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Incentive design constitutes a foundational paradigm for influencing the behavior of strategic agents, wherein a system planner (principal) publicly commits to an incentive mechanism designed to align individual objectives with collective…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-08 Georgios Vasileiou , Lantian Zhang , Silun Zhang

Modern large language models (LLMs) are increasingly fine-tuned via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) or related reward optimisation schemes. While such procedures improve perceived helpfulness, we investigate whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Subramanyam Sahoo

Multi-agent coordination dilemmas expose a fundamental tension between individual optimization and collective welfare, yet characterizing such coordination requires metrics sensitive to temporal structure and collective dynamics. As a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Nikolaos Al. Papadopoulos , Konstantinos Psannis

Engineering electron correlations in quantum dot arrays demands navigation of high-dimensional, non-convex parameter spaces where hole doping fundamentally alters the physics. We present a comparative study of two control paradigms for the…

Strongly Correlated Electrons · Physics 2025-12-09 Shivanshu Dwivedi , Kalum Palandage

We formulate and study a general time-varying multi-agent system where players repeatedly compete under incomplete information. Our work is motivated by scenarios commonly observed in online advertising and retail marketplaces, where agents…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Ludovico Crippa , Yonatan Gur , Bar Light

In multi-agent systems (MAS), a single deceptive agent can nullify all gains of an agentic AI collective and evade deployed defenses. However, existing adversarial studies on MAS target only shallow tasks and do not consider adaptive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Alexandre Le Mercier , Chris Develder , Thomas Demeester

Large language models are typically aligned with human preferences by optimizing $\textit{reward models}$ (RMs) fitted to human feedback. However, human preferences are multi-faceted, and it is increasingly common to derive reward from a…

Understanding the convergence landscape of multi-agent learning is a fundamental problem of great practical relevance in many applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning. While it is known that learning dynamics converge to…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Martin Bichler , Davide Legacci , Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Matthias Oberlechner , Bary Pradelski

Large language models are increasingly deployed as specialized agents that plan, call tools, and take actions over extended horizons. Yet many existing evaluations assume a "clean interface" where dynamics are specified and stable, tools…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Pouya Pezeshkpour , Estevam Hruschka

AI agents dynamically acquire tools, orchestrate sub-agents, and transact across organizational boundaries, yet no existing security layer verifies what an agent can do, whether it executed what it claims, or what happened in a multi-agent…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Ziling Zhou

We study episodic reinforcement learning under unknown adversarial corruptions in both the rewards and the transition probabilities of the underlying system. We propose new algorithms which, compared to the existing results in (Lykouris et…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Yifang Chen , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

The Distributional Alignment Game framework provides a powerful variational perspective on Answer-Level Fine-Tuning (ALFT). However, standard algorithms for these games rely on estimating logarithmic rewards from small batches, introducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Mehryar Mohri , Jon Schneider , Yutao Zhong

AI agents are increasingly granted economic agency (executing trades, managing budgets, negotiating contracts, and spawning sub-agents), yet current frameworks gate this agency on capability benchmarks that are empirically uncorrelated with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Rahul Baxi

Collaboration with artificial intelligence (AI) has improved human decision-making across various domains by leveraging the complementary capabilities of humans and AI. Yet, humans systematically overrely on AI advice, even when their…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Joshua Holstein , Patrick Hemmer , Gerhard Satzger , Wei Sun

Current agentic AI architectures are fundamentally incompatible with the security and epistemological requirements of high-stakes scientific workflows. The problem is not inadequate alignment or insufficient guardrails, it is architectural:…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Manish Bhattarai , Minh Vu

We show that a threshold in decision capacity determines whether self-play reinforcement learning agents collapse under asymmetric rule perturbations. Across poker variants, matrix games, a dice game, and multiple learning algorithms,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Arahan Kujur

Reward function is essential in reinforcement learning (RL), serving as the guiding signal to incentivize agents to solve given tasks, however, is also notoriously difficult to design. In many cases, only imperfect rewards are available,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jianxiong Li , Xiao Hu , Haoran Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

In game-theoretic learning, several agents are simultaneously following their individual interests, so the environment is non-stationary from each player's perspective. In this context, the performance of a learning algorithm is often…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Yu-Guan Hsieh , Kimon Antonakopoulos , Panayotis Mertikopoulos

We study online learning problems in which a decision maker has to take a sequence of decisions subject to $m$ long-term constraints. The goal of the decision maker is to maximize their total reward, while at the same time achieving small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Matteo Castiglioni , Andrea Celli , Alberto Marchesi , Giulia Romano , Nicola Gatti

Autonomous agents have recently achieved remarkable progress across diverse domains, yet most evaluations focus on short-horizon, fully observable tasks. In contrast, many critical real-world tasks, such as large-scale software development,…