Recent advances in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning have prompted the modeling of intricate interactions between agents in simulated environments. In particular, the predator-prey dynamics have captured substantial interest and various simulations been tailored to unique requirements. To prevent further time-intensive developments, we introduce Aquarium, a comprehensive Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning environment for predator-prey interaction, enabling the study of emergent behavior. Aquarium is open source and offers a seamless integration of the PettingZoo framework, allowing a quick start with proven algorithm implementations. It features physics-based agent movement on a two-dimensional, edge-wrapping plane. The agent-environment interaction (observations, actions, rewards) and the environment settings (agent speed, prey reproduction, predator starvation, and others) are fully customizable. Besides a resource-efficient visualization, Aquarium supports to record video files, providing a visual comprehension of agent behavior. To demonstrate the environment's capabilities, we conduct preliminary studies which use PPO to train multiple prey agents to evade a predator. In accordance to the literature, we find Individual Learning to result in worse performance than Parameter Sharing, which significantly improves coordination and sample-efficiency.
The Software Supply Chain (SSC) has captured considerable attention from attackers seeking to infiltrate systems and undermine organizations. There is evidence indicating that adversaries utilize Social Engineering (SocE) techniques specifically aimed at software developers. That is, they interact with developers at critical steps in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), such as accessing Github repositories, incorporating code dependencies, and obtaining approval for Pull Requests (PR) to introduce malicious code. This paper aims to comprehensively explore the existing and emerging SocE tactics employed by adversaries to trick Software Engineers (SWEs) into delivering malicious software. By analyzing a diverse range of resources, which encompass established academic literature and real-world incidents, the paper systematically presents an overview of these manipulative strategies within the realm of the SSC. Such insights prove highly beneficial for threat modeling and security gap analysis.
Fairness in artificial intelligence models has gained significantly more attention in recent years, especially in the area of medicine, as fairness in medical models is critical to people's well-being and lives. High-quality medical fairness datasets are needed to promote fairness learning research. Existing medical fairness datasets are all for classification tasks, and no fairness datasets are available for medical segmentation, while medical segmentation is an equally important clinical task as classifications, which can provide detailed spatial information on organ abnormalities ready to be assessed by clinicians. In this paper, we propose the first fairness dataset for medical segmentation named Harvard-FairSeg with 10,000 subject samples. In addition, we propose a fair error-bound scaling approach to reweight the loss function with the upper error-bound in each identity group, using the segment anything model (SAM). We anticipate that the segmentation performance equity can be improved by explicitly tackling the hard cases with high training errors in each identity group. To facilitate fair comparisons, we utilize a novel equity-scaled segmentation performance metric to compare segmentation metrics in the context of fairness, such as the equity-scaled Dice coefficient. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our fair error-bound scaling approach either has superior or comparable fairness performance to the state-of-the-art fairness learning models. The dataset and code are publicly accessible via //ophai.hms.harvard.edu/harvard-fairseg10k.
Several adaptations of Transformers models have been developed in various domains since its breakthrough in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This trend has spread into the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR), including studies processing music data. However, the practice of leveraging NLP tools for symbolic music data is not novel in MIR. Music has been frequently compared to language, as they share several similarities, including sequential representations of text and music. These analogies are also reflected through similar tasks in MIR and NLP. This survey reviews NLP methods applied to symbolic music generation and information retrieval studies following two axes. We first propose an overview of representations of symbolic music adapted from natural language sequential representations. Such representations are designed by considering the specificities of symbolic music. These representations are then processed by models. Such models, possibly originally developed for text and adapted for symbolic music, are trained on various tasks. We describe these models, in particular deep learning models, through different prisms, highlighting music-specialized mechanisms. We finally present a discussion surrounding the effective use of NLP tools for symbolic music data. This includes technical issues regarding NLP methods and fundamental differences between text and music, which may open several doors for further research into more effectively adapting NLP tools to symbolic MIR.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in objective tasks such as open-domain question answering and mathematical reasoning, which can often be solved through recalling learned factual knowledge or chain-of-thought style reasoning. However, we find that the performance of LLMs in subjective tasks is still unsatisfactory, such as metaphor recognition, dark humor detection, etc. Compared to objective tasks, subjective tasks focus more on interpretation or emotional response rather than a universally accepted reasoning pathway. Based on the characteristics of the tasks and the strong dialogue-generation capabilities of LLMs, we propose RiC (Reasoning in Conversation), a method that focuses on solving subjective tasks through dialogue simulation. The motivation of RiC is to mine useful contextual information by simulating dialogues instead of supplying chain-of-thought style rationales, thereby offering potential useful knowledge behind dialogues for giving the final answers. We evaluate both API-based and open-source LLMs including GPT-4, ChatGPT, and OpenChat across twelve tasks. Experimental results show that RiC can yield significant improvement compared with various baselines.
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revealed their potential for achieving autonomous agents possessing human-level intelligence. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating LLM Agents either use static datasets, potentially leading to data leakage or focus only on single-agent scenarios, overlooking the complexities of multi-agent interactions. There is a lack of a benchmark that evaluates the diverse capabilities of LLM agents in multi-agent, dynamic environments. To this end, we introduce LLMArena, a novel and easily extensible framework for evaluating the diverse capabilities of LLM in multi-agent dynamic environments. LLMArena encompasses seven distinct gaming environments, employing Trueskill scoring to assess crucial abilities in LLM agents, including spatial reasoning, strategic planning, numerical reasoning, risk assessment, communication, opponent modeling, and team collaboration. We conduct an extensive experiment and human evaluation among different sizes and types of LLMs, showing that LLMs still have a significant journey ahead in their development towards becoming fully autonomous agents, especially in opponent modeling and team collaboration. We hope LLMArena could guide future research towards enhancing these capabilities in LLMs, ultimately leading to more sophisticated and practical applications in dynamic, multi-agent settings. The code and data will be available.
Recent advances in instruction-tuned Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have imbued the models with the ability to generate high-level, image-grounded explanations with ease. While such capability is largely attributed to the rich world knowledge contained within the Large Language Models (LLMs), our work reveals their shortcomings in fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) across six different benchmark settings. Most recent state-of-the-art LVLMs like LLaVa-1.5, InstructBLIP and GPT-4V not only severely deteriorate in terms of classification performance, e.g., average drop of 65.58 in EM for Stanford Dogs for LLaVA-1.5, but also struggle to generate an accurate explanation with detailed attributes based on the concept that appears within an input image despite their capability to generate holistic image-level descriptions. In-depth analyses show that instruction-tuned LVLMs exhibit modality gap, showing discrepancy when given textual and visual inputs that correspond to the same concept, preventing the image modality from leveraging the rich parametric knowledge within the LLMs. In an effort to further the community's endeavor in this direction, we propose a multiple granularity attribute-centric evaluation benchmark, Finer, which aims to establish a ground to evaluate LVLMs' fine-grained visual comprehension ability and provide significantly improved explainability.
The growing integration of large language models (LLMs) into social operations amplifies their impact on decisions in crucial areas such as economics, law, education, and healthcare, raising public concerns about these models' discrimination-related safety and reliability. However, prior discrimination measuring frameworks solely assess the average discriminatory behavior of LLMs, often proving inadequate due to the overlook of an additional discrimination-leading factor, i.e., the LLMs' prediction variation across diverse contexts. In this work, we present the Prejudice-Caprice Framework (PCF) that comprehensively measures discrimination in LLMs by considering both their consistently biased preference and preference variation across diverse contexts. Specifically, we mathematically dissect the aggregated contextualized discrimination risk of LLMs into prejudice risk, originating from LLMs' persistent prejudice, and caprice risk, stemming from their generation inconsistency. In addition, we utilize a data-mining approach to gather preference-detecting probes from sentence skeletons, devoid of attribute indications, to approximate LLMs' applied contexts. While initially intended for assessing discrimination in LLMs, our proposed PCF facilitates the comprehensive and flexible measurement of any inductive biases, including knowledge alongside prejudice, across various modality models. We apply our discrimination-measuring framework to 12 common LLMs, yielding intriguing findings: i) modern LLMs demonstrate significant pro-male stereotypes, ii) LLMs' exhibited discrimination correlates with several social and economic factors, iii) prejudice risk dominates the overall discrimination risk and follows a normal distribution, and iv) caprice risk contributes minimally to the overall risk but follows a fat-tailed distribution, suggesting that it is wild risk requiring enhanced surveillance.
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) can yield capable agents and control policies in several domains but is commonly plagued by prohibitively long training times. Additionally, in the case of continuous control problems, the applicability of learned policies on real-world embedded devices is limited due to the lack of real-time guarantees and portability of existing libraries. To address these challenges, we present RLtools, a dependency-free, header-only, pure C++ library for deep supervised and reinforcement learning. Its novel architecture allows RLtools to be used on a wide variety of platforms, from HPC clusters over workstations and laptops to smartphones, smartwatches, and microcontrollers. Specifically, due to the tight integration of the RL algorithms with simulation environments, RLtools can solve popular RL problems up to 76 times faster than other popular RL frameworks. We also benchmark the inference on a diverse set of microcontrollers and show that in most cases our optimized implementation is by far the fastest. Finally, RLtools enables the first-ever demonstration of training a deep RL algorithm directly on a microcontroller, giving rise to the field of Tiny Reinforcement Learning (TinyRL). The source code as well as documentation and live demos are available through our project page at //rl.tools.
The booming success of LLMs initiates rapid development in LLM agents. Though the foundation of an LLM agent is the generative model, it is critical to devise the optimal reasoning strategies and agent architectures. Accordingly, LLM agent research advances from the simple chain-of-thought prompting to more complex ReAct and Reflection reasoning strategy; agent architecture also evolves from single agent generation to multi-agent conversation, as well as multi-LLM multi-agent group chat. However, with the existing intricate frameworks and libraries, creating and evaluating new reasoning strategies and agent architectures has become a complex challenge, which hinders research investigation into LLM agents. Thus, we open-source a new AI agent library, AgentLite, which simplifies this process by offering a lightweight, user-friendly platform for innovating LLM agent reasoning, architectures, and applications with ease. AgentLite is a task-oriented framework designed to enhance the ability of agents to break down tasks and facilitate the development of multi-agent systems. Furthermore, we introduce multiple practical applications developed with AgentLite to demonstrate its convenience and flexibility. Get started now at: \url{//github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/AgentLite}.
Web agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in planning and executing multi-step interactions within complex web-based environments, fulfilling a wide range of web navigation tasks. Despite these advancements, the potential for LLM-powered agents to effectively engage with sequential user instructions in real-world scenarios has not been fully explored. In this work, we introduce a new task of Conversational Web Navigation, which necessitates sophisticated interactions that span multiple turns with both the users and the environment, supported by a specially developed dataset named Multi-Turn Mind2Web (MT-Mind2Web). To tackle the limited context length of LLMs and the context-dependency issue of the conversational tasks, we further propose a novel framework, named self-reflective memory-augmented planning (Self-MAP), which employs memory utilization and self-reflection techniques. Extensive experiments are conducted to benchmark the MT-Mind2Web dataset, and validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.