Related papers: Randomness is sometimes necessary for coordination

Zero-shot coordination (ZSC) aims to enable agents to cooperate with independently trained partners without prior interaction, a key requirement for real-world multi-agent systems and human-AI collaboration. Existing approaches have largely…

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has attracted much research attention recently. However, unlike its single-agent counterpart, many theoretical and algorithmic aspects of MARL have not been well-understood. In this paper, we study…

Zero-shot coordination (ZSC) -- the ability to collaborate with unfamiliar partners -- is essential to making autonomous agents effective teammates. Existing ZSC methods evaluate coordination capabilities between two agents who have not…

We study fair multi-agent multi-armed bandit learning under collision-only coordination. Agents cannot communicate explicitly during learning and observe only their own rewards and whether collisions occur when several agents access the…

Current deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are still highly task-specific and lack the ability to generalize to new environments. Lifelong learning (LLL), however, aims at solving multiple tasks sequentially by efficiently…

We study the problem of computing a Maximal Independent Set (MIS) in distributed networks where each node is a rational agent whose payoff depends on whether it joins the MIS. Classical distributed algorithms assume that nodes follow the…

Successful coordination in Dec-POMDPs requires agents to adopt robust strategies and interpretable styles of play for their partner. A common failure mode is symmetry breaking, when agents arbitrarily converge on one out of many equivalent…

We study multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in infinite-horizon discounted zero-sum Markov games. We focus on the practical but challenging setting of decentralized MARL, where agents make decisions without coordination by a…

This paper presents a shared-control rehabilitation policy for a custom 6-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) upper-limb robot that decomposes complex reaching tasks into decoupled spatial axes. The patient governs the primary reaching direction…

Cooperative MARL often assumes frequent access to global information in a data buffer, such as team rewards or other agents' actions, which is typically unrealistic in decentralized MARL systems due to high communication costs. When…

Pooling heterogeneous datasets across domains is a common strategy in representation learning, but naive pooling can amplify distributional asymmetries and yield biased estimators, especially in settings where zero-shot generalization is…

Quantum sampling, a fundamental subroutine in numerous quantum algorithms, involves encoding a given probability distribution in the amplitudes of a pure state. Given the hefty cost of large-scale quantum storage, we initiate the study of…

Rates of missing data often depend on record-keeping policies and thus may change across times and locations, even when the underlying features are comparatively stable. In this paper, we introduce the problem of Domain Adaptation under…

As humans, robots, and software agents increasingly share safety-critical environments, coordination must move from static task allocation to managing uncertain commitments. Existing frameworks fall short: they either assume rigid, static…

Enterprise AI systems increasingly deploy multiple intelligent agents across mission-critical workflows that must satisfy hard policy constraints, bounded risk exposure, and comprehensive auditability (SOX, HIPAA, GDPR). Existing…

In a recent article [1] we surveyed advances related to adaptation, learning, and optimization over synchronous networks. Various distributed strategies were discussed that enable a collection of networked agents to interact locally in…

Developing mechanisms that flexibly adapt dialog systems to unseen tasks and domains is a major challenge in dialog research. Neural models implicitly memorize task-specific dialog policies from the training data. We posit that this…

We consider a game played between a hider, who hides a static object in one of several possible positions in a bounded planar region, and a searcher, who wishes to reach the object by querying sensors placed in the plane. The searcher is a…

As machine learning agents act more autonomously in the world, they will increasingly interact with each other. Unfortunately, in many social dilemmas like the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma, standard game theory predicts that ML agents will…

Inspired by applications such as supply chain management, epidemics, and social networks, we formulate a stochastic game model that addresses three key features common across these domains: 1) network-structured player interactions, 2)…