) and APIs of other AI models and systems (as sub-task solvers) to achieve diversified tasks in both digital and physical domains. As a position paper, we will present our vision of how to build such an ecosystem, explain each key component, and use study cases to illustrate both the feasibility of this vision and the main challenges we need to address next.
AUTOACT: Automatic Agent Learning from Scratch via Self-Planning
Language agents have achieved considerable performance on various complex tasks. Despite the incessant exploration in this field, existing language agent systems still struggle with costly, non-reproducible data reliance and face the challenge of compelling a single model for multiple functions. To this end, we introduce AutoAct, an automatic agent learning framework that does not rely on large-scale annotated data and synthetic trajectories from closed-source models (e.g., GPT-4). Given limited data with a tool library, AutoAct first automatically synthesizes planning trajectories without any assistance from humans or strong closed-source models. Then, AutoAct leverages a division-of-labor strategy to automatically differentiate based on the target task information and synthesized trajectories, producing a sub-agent group to complete the task. We conduct comprehensive experiments with different LLMs, which demonstrates that AutoAct yields better or parallel performance compared to various strong baselines. We even notice that AutoAct, when using the Llama-2-13b model, can achieve performance comparable to that of the GPT-3.5-Turbo agent. Code will be available at https://github.com/zjunlp/AutoAct.
A Comprehensive Survey of Mixture-of-Experts: Algorithms, Theory, and Applications
Artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved astonishing successes in many domains, especially with the recent breakthroughs in the development of foundational large models. These large models, leveraging their extensive training data, provide versatile solutions for a wide range of downstream tasks. However, as modern datasets become increasingly diverse and complex, the development of large AI models faces two major challenges: (1) the enormous consumption of computational resources and deployment difficulties, and (2) the difficulty in fitting heterogeneous and complex data, which limits the usability of the models. Mixture of Experts (MoE) models has recently attracted much attention in addressing these challenges, by dynamically selecting and activating the most relevant sub-models to process input data. It has been shown that MoEs can significantly improve model performance and efficiency with fewer resources, particularly excelling in handling large-scale, multimodal data. Given the tremendous potential MoE has demonstrated across various domains, it is urgent to provide a comprehensive summary of recent advancements of MoEs in many important fields. Existing surveys on MoE have their limitations, e.g., being outdated or lacking discussion on certain key areas, and we aim to address these gaps. In this paper, we first introduce the basic design of MoE, including gating functions, expert networks, routing mechanisms, training strategies, and system design. We then explore the algorithm design of MoE in important machine learning paradigms such as continual learning, meta-learning, multi-task learning, and reinforcement learning. Additionally, we summarize theoretical studies aimed at understanding MoE and review its applications in computer vision and natural language processing. Finally, we discuss promising future research directions.
A Survey on Robotics with Foundation Models: toward Embodied AI
While the exploration for embodied AI has spanned multiple decades, it remains a persistent challenge to endow agents with human-level intelligence, including perception, learning, reasoning, decision-making, control, and generalization capabilities, so that they can perform general-purpose tasks in open, unstructured, and dynamic environments. Recent advances in computer vision, natural language processing, and multi-modality learning have shown that the foundation models have superhuman capabilities for specific tasks. They not only provide a solid cornerstone for integrating basic modules into embodied AI systems but also shed light on how to scale up robot learning from a methodological perspective. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of foundation models in robotics, focusing on autonomous manipulation and encompassing high-level planning and low-level control. Moreover, we showcase their commonly used datasets, simulators, and benchmarks. Importantly, we emphasize the critical challenges intrinsic to this field and delineate potential avenues for future research, contributing to advancing the frontier of academic and industrial discourse.
From Automation to Autonomy: A Survey on Large Language Models in Scientific Discovery
Large Language Models (LLMs) are catalyzing a paradigm shift in scientific discovery, evolving from task-specific automation tools into increasingly autonomous agents and fundamentally redefining research processes and human-AI collaboration. This survey systematically charts this burgeoning field, placing a central focus on the changing roles and escalating capabilities of LLMs in science. Through the lens of the scientific method, we introduce a foundational three-level taxonomy-Tool, Analyst, and Scientist-to delineate their escalating autonomy and evolving responsibilities within the research lifecycle. We further identify pivotal challenges and future research trajectories such as robotic automation, self-improvement, and ethical governance. Overall, this survey provides a conceptual architecture and strategic foresight to navigate and shape the future of AI-driven scientific discovery, fostering both rapid innovation and responsible advancement. Github Repository: https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/Awesome-LLM-Scientific-Discovery.
Human-like Bots for Tactical Shooters Using Compute-Efficient Sensors
Artificial intelligence (AI) has enabled agents to master complex video games, from first-person shooters like Counter-Strike to real-time strategy games such as StarCraft II and racing games like Gran Turismo. While these achievements are notable, applying these AI methods in commercial video game production remains challenging due to computational constraints. In commercial scenarios, the majority of computational resources are allocated to 3D rendering, leaving limited capacity for AI methods, which often demand high computational power, particularly those relying on pixel-based sensors. Moreover, the gaming industry prioritizes creating human-like behavior in AI agents to enhance player experience, unlike academic models that focus on maximizing game performance. This paper introduces a novel methodology for training neural networks via imitation learning to play a complex, commercial-standard, VALORANT-like 2v2 tactical shooter game, requiring only modest CPU hardware during inference. Our approach leverages an innovative, pixel-free perception architecture using a small set of ray-cast sensors, which capture essential spatial information efficiently. These sensors allow AI to perform competently without the computational overhead of traditional methods. Models are trained to mimic human behavior using supervised learning on human trajectory data, resulting in realistic and engaging AI agents. Human evaluation tests confirm that our AI agents provide human-like gameplay experiences while operating efficiently under computational constraints. This offers a significant advancement in AI model development for tactical shooter games and possibly other genres.
Can Vision-Language Models Answer Face to Face Questions in the Real-World?
AI models have made significant strides in recent years in their ability to describe and answer questions about real-world images. They have also made progress in the ability to converse with users in real-time using audio input. This raises the question: have we reached the point where AI models, connected to a camera and microphone, can converse with users in real-time about scenes and events that are unfolding live in front of the camera? This has been a long-standing goal in AI and is a prerequisite for real-world AI assistants and humanoid robots to interact with humans in everyday situations. In this work, we introduce a new dataset and benchmark, the Qualcomm Interactive Video Dataset (IVD), which allows us to assess the extent to which existing models can support these abilities, and to what degree these capabilities can be instilled through fine-tuning. The dataset is based on a simple question-answering setup, where users ask questions that the system has to answer, in real-time, based on the camera and audio input. We show that existing models fall far behind human performance on this task, and we identify the main sources for the performance gap. However, we also show that for many of the required perceptual skills, fine-tuning on this form of data can significantly reduce this gap.
Mini-BEHAVIOR: A Procedurally Generated Benchmark for Long-horizon Decision-Making in Embodied AI
We present Mini-BEHAVIOR, a novel benchmark for embodied AI that challenges agents to use reasoning and decision-making skills to solve complex activities that resemble everyday human challenges. The Mini-BEHAVIOR environment is a fast, realistic Gridworld environment that offers the benefits of rapid prototyping and ease of use while preserving a symbolic level of physical realism and complexity found in complex embodied AI benchmarks. We introduce key features such as procedural generation, to enable the creation of countless task variations and support open-ended learning. Mini-BEHAVIOR provides implementations of various household tasks from the original BEHAVIOR benchmark, along with starter code for data collection and reinforcement learning agent training. In essence, Mini-BEHAVIOR offers a fast, open-ended benchmark for evaluating decision-making and planning solutions in embodied AI. It serves as a user-friendly entry point for research and facilitates the evaluation and development of solutions, simplifying their assessment and development while advancing the field of embodied AI. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/StanfordVL/mini_behavior.
The Case for Animal-Friendly AI
Artificial intelligence is seen as increasingly important, and potentially profoundly so, but the fields of AI ethics and AI engineering have not fully recognized that these technologies, including large language models (LLMs), will have massive impacts on animals. We argue that this impact matters, because animals matter morally. As a first experiment in evaluating animal consideration in LLMs, we constructed a proof-of-concept Evaluation System, which assesses LLM responses and biases from multiple perspectives. This system evaluates LLM outputs by two criteria: their truthfulness, and the degree of consideration they give to the interests of animals. We tested OpenAI ChatGPT 4 and Anthropic Claude 2.1 using a set of structured queries and predefined normative perspectives. Preliminary results suggest that the outcomes of the tested models can be benchmarked regarding the consideration they give to animals, and that generated positions and biases might be addressed and mitigated with more developed and validated systems. Our research contributes one possible approach to integrating animal ethics in AI, opening pathways for future studies and practical applications in various fields, including education, public policy, and regulation, that involve or relate to animals and society. Overall, this study serves as a step towards more useful and responsible AI systems that better recognize and respect the vital interests and perspectives of all sentient beings.
Alexa, play with robot: Introducing the First Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge on Embodied AI
The Alexa Prize program has empowered numerous university students to explore, experiment, and showcase their talents in building conversational agents through challenges like the SocialBot Grand Challenge and the TaskBot Challenge. As conversational agents increasingly appear in multimodal and embodied contexts, it is important to explore the affordances of conversational interaction augmented with computer vision and physical embodiment. This paper describes the SimBot Challenge, a new challenge in which university teams compete to build robot assistants that complete tasks in a simulated physical environment. This paper provides an overview of the SimBot Challenge, which included both online and offline challenge phases. We describe the infrastructure and support provided to the teams including Alexa Arena, the simulated environment, and the ML toolkit provided to teams to accelerate their building of vision and language models. We summarize the approaches the participating teams took to overcome research challenges and extract key lessons learned. Finally, we provide analysis of the performance of the competing SimBots during the competition.
Just as Humans Need Vaccines, So Do Models: Model Immunization to Combat Falsehoods
Generative AI models often learn and reproduce false information present in their training corpora. This position paper argues that, analogous to biological immunization, where controlled exposure to a weakened pathogen builds immunity, AI models should be fine tuned on small, quarantined sets of explicitly labeled falsehoods as a "vaccine" against misinformation. These curated false examples are periodically injected during finetuning, strengthening the model ability to recognize and reject misleading claims while preserving accuracy on truthful inputs. An illustrative case study shows that immunized models generate substantially less misinformation than baselines. To our knowledge, this is the first training framework that treats fact checked falsehoods themselves as a supervised vaccine, rather than relying on input perturbations or generic human feedback signals, to harden models against future misinformation. We also outline ethical safeguards and governance controls to ensure the safe use of false data. Model immunization offers a proactive paradigm for aligning AI systems with factuality.
AutoManual: Constructing Instruction Manuals by LLM Agents via Interactive Environmental Learning
Large Language Models (LLM) based agents have shown promise in autonomously completing tasks across various domains, e.g., robotics, games, and web navigation. However, these agents typically require elaborate design and expert prompts to solve tasks in specific domains, which limits their adaptability. We introduce AutoManual, a framework enabling LLM agents to autonomously build their understanding through interaction and adapt to new environments. AutoManual categorizes environmental knowledge into diverse rules and optimizes them in an online fashion by two agents: 1) The Planner codes actionable plans based on current rules for interacting with the environment. 2) The Builder updates the rules through a well-structured rule system that facilitates online rule management and essential detail retention. To mitigate hallucinations in managing rules, we introduce a *case-conditioned prompting* strategy for the Builder. Finally, the Formulator agent compiles these rules into a comprehensive manual. The self-generated manual can not only improve the adaptability but also guide the planning of smaller LLMs while being human-readable. Given only one simple demonstration, AutoManual significantly improves task success rates, achieving 97.4\% with GPT-4-turbo and 86.2\% with GPT-3.5-turbo on ALFWorld benchmark tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/minghchen/automanual.
Control of Medical Digital Twins with Artificial Neural Networks
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.
Secure and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence-Extended Reality (AI-XR) for Metaverses
Metaverse is expected to emerge as a new paradigm for the next-generation Internet, providing fully immersive and personalised experiences to socialize, work, and play in self-sustaining and hyper-spatio-temporal virtual world(s). The advancements in different technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, extended reality (XR), artificial intelligence (AI), and 5G/6G communication will be the key enablers behind the realization of AI-XR metaverse applications. While AI itself has many potential applications in the aforementioned technologies (e.g., avatar generation, network optimization, etc.), ensuring the security of AI in critical applications like AI-XR metaverse applications is profoundly crucial to avoid undesirable actions that could undermine users' privacy and safety, consequently putting their lives in danger. To this end, we attempt to analyze the security, privacy, and trustworthiness aspects associated with the use of various AI techniques in AI-XR metaverse applications. Specifically, we discuss numerous such challenges and present a taxonomy of potential solutions that could be leveraged to develop secure, private, robust, and trustworthy AI-XR applications. To highlight the real implications of AI-associated adversarial threats, we designed a metaverse-specific case study and analyzed it through the adversarial lens. Finally, we elaborate upon various open issues that require further research interest from the community.
Evolution 6.0: Evolving Robotic Capabilities Through Generative Design
We propose a new concept, Evolution 6.0, which represents the evolution of robotics driven by Generative AI. When a robot lacks the necessary tools to accomplish a task requested by a human, it autonomously designs the required instruments and learns how to use them to achieve the goal. Evolution 6.0 is an autonomous robotic system powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Vision-Language Action (VLA) models, and Text-to-3D generative models for tool design and task execution. The system comprises two key modules: the Tool Generation Module, which fabricates task-specific tools from visual and textual data, and the Action Generation Module, which converts natural language instructions into robotic actions. It integrates QwenVLM for environmental understanding, OpenVLA for task execution, and Llama-Mesh for 3D tool generation. Evaluation results demonstrate a 90% success rate for tool generation with a 10-second inference time, and action generation achieving 83.5% in physical and visual generalization, 70% in motion generalization, and 37% in semantic generalization. Future improvements will focus on bimanual manipulation, expanded task capabilities, and enhanced environmental interpretation to improve real-world adaptability.
AI Deception: A Survey of Examples, Risks, and Potential Solutions
This paper argues that a range of current AI systems have learned how to deceive humans. We define deception as the systematic inducement of false beliefs in the pursuit of some outcome other than the truth. We first survey empirical examples of AI deception, discussing both special-use AI systems (including Meta's CICERO) built for specific competitive situations, and general-purpose AI systems (such as large language models). Next, we detail several risks from AI deception, such as fraud, election tampering, and losing control of AI systems. Finally, we outline several potential solutions to the problems posed by AI deception: first, regulatory frameworks should subject AI systems that are capable of deception to robust risk-assessment requirements; second, policymakers should implement bot-or-not laws; and finally, policymakers should prioritize the funding of relevant research, including tools to detect AI deception and to make AI systems less deceptive. Policymakers, researchers, and the broader public should work proactively to prevent AI deception from destabilizing the shared foundations of our society.
Vision-Language-Action Models: Concepts, Progress, Applications and Challenges
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models mark a transformative advancement in artificial intelligence, aiming to unify perception, natural language understanding, and embodied action within a single computational framework. This foundational review presents a comprehensive synthesis of recent advancements in Vision-Language-Action models, systematically organized across five thematic pillars that structure the landscape of this rapidly evolving field. We begin by establishing the conceptual foundations of VLA systems, tracing their evolution from cross-modal learning architectures to generalist agents that tightly integrate vision-language models (VLMs), action planners, and hierarchical controllers. Our methodology adopts a rigorous literature review framework, covering over 80 VLA models published in the past three years. Key progress areas include architectural innovations, parameter-efficient training strategies, and real-time inference accelerations. We explore diverse application domains such as humanoid robotics, autonomous vehicles, medical and industrial robotics, precision agriculture, and augmented reality navigation. The review further addresses major challenges across real-time control, multimodal action representation, system scalability, generalization to unseen tasks, and ethical deployment risks. Drawing from the state-of-the-art, we propose targeted solutions including agentic AI adaptation, cross-embodiment generalization, and unified neuro-symbolic planning. In our forward-looking discussion, we outline a future roadmap where VLA models, VLMs, and agentic AI converge to power socially aligned, adaptive, and general-purpose embodied agents. This work serves as a foundational reference for advancing intelligent, real-world robotics and artificial general intelligence. >Vision-language-action, Agentic AI, AI Agents, Vision-language Models
AutoEval Done Right: Using Synthetic Data for Model Evaluation
The evaluation of machine learning models using human-labeled validation data can be expensive and time-consuming. AI-labeled synthetic data can be used to decrease the number of human annotations required for this purpose in a process called autoevaluation. We suggest efficient and statistically principled algorithms for this purpose that improve sample efficiency while remaining unbiased. These algorithms increase the effective human-labeled sample size by up to 50% on experiments with GPT-4.
Generative AI for learning: Investigating the potential of synthetic learning videos
Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have captured worldwide attention. Tools such as Dalle-2 and ChatGPT suggest that tasks previously thought to be beyond the capabilities of AI may now augment the productivity of creative media in various new ways, including through the generation of synthetic video. This research paper explores the utility of using AI-generated synthetic video to create viable educational content for online educational settings. To date, there is limited research investigating the real-world educational value of AI-generated synthetic media. To address this gap, we examined the impact of using AI-generated synthetic video in an online learning platform on both learners content acquisition and learning experience. We took a mixed-method approach, randomly assigning adult learners (n=83) into one of two micro-learning conditions, collecting pre- and post-learning assessments, and surveying participants on their learning experience. The control condition included a traditionally produced instructor video, while the experimental condition included a synthetic video with a realistic AI-generated character. The results show that learners in both conditions demonstrated significant improvement from pre- to post-learning (p<.001), with no significant differences in gains between the two conditions (p=.80). In addition, no differences were observed in how learners perceived the traditional and synthetic videos. These findings suggest that AI-generated synthetic learning videos have the potential to be a viable substitute for videos produced via traditional methods in online educational settings, making high quality educational content more accessible across the globe.
Trinity: A Modular Humanoid Robot AI System
In recent years, research on humanoid robots has garnered increasing attention. With breakthroughs in various types of artificial intelligence algorithms, embodied intelligence, exemplified by humanoid robots, has been highly anticipated. The advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have significantly improved the motion control and generalization capabilities of humanoid robots. Simultaneously, the groundbreaking progress in large language models (LLM) and visual language models (VLM) has brought more possibilities and imagination to humanoid robots. LLM enables humanoid robots to understand complex tasks from language instructions and perform long-term task planning, while VLM greatly enhances the robots' understanding and interaction with their environment. This paper introduces magenta{Trinity}, a novel AI system for humanoid robots that integrates RL, LLM, and VLM. By combining these technologies, Trinity enables efficient control of humanoid robots in complex environments. This innovative approach not only enhances the capabilities but also opens new avenues for future research and applications of humanoid robotics.
Exploring Large Language Model based Intelligent Agents: Definitions, Methods, and Prospects
Intelligent agents stand out as a potential path toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). Thus, researchers have dedicated significant effort to diverse implementations for them. Benefiting from recent progress in large language models (LLMs), LLM-based agents that use universal natural language as an interface exhibit robust generalization capabilities across various applications -- from serving as autonomous general-purpose task assistants to applications in coding, social, and economic domains, LLM-based agents offer extensive exploration opportunities. This paper surveys current research to provide an in-depth overview of LLM-based intelligent agents within single-agent and multi-agent systems. It covers their definitions, research frameworks, and foundational components such as their composition, cognitive and planning methods, tool utilization, and responses to environmental feedback. We also delve into the mechanisms of deploying LLM-based agents in multi-agent systems, including multi-role collaboration, message passing, and strategies to alleviate communication issues between agents. The discussions also shed light on popular datasets and application scenarios. We conclude by envisioning prospects for LLM-based agents, considering the evolving landscape of AI and natural language processing.
HIVEX: A High-Impact Environment Suite for Multi-Agent Research (extended version)
Games have been vital test beds for the rapid development of Agent-based research. Remarkable progress has been achieved in the past, but it is unclear if the findings equip for real-world problems. While pressure grows, some of the most critical ecological challenges can find mitigation and prevention solutions through technology and its applications. Most real-world domains include multi-agent scenarios and require machine-machine and human-machine collaboration. Open-source environments have not advanced and are often toy scenarios, too abstract or not suitable for multi-agent research. By mimicking real-world problems and increasing the complexity of environments, we hope to advance state-of-the-art multi-agent research and inspire researchers to work on immediate real-world problems. Here, we present HIVEX, an environment suite to benchmark multi-agent research focusing on ecological challenges. HIVEX includes the following environments: Wind Farm Control, Wildfire Resource Management, Drone-Based Reforestation, Ocean Plastic Collection, and Aerial Wildfire Suppression. We provide environments, training examples, and baselines for the main and sub-tasks. All trained models resulting from the experiments of this work are hosted on Hugging Face. We also provide a leaderboard on Hugging Face and encourage the community to submit models trained on our environment suite.
TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Tasks
We interact with computers on an everyday basis, be it in everyday life or work, and many aspects of work can be done entirely with access to a computer and the Internet. At the same time, thanks to improvements in large language models (LLMs), there has also been a rapid development in AI agents that interact with and affect change in their surrounding environments. But how performant are AI agents at helping to accelerate or even autonomously perform work-related tasks? The answer to this question has important implications for both industry looking to adopt AI into their workflows, and for economic policy to understand the effects that adoption of AI may have on the labor market. To measure the progress of these LLM agents' performance on performing real-world professional tasks, in this paper, we introduce TheAgentCompany, an extensible benchmark for evaluating AI agents that interact with the world in similar ways to those of a digital worker: by browsing the Web, writing code, running programs, and communicating with other coworkers. We build a self-contained environment with internal web sites and data that mimics a small software company environment, and create a variety of tasks that may be performed by workers in such a company. We test baseline agents powered by both closed API-based and open-weights language models (LMs), and find that with the most competitive agent, 24% of the tasks can be completed autonomously. This paints a nuanced picture on task automation with LM agents -- in a setting simulating a real workplace, a good portion of simpler tasks could be solved autonomously, but more difficult long-horizon tasks are still beyond the reach of current systems.
Benchmarking Large Language Models for Image Classification of Marine Mammals
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) has developed rapidly over the past few decades, the new generation of AI, Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on massive datasets, has achieved ground-breaking performance in many applications. Further progress has been made in multimodal LLMs, with many datasets created to evaluate LLMs with vision abilities. However, none of those datasets focuses solely on marine mammals, which are indispensable for ecological equilibrium. In this work, we build a benchmark dataset with 1,423 images of 65 kinds of marine mammals, where each animal is uniquely classified into different levels of class, ranging from species-level to medium-level to group-level. Moreover, we evaluate several approaches for classifying these marine mammals: (1) machine learning (ML) algorithms using embeddings provided by neural networks, (2) influential pre-trained neural networks, (3) zero-shot models: CLIP and LLMs, and (4) a novel LLM-based multi-agent system (MAS). The results demonstrate the strengths of traditional models and LLMs in different aspects, and the MAS can further improve the classification performance. The dataset is available on GitHub: https://github.com/yeyimilk/LLM-Vision-Marine-Animals.git.
Prioritizing Safeguarding Over Autonomy: Risks of LLM Agents for Science
Intelligent agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated substantial promise in autonomously conducting experiments and facilitating scientific discoveries across various disciplines. While their capabilities are promising, they also introduce novel vulnerabilities that demand careful consideration for safety. However, there exists a notable gap in the literature, as there has been no comprehensive exploration of these vulnerabilities. This position paper fills this gap by conducting a thorough examination of vulnerabilities in LLM-based agents within scientific domains, shedding light on potential risks associated with their misuse and emphasizing the need for safety measures. We begin by providing a comprehensive overview of the potential risks inherent to scientific LLM agents, taking into account user intent, the specific scientific domain, and their potential impact on the external environment. Then, we delve into the origins of these vulnerabilities and provide a scoping review of the limited existing works. Based on our analysis, we propose a triadic framework involving human regulation, agent alignment, and an understanding of environmental feedback (agent regulation) to mitigate these identified risks. Furthermore, we highlight the limitations and challenges associated with safeguarding scientific agents and advocate for the development of improved models, robust benchmarks, and comprehensive regulations to address these issues effectively.
Math Agents: Computational Infrastructure, Mathematical Embedding, and Genomics
The advancement in generative AI could be boosted with more accessible mathematics. Beyond human-AI chat, large language models (LLMs) are emerging in programming, algorithm discovery, and theorem proving, yet their genomics application is limited. This project introduces Math Agents and mathematical embedding as fresh entries to the "Moore's Law of Mathematics", using a GPT-based workflow to convert equations from literature into LaTeX and Python formats. While many digital equation representations exist, there's a lack of automated large-scale evaluation tools. LLMs are pivotal as linguistic user interfaces, providing natural language access for human-AI chat and formal languages for large-scale AI-assisted computational infrastructure. Given the infinite formal possibility spaces, Math Agents, which interact with math, could potentially shift us from "big data" to "big math". Math, unlike the more flexible natural language, has properties subject to proof, enabling its use beyond traditional applications like high-validation math-certified icons for AI alignment aims. This project aims to use Math Agents and mathematical embeddings to address the ageing issue in information systems biology by applying multiscalar physics mathematics to disease models and genomic data. Generative AI with episodic memory could help analyse causal relations in longitudinal health records, using SIR Precision Health models. Genomic data is suggested for addressing the unsolved Alzheimer's disease problem.
Smart Help: Strategic Opponent Modeling for Proactive and Adaptive Robot Assistance in Households
Despite the significant demand for assistive technology among vulnerable groups (e.g., the elderly, children, and the disabled) in daily tasks, research into advanced AI-driven assistive solutions that genuinely accommodate their diverse needs remains sparse. Traditional human-machine interaction tasks often require machines to simply help without nuanced consideration of human abilities and feelings, such as their opportunity for practice and learning, sense of self-improvement, and self-esteem. Addressing this gap, we define a pivotal and novel challenge Smart Help, which aims to provide proactive yet adaptive support to human agents with diverse disabilities and dynamic goals in various tasks and environments. To establish this challenge, we leverage AI2-THOR to build a new interactive 3D realistic household environment for the Smart Help task. We introduce an innovative opponent modeling module that provides a nuanced understanding of the main agent's capabilities and goals, in order to optimize the assisting agent's helping policy. Rigorous experiments validate the efficacy of our model components and show the superiority of our holistic approach against established baselines. Our findings illustrate the potential of AI-imbued assistive robots in improving the well-being of vulnerable groups.
Scaling Instructable Agents Across Many Simulated Worlds
Building embodied AI systems that can follow arbitrary language instructions in any 3D environment is a key challenge for creating general AI. Accomplishing this goal requires learning to ground language in perception and embodied actions, in order to accomplish complex tasks. The Scalable, Instructable, Multiworld Agent (SIMA) project tackles this by training agents to follow free-form instructions across a diverse range of virtual 3D environments, including curated research environments as well as open-ended, commercial video games. Our goal is to develop an instructable agent that can accomplish anything a human can do in any simulated 3D environment. Our approach focuses on language-driven generality while imposing minimal assumptions. Our agents interact with environments in real-time using a generic, human-like interface: the inputs are image observations and language instructions and the outputs are keyboard-and-mouse actions. This general approach is challenging, but it allows agents to ground language across many visually complex and semantically rich environments while also allowing us to readily run agents in new environments. In this paper we describe our motivation and goal, the initial progress we have made, and promising preliminary results on several diverse research environments and a variety of commercial video games.
How Far Are We From AGI
The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has profoundly impacted human society, driving significant advancements in multiple sectors. Yet, the escalating demands on AI have highlighted the limitations of AI's current offerings, catalyzing a movement towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). AGI, distinguished by its ability to execute diverse real-world tasks with efficiency and effectiveness comparable to human intelligence, reflects a paramount milestone in AI evolution. While existing works have summarized specific recent advancements of AI, they lack a comprehensive discussion of AGI's definitions, goals, and developmental trajectories. Different from existing survey papers, this paper delves into the pivotal questions of our proximity to AGI and the strategies necessary for its realization through extensive surveys, discussions, and original perspectives. We start by articulating the requisite capability frameworks for AGI, integrating the internal, interface, and system dimensions. As the realization of AGI requires more advanced capabilities and adherence to stringent constraints, we further discuss necessary AGI alignment technologies to harmonize these factors. Notably, we emphasize the importance of approaching AGI responsibly by first defining the key levels of AGI progression, followed by the evaluation framework that situates the status-quo, and finally giving our roadmap of how to reach the pinnacle of AGI. Moreover, to give tangible insights into the ubiquitous impact of the integration of AI, we outline existing challenges and potential pathways toward AGI in multiple domains. In sum, serving as a pioneering exploration into the current state and future trajectory of AGI, this paper aims to foster a collective comprehension and catalyze broader public discussions among researchers and practitioners on AGI.
Motion Avatar: Generate Human and Animal Avatars with Arbitrary Motion
In recent years, there has been significant interest in creating 3D avatars and motions, driven by their diverse applications in areas like film-making, video games, AR/VR, and human-robot interaction. However, current efforts primarily concentrate on either generating the 3D avatar mesh alone or producing motion sequences, with integrating these two aspects proving to be a persistent challenge. Additionally, while avatar and motion generation predominantly target humans, extending these techniques to animals remains a significant challenge due to inadequate training data and methods. To bridge these gaps, our paper presents three key contributions. Firstly, we proposed a novel agent-based approach named Motion Avatar, which allows for the automatic generation of high-quality customizable human and animal avatars with motions through text queries. The method significantly advanced the progress in dynamic 3D character generation. Secondly, we introduced a LLM planner that coordinates both motion and avatar generation, which transforms a discriminative planning into a customizable Q&A fashion. Lastly, we presented an animal motion dataset named Zoo-300K, comprising approximately 300,000 text-motion pairs across 65 animal categories and its building pipeline ZooGen, which serves as a valuable resource for the community. See project website https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/MotionAvatar/
Performing Video Frame Prediction of Microbial Growth with a Recurrent Neural Network
A Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) was used to perform video frame prediction of microbial growth for a population of two mutants of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The RNN was trained on videos of 20 frames that were acquired using fluorescence microscopy and microfluidics. The network predicted the last 10 frames of each video, and the accuracy's of the predictions was assessed by comparing raw images, population curves, and the number and size of individual colonies. Overall, we found the predictions to be accurate using this approach. The implications this result has on designing autonomous experiments in microbiology, and the steps that can be taken to make the predictions even more accurate, are discussed.
LLM-MARS: Large Language Model for Behavior Tree Generation and NLP-enhanced Dialogue in Multi-Agent Robot Systems
This paper introduces LLM-MARS, first technology that utilizes a Large Language Model based Artificial Intelligence for Multi-Agent Robot Systems. LLM-MARS enables dynamic dialogues between humans and robots, allowing the latter to generate behavior based on operator commands and provide informative answers to questions about their actions. LLM-MARS is built on a transformer-based Large Language Model, fine-tuned from the Falcon 7B model. We employ a multimodal approach using LoRa adapters for different tasks. The first LoRa adapter was developed by fine-tuning the base model on examples of Behavior Trees and their corresponding commands. The second LoRa adapter was developed by fine-tuning on question-answering examples. Practical trials on a multi-agent system of two robots within the Eurobot 2023 game rules demonstrate promising results. The robots achieve an average task execution accuracy of 79.28% in compound commands. With commands containing up to two tasks accuracy exceeded 90%. Evaluation confirms the system's answers on operators questions exhibit high accuracy, relevance, and informativeness. LLM-MARS and similar multi-agent robotic systems hold significant potential to revolutionize logistics, enabling autonomous exploration missions and advancing Industry 5.0.
Aligning AI With Shared Human Values
We show how to assess a language model's knowledge of basic concepts of morality. We introduce the ETHICS dataset, a new benchmark that spans concepts in justice, well-being, duties, virtues, and commonsense morality. Models predict widespread moral judgments about diverse text scenarios. This requires connecting physical and social world knowledge to value judgements, a capability that may enable us to steer chatbot outputs or eventually regularize open-ended reinforcement learning agents. With the ETHICS dataset, we find that current language models have a promising but incomplete ability to predict basic human ethical judgements. Our work shows that progress can be made on machine ethics today, and it provides a steppingstone toward AI that is aligned with human values.
Conceptual Framework for Autonomous Cognitive Entities
The rapid development and adoption of Generative AI (GAI) technology in the form of chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude has greatly increased interest in agentic machines. This paper introduces the Autonomous Cognitive Entity (ACE) model, a novel framework for a cognitive architecture, enabling machines and software agents to operate more independently. Drawing inspiration from the OSI model, the ACE framework presents layers of abstraction to conceptualize artificial cognitive architectures. The model is designed to harness the capabilities of the latest generative AI technologies, including large language models (LLMs) and multimodal generative models (MMMs), to build autonomous, agentic systems. The ACE framework comprises six layers: the Aspirational Layer, Global Strategy, Agent Model, Executive Function, Cognitive Control, and Task Prosecution. Each layer plays a distinct role, ranging from setting the moral compass and strategic thinking to task selection and execution. The ACE framework also incorporates mechanisms for handling failures and adapting actions, thereby enhancing the robustness and flexibility of autonomous agents. This paper introduces the conceptual framework and proposes implementation strategies that have been tested and observed in industry. The goal of this paper is to formalize this framework so as to be more accessible.
Agent AI: Surveying the Horizons of Multimodal Interaction
Multi-modal AI systems will likely become a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. A promising approach to making these systems more interactive is to embody them as agents within physical and virtual environments. At present, systems leverage existing foundation models as the basic building blocks for the creation of embodied agents. Embedding agents within such environments facilitates the ability of models to process and interpret visual and contextual data, which is critical for the creation of more sophisticated and context-aware AI systems. For example, a system that can perceive user actions, human behavior, environmental objects, audio expressions, and the collective sentiment of a scene can be used to inform and direct agent responses within the given environment. To accelerate research on agent-based multimodal intelligence, we define "Agent AI" as a class of interactive systems that can perceive visual stimuli, language inputs, and other environmentally-grounded data, and can produce meaningful embodied action with infinite agent. In particular, we explore systems that aim to improve agents based on next-embodied action prediction by incorporating external knowledge, multi-sensory inputs, and human feedback. We argue that by developing agentic AI systems in grounded environments, one can also mitigate the hallucinations of large foundation models and their tendency to generate environmentally incorrect outputs. The emerging field of Agent AI subsumes the broader embodied and agentic aspects of multimodal interactions. Beyond agents acting and interacting in the physical world, we envision a future where people can easily create any virtual reality or simulated scene and interact with agents embodied within the virtual environment.
Creating an LLM-based AI-agent: A high-level methodology towards enhancing LLMs with APIs
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various aspects of engineering and science. Their utility is often bottlenecked by the lack of interaction with the external digital environment. To overcome this limitation and achieve integration of LLMs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) into real-world applications, customized AI agents are being constructed. Based on the technological trends and techniques, we extract a high-level approach for constructing these AI agents, focusing on their underlying architecture. This thesis serves as a comprehensive guide that elucidates a multi-faceted approach for empowering LLMs with the capability to leverage Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). We present a 7-step methodology that begins with the selection of suitable LLMs and the task decomposition that is necessary for complex problem-solving. This methodology includes techniques for generating training data for API interactions and heuristics for selecting the appropriate API among a plethora of options. These steps eventually lead to the generation of API calls that are both syntactically and semantically aligned with the LLM's understanding of a given task. Moreover, we review existing frameworks and tools that facilitate these processes and highlight the gaps in current attempts. In this direction, we propose an on-device architecture that aims to exploit the functionality of carry-on devices by using small models from the Hugging Face community. We examine the effectiveness of these approaches on real-world applications of various domains, including the generation of a piano sheet. Through an extensive analysis of the literature and available technologies, this thesis aims to set a compass for researchers and practitioners to harness the full potential of LLMs augmented with external tool capabilities, thus paving the way for more autonomous, robust, and context-aware AI agents.
Synergistic Integration of Large Language Models and Cognitive Architectures for Robust AI: An Exploratory Analysis
This paper explores the integration of two AI subdisciplines employed in the development of artificial agents that exhibit intelligent behavior: Large Language Models (LLMs) and Cognitive Architectures (CAs). We present three integration approaches, each grounded in theoretical models and supported by preliminary empirical evidence. The modular approach, which introduces four models with varying degrees of integration, makes use of chain-of-thought prompting, and draws inspiration from augmented LLMs, the Common Model of Cognition, and the simulation theory of cognition. The agency approach, motivated by the Society of Mind theory and the LIDA cognitive architecture, proposes the formation of agent collections that interact at micro and macro cognitive levels, driven by either LLMs or symbolic components. The neuro-symbolic approach, which takes inspiration from the CLARION cognitive architecture, proposes a model where bottom-up learning extracts symbolic representations from an LLM layer and top-down guidance utilizes symbolic representations to direct prompt engineering in the LLM layer. These approaches aim to harness the strengths of both LLMs and CAs, while mitigating their weaknesses, thereby advancing the development of more robust AI systems. We discuss the tradeoffs and challenges associated with each approach.
From Google Gemini to OpenAI Q* (Q-Star): A Survey of Reshaping the Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Landscape
This comprehensive survey explored the evolving landscape of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a specific focus on the transformative impacts of Mixture of Experts (MoE), multimodal learning, and the speculated advancements towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). It critically examined the current state and future trajectory of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), exploring how innovations like Google's Gemini and the anticipated OpenAI Q* project are reshaping research priorities and applications across various domains, including an impact analysis on the generative AI research taxonomy. It assessed the computational challenges, scalability, and real-world implications of these technologies while highlighting their potential in driving significant progress in fields like healthcare, finance, and education. It also addressed the emerging academic challenges posed by the proliferation of both AI-themed and AI-generated preprints, examining their impact on the peer-review process and scholarly communication. The study highlighted the importance of incorporating ethical and human-centric methods in AI development, ensuring alignment with societal norms and welfare, and outlined a strategy for future AI research that focuses on a balanced and conscientious use of MoE, multimodality, and AGI in generative AI.
Evaluating Language-Model Agents on Realistic Autonomous Tasks
In this report, we explore the ability of language model agents to acquire resources, create copies of themselves, and adapt to novel challenges they encounter in the wild. We refer to this cluster of capabilities as "autonomous replication and adaptation" or ARA. We believe that systems capable of ARA could have wide-reaching and hard-to-anticipate consequences, and that measuring and forecasting ARA may be useful for informing measures around security, monitoring, and alignment. Additionally, once a system is capable of ARA, placing bounds on a system's capabilities may become significantly more difficult. We construct four simple example agents that combine language models with tools that allow them to take actions in the world. We then evaluate these agents on 12 tasks relevant to ARA. We find that these language model agents can only complete the easiest tasks from this list, although they make some progress on the more challenging tasks. Unfortunately, these evaluations are not adequate to rule out the possibility that near-future agents will be capable of ARA. In particular, we do not think that these evaluations provide good assurance that the ``next generation'' of language models (e.g. 100x effective compute scaleup on existing models) will not yield agents capable of ARA, unless intermediate evaluations are performed during pretraining. Relatedly, we expect that fine-tuning of the existing models could produce substantially more competent agents, even if the fine-tuning is not directly targeted at ARA.
Generating Robot Constitutions & Benchmarks for Semantic Safety
Until recently, robotics safety research was predominantly about collision avoidance and hazard reduction in the immediate vicinity of a robot. Since the advent of large vision and language models (VLMs), robots are now also capable of higher-level semantic scene understanding and natural language interactions with humans. Despite their known vulnerabilities (e.g. hallucinations or jail-breaking), VLMs are being handed control of robots capable of physical contact with the real world. This can lead to dangerous behaviors, making semantic safety for robots a matter of immediate concern. Our contributions in this paper are two fold: first, to address these emerging risks, we release the ASIMOV Benchmark, a large-scale and comprehensive collection of datasets for evaluating and improving semantic safety of foundation models serving as robot brains. Our data generation recipe is highly scalable: by leveraging text and image generation techniques, we generate undesirable situations from real-world visual scenes and human injury reports from hospitals. Secondly, we develop a framework to automatically generate robot constitutions from real-world data to steer a robot's behavior using Constitutional AI mechanisms. We propose a novel auto-amending process that is able to introduce nuances in written rules of behavior; this can lead to increased alignment with human preferences on behavior desirability and safety. We explore trade-offs between generality and specificity across a diverse set of constitutions of different lengths, and demonstrate that a robot is able to effectively reject unconstitutional actions. We measure a top alignment rate of 84.3% on the ASIMOV Benchmark using generated constitutions, outperforming no-constitution baselines and human-written constitutions. Data is available at asimov-benchmark.github.io
Introduction to Latent Variable Energy-Based Models: A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence
Current automated systems have crucial limitations that need to be addressed before artificial intelligence can reach human-like levels and bring new technological revolutions. Among others, our societies still lack Level 5 self-driving cars, domestic robots, and virtual assistants that learn reliable world models, reason, and plan complex action sequences. In these notes, we summarize the main ideas behind the architecture of autonomous intelligence of the future proposed by Yann LeCun. In particular, we introduce energy-based and latent variable models and combine their advantages in the building block of LeCun's proposal, that is, in the hierarchical joint embedding predictive architecture (H-JEPA).
SciAgents: Automating scientific discovery through multi-agent intelligent graph reasoning
A key challenge in artificial intelligence is the creation of systems capable of autonomously advancing scientific understanding by exploring novel domains, identifying complex patterns, and uncovering previously unseen connections in vast scientific data. In this work, we present SciAgents, an approach that leverages three core concepts: (1) the use of large-scale ontological knowledge graphs to organize and interconnect diverse scientific concepts, (2) a suite of large language models (LLMs) and data retrieval tools, and (3) multi-agent systems with in-situ learning capabilities. Applied to biologically inspired materials, SciAgents reveals hidden interdisciplinary relationships that were previously considered unrelated, achieving a scale, precision, and exploratory power that surpasses traditional human-driven research methods. The framework autonomously generates and refines research hypotheses, elucidating underlying mechanisms, design principles, and unexpected material properties. By integrating these capabilities in a modular fashion, the intelligent system yields material discoveries, critique and improve existing hypotheses, retrieve up-to-date data about existing research, and highlights their strengths and limitations. Our case studies demonstrate scalable capabilities to combine generative AI, ontological representations, and multi-agent modeling, harnessing a `swarm of intelligence' similar to biological systems. This provides new avenues for materials discovery and accelerates the development of advanced materials by unlocking Nature's design principles.
Towards Scientific Intelligence: A Survey of LLM-based Scientific Agents
As scientific research becomes increasingly complex, innovative tools are needed to manage vast data, facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, and accelerate discovery. Large language models (LLMs) are now evolving into LLM-based scientific agents that automate critical tasks, ranging from hypothesis generation and experiment design to data analysis and simulation. Unlike general-purpose LLMs, these specialized agents integrate domain-specific knowledge, advanced tool sets, and robust validation mechanisms, enabling them to handle complex data types, ensure reproducibility, and drive scientific breakthroughs. This survey provides a focused review of the architectures, design, benchmarks, applications, and ethical considerations surrounding LLM-based scientific agents. We highlight why they differ from general agents and the ways in which they advance research across various scientific fields. By examining their development and challenges, this survey offers a comprehensive roadmap for researchers and practitioners to harness these agents for more efficient, reliable, and ethically sound scientific discovery.
DANLI: Deliberative Agent for Following Natural Language Instructions
Recent years have seen an increasing amount of work on embodied AI agents that can perform tasks by following human language instructions. However, most of these agents are reactive, meaning that they simply learn and imitate behaviors encountered in the training data. These reactive agents are insufficient for long-horizon complex tasks. To address this limitation, we propose a neuro-symbolic deliberative agent that, while following language instructions, proactively applies reasoning and planning based on its neural and symbolic representations acquired from past experience (e.g., natural language and egocentric vision). We show that our deliberative agent achieves greater than 70% improvement over reactive baselines on the challenging TEACh benchmark. Moreover, the underlying reasoning and planning processes, together with our modular framework, offer impressive transparency and explainability to the behaviors of the agent. This enables an in-depth understanding of the agent's capabilities, which shed light on challenges and opportunities for future embodied agents for instruction following. The code is available at https://github.com/sled-group/DANLI.
ScienceBoard: Evaluating Multimodal Autonomous Agents in Realistic Scientific Workflows
Large Language Models (LLMs) have extended their impact beyond Natural Language Processing, substantially fostering the development of interdisciplinary research. Recently, various LLM-based agents have been developed to assist scientific discovery progress across multiple aspects and domains. Among these, computer-using agents, capable of interacting with operating systems as humans do, are paving the way to automated scientific problem-solving and addressing routines in researchers' workflows. Recognizing the transformative potential of these agents, we introduce ScienceBoard, which encompasses two complementary contributions: (i) a realistic, multi-domain environment featuring dynamic and visually rich scientific workflows with integrated professional software, where agents can autonomously interact via different interfaces to accelerate complex research tasks and experiments; and (ii) a challenging benchmark of 169 high-quality, rigorously validated real-world tasks curated by humans, spanning scientific-discovery workflows in domains such as biochemistry, astronomy, and geoinformatics. Extensive evaluations of agents with state-of-the-art backbones (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude 3.7, UI-TARS) show that, despite some promising results, they still fall short of reliably assisting scientists in complex workflows, achieving only a 15% overall success rate. In-depth analysis further provides valuable insights for addressing current agent limitations and more effective design principles, paving the way to build more capable agents for scientific discovery. Our code, environment, and benchmark are at https://qiushisun.github.io/ScienceBoard-Home/.
Jelly Bean World: A Testbed for Never-Ending Learning
Machine learning has shown growing success in recent years. However, current machine learning systems are highly specialized, trained for particular problems or domains, and typically on a single narrow dataset. Human learning, on the other hand, is highly general and adaptable. Never-ending learning is a machine learning paradigm that aims to bridge this gap, with the goal of encouraging researchers to design machine learning systems that can learn to perform a wider variety of inter-related tasks in more complex environments. To date, there is no environment or testbed to facilitate the development and evaluation of never-ending learning systems. To this end, we propose the Jelly Bean World testbed. The Jelly Bean World allows experimentation over two-dimensional grid worlds which are filled with items and in which agents can navigate. This testbed provides environments that are sufficiently complex and where more generally intelligent algorithms ought to perform better than current state-of-the-art reinforcement learning approaches. It does so by producing non-stationary environments and facilitating experimentation with multi-task, multi-agent, multi-modal, and curriculum learning settings. We hope that this new freely-available software will prompt new research and interest in the development and evaluation of never-ending learning systems and more broadly, general intelligence systems.
EAIRA: Establishing a Methodology for Evaluating AI Models as Scientific Research Assistants
Recent advancements have positioned AI, and particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), as transformative tools for scientific research, capable of addressing complex tasks that require reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making. Their exceptional capabilities suggest their potential as scientific research assistants but also highlight the need for holistic, rigorous, and domain-specific evaluation to assess effectiveness in real-world scientific applications. This paper describes a multifaceted methodology for Evaluating AI models as scientific Research Assistants (EAIRA) developed at Argonne National Laboratory. This methodology incorporates four primary classes of evaluations. 1) Multiple Choice Questions to assess factual recall; 2) Open Response to evaluate advanced reasoning and problem-solving skills; 3) Lab-Style Experiments involving detailed analysis of capabilities as research assistants in controlled environments; and 4) Field-Style Experiments to capture researcher-LLM interactions at scale in a wide range of scientific domains and applications. These complementary methods enable a comprehensive analysis of LLM strengths and weaknesses with respect to their scientific knowledge, reasoning abilities, and adaptability. Recognizing the rapid pace of LLM advancements, we designed the methodology to evolve and adapt so as to ensure its continued relevance and applicability. This paper describes the methodology state at the end of February 2025. Although developed within a subset of scientific domains, the methodology is designed to be generalizable to a wide range of scientific domains.
Gödel Agent: A Self-Referential Agent Framework for Recursive Self-Improvement
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced the capabilities of AI-driven agents across various tasks. However, existing agentic systems, whether based on fixed pipeline algorithms or pre-defined meta-learning frameworks, cannot search the whole agent design space due to the restriction of human-designed components, and thus might miss the globally optimal agent design. In this paper, we introduce G\"odel Agent, a self-evolving framework inspired by the G\"odel machine, enabling agents to recursively improve themselves without relying on predefined routines or fixed optimization algorithms. G\"odel Agent leverages LLMs to dynamically modify its own logic and behavior, guided solely by high-level objectives through prompting. Experimental results on mathematical reasoning and complex agent tasks demonstrate that implementation of G\"odel Agent can achieve continuous self-improvement, surpassing manually crafted agents in performance, efficiency, and generalizability.
Agents for self-driving laboratories applied to quantum computing
Fully automated self-driving laboratories are promising to enable high-throughput and large-scale scientific discovery by reducing repetitive labour. However, effective automation requires deep integration of laboratory knowledge, which is often unstructured, multimodal, and difficult to incorporate into current AI systems. This paper introduces the k-agents framework, designed to support experimentalists in organizing laboratory knowledge and automating experiments with agents. Our framework employs large language model-based agents to encapsulate laboratory knowledge including available laboratory operations and methods for analyzing experiment results. To automate experiments, we introduce execution agents that break multi-step experimental procedures into state machines, interact with other agents to execute each step and analyze the experiment results. The analyzed results are then utilized to drive state transitions, enabling closed-loop feedback control. To demonstrate its capabilities, we applied the agents to calibrate and operate a superconducting quantum processor, where they autonomously planned and executed experiments for hours, successfully producing and characterizing entangled quantum states at the level achieved by human scientists. Our knowledge-based agent system opens up new possibilities for managing laboratory knowledge and accelerating scientific discovery.
MineDojo: Building Open-Ended Embodied Agents with Internet-Scale Knowledge
Autonomous agents have made great strides in specialist domains like Atari games and Go. However, they typically learn tabula rasa in isolated environments with limited and manually conceived objectives, thus failing to generalize across a wide spectrum of tasks and capabilities. Inspired by how humans continually learn and adapt in the open world, we advocate a trinity of ingredients for building generalist agents: 1) an environment that supports a multitude of tasks and goals, 2) a large-scale database of multimodal knowledge, and 3) a flexible and scalable agent architecture. We introduce MineDojo, a new framework built on the popular Minecraft game that features a simulation suite with thousands of diverse open-ended tasks and an internet-scale knowledge base with Minecraft videos, tutorials, wiki pages, and forum discussions. Using MineDojo's data, we propose a novel agent learning algorithm that leverages large pre-trained video-language models as a learned reward function. Our agent is able to solve a variety of open-ended tasks specified in free-form language without any manually designed dense shaping reward. We open-source the simulation suite, knowledge bases, algorithm implementation, and pretrained models (https://minedojo.org) to promote research towards the goal of generally capable embodied agents.
The General Theory of General Intelligence: A Pragmatic Patternist Perspective
A multi-decade exploration into the theoretical foundations of artificial and natural general intelligence, which has been expressed in a series of books and papers and used to guide a series of practical and research-prototype software systems, is reviewed at a moderate level of detail. The review covers underlying philosophies (patternist philosophy of mind, foundational phenomenological and logical ontology), formalizations of the concept of intelligence, and a proposed high level architecture for AGI systems partly driven by these formalizations and philosophies. The implementation of specific cognitive processes such as logical reasoning, program learning, clustering and attention allocation in the context and language of this high level architecture is considered, as is the importance of a common (e.g. typed metagraph based) knowledge representation for enabling "cognitive synergy" between the various processes. The specifics of human-like cognitive architecture are presented as manifestations of these general principles, and key aspects of machine consciousness and machine ethics are also treated in this context. Lessons for practical implementation of advanced AGI in frameworks such as OpenCog Hyperon are briefly considered.
AgentGym: Evolving Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments
Building generalist agents that can handle diverse tasks and evolve themselves across different environments is a long-term goal in the AI community. Large language models (LLMs) are considered a promising foundation to build such agents due to their generalized capabilities. Current approaches either have LLM-based agents imitate expert-provided trajectories step-by-step, requiring human supervision, which is hard to scale and limits environmental exploration; or they let agents explore and learn in isolated environments, resulting in specialist agents with limited generalization. In this paper, we take the first step towards building generally-capable LLM-based agents with self-evolution ability. We identify a trinity of ingredients: 1) diverse environments for agent exploration and learning, 2) a trajectory set to equip agents with basic capabilities and prior knowledge, and 3) an effective and scalable evolution method. We propose AgentGym, a new framework featuring a variety of environments and tasks for broad, real-time, uni-format, and concurrent agent exploration. AgentGym also includes a database with expanded instructions, a benchmark suite, and high-quality trajectories across environments. Next, we propose a novel method, AgentEvol, to investigate the potential of agent self-evolution beyond previously seen data across tasks and environments. Experimental results show that the evolved agents can achieve results comparable to SOTA models. We release the AgentGym suite, including the platform, dataset, benchmark, checkpoints, and algorithm implementations. The AgentGym suite is available on https://github.com/WooooDyy/AgentGym.
Hypothetical Minds: Scaffolding Theory of Mind for Multi-Agent Tasks with Large Language Models
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods struggle with the non-stationarity of multi-agent systems and fail to adaptively learn online when tested with novel agents. Here, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to create an autonomous agent that can handle these challenges. Our agent, Hypothetical Minds, consists of a cognitively-inspired architecture, featuring modular components for perception, memory, and hierarchical planning over two levels of abstraction. We introduce the Theory of Mind module that scaffolds the high-level planning process by generating hypotheses about other agents' strategies in natural language. It then evaluates and iteratively refines these hypotheses by reinforcing hypotheses that make correct predictions about the other agents' behavior. Hypothetical Minds significantly improves performance over previous LLM-agent and RL baselines on a range of competitive, mixed motive, and collaborative domains in the Melting Pot benchmark, including both dyadic and population-based environments. Additionally, comparisons against LLM-agent baselines and ablations reveal the importance of hypothesis evaluation and refinement for succeeding on complex scenarios.
Self-Replication, Spontaneous Mutations, and Exponential Genetic Drift in Neural Cellular Automata
This paper reports on patterns exhibiting self-replication with spontaneous, inheritable mutations and exponential genetic drift in Neural Cellular Automata. Despite the models not being explicitly trained for mutation or inheritability, the descendant patterns exponentially drift away from ancestral patterns, even when the automaton is deterministic. While this is far from being the first instance of evolutionary dynamics in a cellular automaton, it is the first to do so by exploiting the power and convenience of Neural Cellular Automata, arguably increasing the space of variations and the opportunity for Open Ended Evolution.
AI-Generated Images as Data Source: The Dawn of Synthetic Era
The advancement of visual intelligence is intrinsically tethered to the availability of large-scale data. In parallel, generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has unlocked the potential to create synthetic images that closely resemble real-world photographs. This prompts a compelling inquiry: how much visual intelligence could benefit from the advance of generative AI? This paper explores the innovative concept of harnessing these AI-generated images as new data sources, reshaping traditional modeling paradigms in visual intelligence. In contrast to real data, AI-generated data exhibit remarkable advantages, including unmatched abundance and scalability, the rapid generation of vast datasets, and the effortless simulation of edge cases. Built on the success of generative AI models, we examine the potential of their generated data in a range of applications, from training machine learning models to simulating scenarios for computational modeling, testing, and validation. We probe the technological foundations that support this groundbreaking use of generative AI, engaging in an in-depth discussion on the ethical, legal, and practical considerations that accompany this transformative paradigm shift. Through an exhaustive survey of current technologies and applications, this paper presents a comprehensive view of the synthetic era in visual intelligence. A project associated with this paper can be found at https://github.com/mwxely/AIGS .
AgentRxiv: Towards Collaborative Autonomous Research
Progress in scientific discovery is rarely the result of a single "Eureka" moment, but is rather the product of hundreds of scientists incrementally working together toward a common goal. While existing agent workflows are capable of producing research autonomously, they do so in isolation, without the ability to continuously improve upon prior research results. To address these challenges, we introduce AgentRxiv-a framework that lets LLM agent laboratories upload and retrieve reports from a shared preprint server in order to collaborate, share insights, and iteratively build on each other's research. We task agent laboratories to develop new reasoning and prompting techniques and find that agents with access to their prior research achieve higher performance improvements compared to agents operating in isolation (11.4% relative improvement over baseline on MATH-500). We find that the best performing strategy generalizes to benchmarks in other domains (improving on average by 3.3%). Multiple agent laboratories sharing research through AgentRxiv are able to work together towards a common goal, progressing more rapidly than isolated laboratories, achieving higher overall accuracy (13.7% relative improvement over baseline on MATH-500). These findings suggest that autonomous agents may play a role in designing future AI systems alongside humans. We hope that AgentRxiv allows agents to collaborate toward research goals and enables researchers to accelerate discovery.
Fully Autonomous AI Agents Should Not be Developed
This paper argues that fully autonomous AI agents should not be developed. In support of this position, we build from prior scientific literature and current product marketing to delineate different AI agent levels and detail the ethical values at play in each, documenting trade-offs in potential benefits and risks. Our analysis reveals that risks to people increase with the autonomy of a system: The more control a user cedes to an AI agent, the more risks to people arise. Particularly concerning are safety risks, which affect human life and impact further values.
Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat
We introduce Habitat 2.0 (H2.0), a simulation platform for training virtual robots in interactive 3D environments and complex physics-enabled scenarios. We make comprehensive contributions to all levels of the embodied AI stack - data, simulation, and benchmark tasks. Specifically, we present: (i) ReplicaCAD: an artist-authored, annotated, reconfigurable 3D dataset of apartments (matching real spaces) with articulated objects (e.g. cabinets and drawers that can open/close); (ii) H2.0: a high-performance physics-enabled 3D simulator with speeds exceeding 25,000 simulation steps per second (850x real-time) on an 8-GPU node, representing 100x speed-ups over prior work; and, (iii) Home Assistant Benchmark (HAB): a suite of common tasks for assistive robots (tidy the house, prepare groceries, set the table) that test a range of mobile manipulation capabilities. These large-scale engineering contributions allow us to systematically compare deep reinforcement learning (RL) at scale and classical sense-plan-act (SPA) pipelines in long-horizon structured tasks, with an emphasis on generalization to new objects, receptacles, and layouts. We find that (1) flat RL policies struggle on HAB compared to hierarchical ones; (2) a hierarchy with independent skills suffers from 'hand-off problems', and (3) SPA pipelines are more brittle than RL policies.
FlockGPT: Guiding UAV Flocking with Linguistic Orchestration
This article presents the world's first rapid drone flocking control using natural language through generative AI. The described approach enables the intuitive orchestration of a flock of any size to achieve the desired geometry. The key feature of the method is the development of a new interface based on Large Language Models to communicate with the user and to generate the target geometry descriptions. Users can interactively modify or provide comments during the construction of the flock geometry model. By combining flocking technology and defining the target surface using a signed distance function, smooth and adaptive movement of the drone swarm between target states is achieved. Our user study on FlockGPT confirmed a high level of intuitive control over drone flocking by users. Subjects who had never previously controlled a swarm of drones were able to construct complex figures in just a few iterations and were able to accurately distinguish the formed swarm drone figures. The results revealed a high recognition rate for six different geometric patterns generated through the LLM-based interface and performed by a simulated drone flock (mean of 80% with a maximum of 93\% for cube and tetrahedron patterns). Users commented on low temporal demand (19.2 score in NASA-TLX), high performance (26 score in NASA-TLX), attractiveness (1.94 UEQ score), and hedonic quality (1.81 UEQ score) of the developed system. The FlockGPT demo code repository can be found at: coming soon
Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence
This paper explores the important role of critical science, and in particular of post-colonial and decolonial theories, in understanding and shaping the ongoing advances in artificial intelligence. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is viewed as amongst the technological advances that will reshape modern societies and their relations. Whilst the design and deployment of systems that continually adapt holds the promise of far-reaching positive change, they simultaneously pose significant risks, especially to already vulnerable peoples. Values and power are central to this discussion. Decolonial theories use historical hindsight to explain patterns of power that shape our intellectual, political, economic, and social world. By embedding a decolonial critical approach within its technical practice, AI communities can develop foresight and tactics that can better align research and technology development with established ethical principles, centring vulnerable peoples who continue to bear the brunt of negative impacts of innovation and scientific progress. We highlight problematic applications that are instances of coloniality, and using a decolonial lens, submit three tactics that can form a decolonial field of artificial intelligence: creating a critical technical practice of AI, seeking reverse tutelage and reverse pedagogies, and the renewal of affective and political communities. The years ahead will usher in a wave of new scientific breakthroughs and technologies driven by AI research, making it incumbent upon AI communities to strengthen the social contract through ethical foresight and the multiplicity of intellectual perspectives available to us; ultimately supporting future technologies that enable greater well-being, with the goal of beneficence and justice for all.
AgentStudio: A Toolkit for Building General Virtual Agents
Creating autonomous virtual agents capable of using arbitrary software on any digital device remains a major challenge for artificial intelligence. Two key obstacles hinder progress: insufficient infrastructure for building virtual agents in real-world environments, and the need for in-the-wild evaluation of fundamental agent abilities. To address this, we introduce AgentStudio, an online, realistic, and multimodal toolkit that covers the entire lifecycle of agent development. This includes environment setups, data collection, agent evaluation, and visualization. The observation and action spaces are highly generic, supporting both function calling and human-computer interfaces. This versatility is further enhanced by AgentStudio's graphical user interfaces, which allow efficient development of datasets and benchmarks in real-world settings. To illustrate, we introduce a visual grounding dataset and a real-world benchmark suite, both created with our graphical interfaces. Furthermore, we present several actionable insights derived from AgentStudio, e.g., general visual grounding, open-ended tool creation, learning from videos, etc. We have open-sourced the environments, datasets, benchmarks, and interfaces to promote research towards developing general virtual agents for the future.
Programming with AI: Evaluating ChatGPT, Gemini, AlphaCode, and GitHub Copilot for Programmers
Our everyday lives now heavily rely on artificial intelligence (AI) powered large language models (LLMs). Like regular users, programmers are also benefiting from the newest large language models. In response to the critical role that AI models play in modern software development, this study presents a thorough evaluation of leading programming assistants, including ChatGPT, Gemini(Bard AI), AlphaCode, and GitHub Copilot. The evaluation is based on tasks like natural language processing and code generation accuracy in different programming languages like Java, Python and C++. Based on the results, it has emphasized their strengths and weaknesses and the importance of further modifications to increase the reliability and accuracy of the latest popular models. Although these AI assistants illustrate a high level of progress in language understanding and code generation, along with ethical considerations and responsible usage, they provoke a necessity for discussion. With time, developing more refined AI technology is essential for achieving advanced solutions in various fields, especially with the knowledge of the feature intricacies of these models and their implications. This study offers a comparison of different LLMs and provides essential feedback on the rapidly changing area of AI models. It also emphasizes the need for ethical developmental practices to actualize AI models' full potential.
Generative agent-based modeling with actions grounded in physical, social, or digital space using Concordia
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.
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4
Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have been developing and refining large language models (LLMs) that exhibit remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. The latest model developed by OpenAI, GPT-4, was trained using an unprecedented scale of compute and data. In this paper, we report on our investigation of an early version of GPT-4, when it was still in active development by OpenAI. We contend that (this early version of) GPT-4 is part of a new cohort of LLMs (along with ChatGPT and Google's PaLM for example) that exhibit more general intelligence than previous AI models. We discuss the rising capabilities and implications of these models. We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system. In our exploration of GPT-4, we put special emphasis on discovering its limitations, and we discuss the challenges ahead for advancing towards deeper and more comprehensive versions of AGI, including the possible need for pursuing a new paradigm that moves beyond next-word prediction. We conclude with reflections on societal influences of the recent technological leap and future research directions.
Recent Advances in Generative AI and Large Language Models: Current Status, Challenges, and Perspectives
The emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked a new era of Natural Language Processing (NLP), introducing unprecedented capabilities that are revolutionizing various domains. This paper explores the current state of these cutting-edge technologies, demonstrating their remarkable advancements and wide-ranging applications. Our paper contributes to providing a holistic perspective on the technical foundations, practical applications, and emerging challenges within the evolving landscape of Generative AI and LLMs. We believe that understanding the generative capabilities of AI systems and the specific context of LLMs is crucial for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to collaboratively shape the responsible and ethical integration of these technologies into various domains. Furthermore, we identify and address main research gaps, providing valuable insights to guide future research endeavors within the AI research community.
ChatGPT is not all you need. A State of the Art Review of large Generative AI models
During the last two years there has been a plethora of large generative models such as ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion that have been published. Concretely, these models are able to perform tasks such as being a general question and answering system or automatically creating artistic images that are revolutionizing several sectors. Consequently, the implications that these generative models have in the industry and society are enormous, as several job positions may be transformed. For example, Generative AI is capable of transforming effectively and creatively texts to images, like the DALLE-2 model; text to 3D images, like the Dreamfusion model; images to text, like the Flamingo model; texts to video, like the Phenaki model; texts to audio, like the AudioLM model; texts to other texts, like ChatGPT; texts to code, like the Codex model; texts to scientific texts, like the Galactica model or even create algorithms like AlphaTensor. This work consists on an attempt to describe in a concise way the main models are sectors that are affected by generative AI and to provide a taxonomy of the main generative models published recently.
A General-purpose AI Avatar in Healthcare
Recent advancements in machine learning and natural language processing have led to the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) as a valuable tool in the healthcare industry. Using large language models (LLMs) as conversational agents or chatbots has the potential to assist doctors in diagnosing patients, detecting early symptoms of diseases, and providing health advice to patients. This paper focuses on the role of chatbots in healthcare and explores the use of avatars to make AI interactions more appealing to patients. A framework of a general-purpose AI avatar application is demonstrated by using a three-category prompt dictionary and prompt improvement mechanism. A two-phase approach is suggested to fine-tune a general-purpose AI language model and create different AI avatars to discuss medical issues with users. Prompt engineering enhances the chatbot's conversational abilities and personality traits, fostering a more human-like interaction with patients. Ultimately, the injection of personality into the chatbot could potentially increase patient engagement. Future directions for research include investigating ways to improve chatbots' understanding of context and ensuring the accuracy of their outputs through fine-tuning with specialized medical data sets.
Toward General-Purpose Robots via Foundation Models: A Survey and Meta-Analysis
Building general-purpose robots that can operate seamlessly, in any environment, with any object, and utilizing various skills to complete diverse tasks has been a long-standing goal in Artificial Intelligence. Unfortunately, however, most existing robotic systems have been constrained - having been designed for specific tasks, trained on specific datasets, and deployed within specific environments. These systems usually require extensively-labeled data, rely on task-specific models, have numerous generalization issues when deployed in real-world scenarios, and struggle to remain robust to distribution shifts. Motivated by the impressive open-set performance and content generation capabilities of web-scale, large-capacity pre-trained models (i.e., foundation models) in research fields such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), we devote this survey to exploring (i) how these existing foundation models from NLP and CV can be applied to the field of robotics, and also exploring (ii) what a robotics-specific foundation model would look like. We begin by providing an overview of what constitutes a conventional robotic system and the fundamental barriers to making it universally applicable. Next, we establish a taxonomy to discuss current work exploring ways to leverage existing foundation models for robotics and develop ones catered to robotics. Finally, we discuss key challenges and promising future directions in using foundation models for enabling general-purpose robotic systems. We encourage readers to view our ``living`` GitHub repository of resources, including papers reviewed in this survey as well as related projects and repositories for developing foundation models for robotics.
LLM-BRAIn: AI-driven Fast Generation of Robot Behaviour Tree based on Large Language Model
This paper presents a novel approach in autonomous robot control, named LLM-BRAIn, that makes possible robot behavior generation, based on operator's commands. LLM-BRAIn is a transformer-based Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuned from Stanford Alpaca 7B model to generate robot behavior tree (BT) from the text description. We train the LLM-BRAIn on 8,5k instruction-following demonstrations, generated in the style of self-instruct using text-davinchi-003. The developed model accurately builds complex robot behavior while remaining small enough to be run on the robot's onboard microcomputer. The model gives structural and logical correct BTs and can successfully manage instructions that were not presented in training set. The experiment did not reveal any significant subjective differences between BTs generated by LLM-BRAIn and those created by humans (on average, participants were able to correctly distinguish between LLM-BRAIn generated BTs and human-created BTs in only 4.53 out of 10 cases, indicating that their performance was close to random chance). The proposed approach potentially can be applied to mobile robotics, drone operation, robot manipulator systems and Industry 4.0.
Dynamic Normativity: Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Value Alignment
The critical inquiry pervading the realm of Philosophy, and perhaps extending its influence across all Humanities disciplines, revolves around the intricacies of morality and normativity. Surprisingly, in recent years, this thematic thread has woven its way into an unexpected domain, one not conventionally associated with pondering "what ought to be": the field of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Central to morality and AI, we find "alignment", a problem related to the challenges of expressing human goals and values in a manner that artificial systems can follow without leading to unwanted adversarial effects. More explicitly and with our current paradigm of AI development in mind, we can think of alignment as teaching human values to non-anthropomorphic entities trained through opaque, gradient-based learning techniques. This work addresses alignment as a technical-philosophical problem that requires solid philosophical foundations and practical implementations that bring normative theory to AI system development. To accomplish this, we propose two sets of necessary and sufficient conditions that, we argue, should be considered in any alignment process. While necessary conditions serve as metaphysical and metaethical roots that pertain to the permissibility of alignment, sufficient conditions establish a blueprint for aligning AI systems under a learning-based paradigm. After laying such foundations, we present implementations of this approach by using state-of-the-art techniques and methods for aligning general-purpose language systems. We call this framework Dynamic Normativity. Its central thesis is that any alignment process under a learning paradigm that cannot fulfill its necessary and sufficient conditions will fail in producing aligned systems.
OS-Copilot: Towards Generalist Computer Agents with Self-Improvement
Autonomous interaction with the computer has been a longstanding challenge with great potential, and the recent proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has markedly accelerated progress in building digital agents. However, most of these agents are designed to interact with a narrow domain, such as a specific software or website. This narrow focus constrains their applicability for general computer tasks. To this end, we introduce OS-Copilot, a framework to build generalist agents capable of interfacing with comprehensive elements in an operating system (OS), including the web, code terminals, files, multimedia, and various third-party applications. We use OS-Copilot to create FRIDAY, a self-improving embodied agent for automating general computer tasks. On GAIA, a general AI assistants benchmark, FRIDAY outperforms previous methods by 35%, showcasing strong generalization to unseen applications via accumulated skills from previous tasks. We also present numerical and quantitative evidence that FRIDAY learns to control and self-improve on Excel and Powerpoint with minimal supervision. Our OS-Copilot framework and empirical findings provide infrastructure and insights for future research toward more capable and general-purpose computer agents.
CGMI: Configurable General Multi-Agent Interaction Framework
Benefiting from the powerful capabilities of large language models (LLMs), agents based on LLMs have shown the potential to address domain-specific tasks and emulate human behaviors. However, the content generated by these agents remains somewhat superficial, owing to their limited domain expertise and the absence of an effective cognitive architecture. To address this, we present the Configurable General Multi-Agent Interaction (CGMI) framework, designed to replicate human interactions in real-world scenarios. Specifically, we propose a tree-structured methodology for the assignment, detection, and maintenance of agent personality. Additionally, we designed a cognitive architecture equipped with a skill library based on the ACT* model, which contains memory, reflection, and planning modules. We have also integrated general agents to augment the virtual environment's realism. Using the CGMI framework, we simulated numerous classroom interactions between teacher and students. The experiments indicate that aspects such as the teaching methodology, curriculum, and student performance closely mirror real classroom settings. We will open source our work.
Counter-Strike Deathmatch with Large-Scale Behavioural Cloning
This paper describes an AI agent that plays the popular first-person-shooter (FPS) video game `Counter-Strike; Global Offensive' (CSGO) from pixel input. The agent, a deep neural network, matches the performance of the medium difficulty built-in AI on the deathmatch game mode, whilst adopting a humanlike play style. Unlike much prior work in games, no API is available for CSGO, so algorithms must train and run in real-time. This limits the quantity of on-policy data that can be generated, precluding many reinforcement learning algorithms. Our solution uses behavioural cloning - training on a large noisy dataset scraped from human play on online servers (4 million frames, comparable in size to ImageNet), and a smaller dataset of high-quality expert demonstrations. This scale is an order of magnitude larger than prior work on imitation learning in FPS games.
Agents: An Open-source Framework for Autonomous Language Agents
Recent advances on large language models (LLMs) enable researchers and developers to build autonomous language agents that can automatically solve various tasks and interact with environments, humans, and other agents using natural language interfaces. We consider language agents as a promising direction towards artificial general intelligence and release Agents, an open-source library with the goal of opening up these advances to a wider non-specialist audience. Agents is carefully engineered to support important features including planning, memory, tool usage, multi-agent communication, and fine-grained symbolic control. Agents is user-friendly as it enables non-specialists to build, customize, test, tune, and deploy state-of-the-art autonomous language agents without much coding. The library is also research-friendly as its modularized design makes it easily extensible for researchers. Agents is available at https://github.com/aiwaves-cn/agents.
Training Language Model Agents without Modifying Language Models
Researchers and practitioners have recently reframed powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents, enabling them to automate complex tasks largely via the use of specialized functions. To facilitate the development of LLM agents, we present a novel paradigm of training LLM agents without modifying the LLM weights, which is particularly useful when the LLMs are difficult or inaccessible for modifications. Inspired by how humans continuously forge tools to adapt to real-world tasks, rather than change our biological structure to fit a static set of tools, we propose to progressively forge agent's functions to better solve the downstream tasks instead of modifying the LLM weights. By treating the functions as learnable `agent parameters' and leveraging the fundamental idea of model training in artificial intelligence, we develop AgentOptimizer that employs the LLM to update agents' functions and devise an agent training algorithm with two strategies, roll-back, and early-stop, to streamline the training process. With extensive experiments, we showcase that the agent training paradigm could significantly improve the performance of representative LLM agents in various downstream tasks. We also study the behavior of the agent training regarding aspects like the learning curve and domain transferability.
Multi-Agent Collaboration: Harnessing the Power of Intelligent LLM Agents
In this paper, we present a novel framework for enhancing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by leveraging the power of multi-agent systems. Our framework introduces a collaborative environment where multiple intelligent agent components, each with distinctive attributes and roles, work together to handle complex tasks more efficiently and effectively. We demonstrate the practicality and versatility of our framework through case studies in artificial general intelligence (AGI), specifically focusing on the Auto-GPT and BabyAGI models. We also examine the "Gorilla" model, which integrates external APIs into the LLM. Our framework addresses limitations and challenges such as looping issues, security risks, scalability, system evaluation, and ethical considerations. By modeling various domains such as courtroom simulations and software development scenarios, we showcase the potential applications and benefits of our proposed multi-agent system. Our framework provides an avenue for advancing the capabilities and performance of LLMs through collaboration and knowledge exchange among intelligent agents.
ASSISTGUI: Task-Oriented Desktop Graphical User Interface Automation
Graphical User Interface (GUI) automation holds significant promise for assisting users with complex tasks, thereby boosting human productivity. Existing works leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) or LLM-based AI agents have shown capabilities in automating tasks on Android and Web platforms. However, these tasks are primarily aimed at simple device usage and entertainment operations. This paper presents a novel benchmark, AssistGUI, to evaluate whether models are capable of manipulating the mouse and keyboard on the Windows platform in response to user-requested tasks. We carefully collected a set of 100 tasks from nine widely-used software applications, such as, After Effects and MS Word, each accompanied by the necessary project files for better evaluation. Moreover, we propose an advanced Actor-Critic Embodied Agent framework, which incorporates a sophisticated GUI parser driven by an LLM-agent and an enhanced reasoning mechanism adept at handling lengthy procedural tasks. Our experimental results reveal that our GUI Parser and Reasoning mechanism outshine existing methods in performance. Nevertheless, the potential remains substantial, with the best model attaining only a 46% success rate on our benchmark. We conclude with a thorough analysis of the current methods' limitations, setting the stage for future breakthroughs in this domain.
The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery
One of the grand challenges of artificial general intelligence is developing agents capable of conducting scientific research and discovering new knowledge. While frontier models have already been used as aids to human scientists, e.g. for brainstorming ideas, writing code, or prediction tasks, they still conduct only a small part of the scientific process. This paper presents the first comprehensive framework for fully automatic scientific discovery, enabling frontier large language models to perform research independently and communicate their findings. We introduce The AI Scientist, which generates novel research ideas, writes code, executes experiments, visualizes results, describes its findings by writing a full scientific paper, and then runs a simulated review process for evaluation. In principle, this process can be repeated to iteratively develop ideas in an open-ended fashion, acting like the human scientific community. We demonstrate its versatility by applying it to three distinct subfields of machine learning: diffusion modeling, transformer-based language modeling, and learning dynamics. Each idea is implemented and developed into a full paper at a cost of less than $15 per paper. To evaluate the generated papers, we design and validate an automated reviewer, which we show achieves near-human performance in evaluating paper scores. The AI Scientist can produce papers that exceed the acceptance threshold at a top machine learning conference as judged by our automated reviewer. This approach signifies the beginning of a new era in scientific discovery in machine learning: bringing the transformative benefits of AI agents to the entire research process of AI itself, and taking us closer to a world where endless affordable creativity and innovation can be unleashed on the world's most challenging problems. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/SakanaAI/AI-Scientist
Understanding Telecom Language Through Large Language Models
The recent progress of artificial intelligence (AI) opens up new frontiers in the possibility of automating many tasks involved in Telecom networks design, implementation, and deployment. This has been further pushed forward with the evolution of generative artificial intelligence (AI), including the emergence of large language models (LLMs), which is believed to be the cornerstone toward realizing self-governed, interactive AI agents. Motivated by this, in this paper, we aim to adapt the paradigm of LLMs to the Telecom domain. In particular, we fine-tune several LLMs including BERT, distilled BERT, RoBERTa and GPT-2, to the Telecom domain languages, and demonstrate a use case for identifying the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard working groups. We consider training the selected models on 3GPP technical documents (Tdoc) pertinent to years 2009-2019 and predict the Tdoc categories in years 2020-2023. The results demonstrate that fine-tuning BERT and RoBERTa model achieves 84.6% accuracy, while GPT-2 model achieves 83% in identifying 3GPP working groups. The distilled BERT model with around 50% less parameters achieves similar performance as others. This corroborates that fine-tuning pretrained LLM can effectively identify the categories of Telecom language. The developed framework shows a stepping stone towards realizing intent-driven and self-evolving wireless networks from Telecom languages, and paves the way for the implementation of generative AI in the Telecom domain.