Zhaowei Zhang

Chandler Smith, Marwa Abdulhai, Manfred Diaz et al.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities for social interaction and are increasingly being deployed in situations where they might engage with both human and artificial agents. These interactions represent a critical frontier for LLM-based agents, yet existing evaluation methods fail to measure how well these capabilities generalize to novel social situations. In this paper, we introduce a method for evaluating the ability of LLM-based agents to cooperate in zero-shot, mixed-motive environments using Concordia, a natural language multi-agent simulation environment. Our method measures general cooperative intelligence by testing an agent's ability to identify and exploit opportunities for mutual gain across diverse partners and contexts. We present empirical results from the NeurIPS 2024 Concordia Contest, where agents were evaluated on their ability to achieve mutual gains across a suite of diverse scenarios ranging from negotiation to collective action problems. Our findings reveal significant gaps between current agent capabilities and the robust generalization required for reliable cooperation, particularly in scenarios demanding persuasion and norm enforcement.

Fanqi Kong, Ruijie Zhang, Huaxiao Yin et al.

Large language model based multi-agent systems (MAS) have unlocked significant advancements in tackling complex problems, but their increasing capability introduces a structural fragility that makes them difficult to debug. A key obstacle to improving their reliability is the severe scarcity of large-scale, diverse datasets for error attribution, as existing resources rely on costly and unscalable manual annotation. To address this bottleneck, we introduce Aegis, a novel framework for Automated error generation and attribution for multi-agent systems. Aegis constructs a large dataset of 9,533 trajectories with annotated faulty agents and error modes, covering diverse MAS architectures and task domains. This is achieved using a LLM-based manipulator that can adaptively inject context-aware errors into successful execution trajectories. Leveraging fine-grained labels and the structured arrangement of positive-negative sample pairs, Aegis supports three different learning paradigms: Supervised Fine-Tuning, Reinforcement Learning, and Contrastive Learning. We develop learning methods for each paradigm. Comprehensive experiments show that trained models consistently achieve substantial improvements in error attribution. Notably, several of our fine-tuned LLMs demonstrate performance competitive with or superior to proprietary models an order of magnitude larger, validating our automated data generation framework as a crucial resource for developing more robust and interpretable multi-agent systems. Our project website is available at https://kfq20.github.io/Aegis-Website/.

Siyuan Qi, Shuo Chen, Yexin Li et al.

The generalization of decision-making agents encompasses two fundamental elements: learning from past experiences and reasoning in novel contexts. However, the predominant emphasis in most interactive environments is on learning, often at the expense of complexity in reasoning. In this paper, we introduce CivRealm, an environment inspired by the Civilization game. Civilization's profound alignment with human history and society necessitates sophisticated learning, while its ever-changing situations demand strong reasoning to generalize. Particularly, CivRealm sets up an imperfect-information general-sum game with a changing number of players; it presents a plethora of complex features, challenging the agent to deal with open-ended stochastic environments that require diplomacy and negotiation skills. Within CivRealm, we provide interfaces for two typical agent types: tensor-based agents that focus on learning, and language-based agents that emphasize reasoning. To catalyze further research, we present initial results for both paradigms. The canonical RL-based agents exhibit reasonable performance in mini-games, whereas both RL- and LLM-based agents struggle to make substantial progress in the full game. Overall, CivRealm stands as a unique learning and reasoning challenge for decision-making agents. The code is available at https://github.com/bigai-ai/civrealm.