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People often optimize for long-term goals in collaboration: A mentor or companion doesn't just answer questions, but also scaffolds learning, tracks progress, and prioritizes the other person's growth over immediate results. In contrast,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Grace Liu , Brian Christian , Tsvetomira Dumbalska , Michiel A. Bakker , Rachit Dubey

Benchmarks are essential for quantitatively tracking progress in AI. As AI agents become increasingly capable, researchers and practitioners have introduced agentic benchmarks to evaluate agents on complex, real-world tasks. These…

We study misspecified Bayesian learning in principal-agent relationships, where an agent is assessed by an evaluator and rewarded by the market. The agent's outcome depends on their innate ability, costly effort -- whose effectiveness is…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-02 Federico Echenique , Anqi Li

Distributed learning has gained significant attention due to its advantages in scalability, privacy, and fault tolerance.In this paradigm, multiple agents collaboratively train a global model by exchanging parameters only with their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Ziqin Chen , Yongqiang Wang

In practice, incentive providers (i.e., principals) often cannot observe the reward realizations of incentivized agents, which is in contrast to many principal-agent models that have been previously studied. This information asymmetry…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Ilgin Dogan , Zuo-Jun Max Shen , Anil Aswani

Collusion among autonomous agents poses a critical security threat in embodied multi-agent systems (MAS), where coordinated behaviors can deviate from global objectives and lead to real-world consequences. Existing defenses, primarily based…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Qi Liu , Xiaohui Chen , Zhihui Zhao , Yaowen Zheng , Dan Yu , Zehua Zhang , Limin Sun , Yongle Chen

In the classical principal-agent hidden-action contract model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. In order to complete the task, the agent chooses an action from a set of actions, where each potential action…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Tomer Ezra , Stefano Leonardi , Matteo Russo

Automated regression testing is essential for maintaining rapid, high-quality delivery in Agile and Scrum organizations. Many teams, including Hacon (a Siemens company), face a persistent gap: validated test specifications accumulate faster…

Eliciting truthful reports from autonomous agents is a core problem in scalable AI oversight: a principal scores the agent's report using a strictly proper scoring rule, but the agent also benefits from the report through a non-accuracy…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Lauri Lovén , Sasu Tarkoma

Failure attribution in multi-agent systems -- pinpointing the exact step where a decisive error occurs -- is a critical yet unsolved challenge. Current methods treat this as a pattern recognition task over long conversation logs, leading to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Alva West , Yixuan Weng , Minjun Zhu , Zhen Lin , Zhiyuan Ning , Yue Zhang

Existing research has identified three structural performance bottlenecks in AI research agents: (1) synchronous single-GPU execution constrains sample throughput, limiting the benefit of search; (2) a generalization gap where…

Online platforms in the Internet Economy commonly incorporate recommender systems that recommend products (or "arms") to users (or "agents"). A key challenge in this domain arises from myopic agents who are naturally incentivized to exploit…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Xiaowu Dai , Wenlu Xu , Yuan Qi , Michael I. Jordan

Imitation is widely observed in populations of decision-making agents. Using our recent convergence results for asynchronous imitation dynamics on networks, we consider how such networks can be efficiently driven to a desired equilibrium…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-04-17 James Riehl , Pouria Ramazi , Ming Cao

The development lifecycle of generative AI systems requires continual evaluation, data acquisition, and annotation, which is costly in both resources and time. In practice, rapid iteration often makes it necessary to rely on synthetic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Anastasios N. Angelopoulos , Jacob Eisenstein , Jonathan Berant , Alekh Agarwal , Adam Fisch

Alignment research focuses on making individual AI systems reliable. Human institutions achieve reliable collective behaviour differently: they mitigate the risk posed by misaligned individuals through organisational structure. Multi-agent…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 William Waites

Value alignment problems arise in scenarios where the specified objectives of an AI agent don't match the true underlying objective of its users. The problem has been widely argued to be one of the central safety problems in AI.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Malek Mechergui , Sarath Sreedharan

It is widely known how the human ability to cooperate has influenced the thriving of our species. However, as we move towards a hybrid human-machine future, it is still unclear how the introduction of AI agents in our social interactions…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2022-05-16 Inês Terrucha , Elias Fernández Domingos , Francisco C. Santos , Pieter Simoens , Tom Lenaerts

Existing automated research systems operate as stateless, linear pipelines -- generating outputs without maintaining any persistent understanding of the research landscape they navigate. They process papers sequentially, propose ideas…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Yunbo Long

While multiagent systems have shown promise for tackling complex tasks via specialization, finetuning multiple agents simultaneously faces two key challenges: (1) credit assignment across agents, and (2) sample efficiency of expensive…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Ed Li , Junyu Ren , Cat Yan

As industry reports claim agentic AI systems deliver double-digit productivity gains and multi-trillion dollar economic potential, the validity of these claims has become critical for investment decisions, regulatory policy, and responsible…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Kiana Jafari Meimandi , Gabriela Aránguiz-Dias , Grace Ra Kim , Lana Saadeddin , Allie Griffith , Mykel J. Kochenderfer