Daily Papers

Recent advances in generalist multi-agent systems (MAS) have largely followed a context-engineering plus centralized paradigm, where a planner agent coordinates multiple worker agents through unidirectional prompt passing. While effective under strong planner models, this design suffers from two critical limitations: (1) strong dependency on the planner's capability, which leads to degraded performance when a smaller LLM powers the planner; and (2) limited inter-agent communication, where collaboration relies on costly prompt concatenation and context injection, introducing redundancy and information loss. To address these challenges, we propose Anemoi, a semi-centralized MAS built on the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication MCP server from Coral Protocol. Unlike traditional designs, Anemoi enables structured and direct inter-agent collaboration, allowing all agents to monitor progress, assess results, identify bottlenecks, and propose refinements in real time. This paradigm reduces reliance on a single planner, supports adaptive plan updates, and minimizes redundant context passing, resulting in more scalable and cost-efficient execution. Evaluated on the GAIA benchmark, Anemoi achieved 52.73% accuracy with a small LLM (GPT-4.1-mini) as the planner, surpassing the strongest open-source baseline OWL (43.63%) by +9.09% under identical LLM settings. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/Coral-Protocol/Anemoi.

Existing skeleton-based action recognition methods typically follow a centralized learning paradigm, which can pose privacy concerns when exposing human-related videos. Federated Learning (FL) has attracted much attention due to its outstanding advantages in privacy-preserving. However, directly applying FL approaches to skeleton videos suffers from unstable training. In this paper, we investigate and discover that the heterogeneous human topology graph structure is the crucial factor hindering training stability. To address this limitation, we pioneer a novel Federated Skeleton-based Action Recognition (FSAR) paradigm, which enables the construction of a globally generalized model without accessing local sensitive data. Specifically, we introduce an Adaptive Topology Structure (ATS), separating generalization and personalization by learning a domain-invariant topology shared across clients and a domain-specific topology decoupled from global model aggregation.Furthermore, we explore Multi-grain Knowledge Distillation (MKD) to mitigate the discrepancy between clients and server caused by distinct updating patterns through aligning shallow block-wise motion features. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that FSAR outperforms state-of-the-art FL-based methods while inherently protecting privacy.

Federated learning (FL) has garnered significant attention as a prominent privacy-preserving Machine Learning (ML) paradigm. Decentralized FL (DFL) eschews traditional FL's centralized server architecture, enhancing the system's robustness and scalability. However, these advantages of DFL also create new vulnerabilities for malicious participants to execute adversarial attacks, especially model poisoning attacks. In model poisoning attacks, malicious participants aim to diminish the performance of benign models by creating and disseminating the compromised model. Existing research on model poisoning attacks has predominantly concentrated on undermining global models within the Centralized FL (CFL) paradigm, while there needs to be more research in DFL. To fill the research gap, this paper proposes an innovative model poisoning attack called DMPA. This attack calculates the differential characteristics of multiple malicious client models and obtains the most effective poisoning strategy, thereby orchestrating a collusive attack by multiple participants. The effectiveness of this attack is validated across multiple datasets, with results indicating that the DMPA approach consistently surpasses existing state-of-the-art FL model poisoning attack strategies.

Large language models (LLMs) possess extensive knowledge bases and strong reasoning capabilities, making them promising tools for complex, multi-agent planning in embodied environments. However, despite LLMs' advanced abilities and the sophisticated modular design of agentic methods, existing LLM-based planning algorithms remain limited by weak adaptation capabilities to multi-agent embodied scenarios. We address this limitation by introducing a framework that enables LLM agents to learn and evolve both before and during test time, equipping them with environment-relevant knowledge for better planning and enhanced communication for improved cooperation. Inspired by centralized training with decentralized execution in multi-agent reinforcement learning, we propose a Learn as Individuals, Evolve as a Team (LIET) paradigm for multi-agent LLMs adaptation. At the individual level, LLM agents learn a local utility function from exploratory datasets to better comprehend the embodied environment, which is then queried during test time to support informed decision-making. At the team level, LLM agents collaboratively and iteratively maintain and update a shared cooperation knowledge list based on new experiences, using it to guide more effective communication. By combining individual learning with team evolution, LIET enables comprehensive and flexible adaptation for LLM agents. Our experiments on Communicative Watch-And-Help and ThreeD-World Multi-Agent Transport benchmarks demonstrate that LIET, instantiated with both LLaMA and GPT-4o, outperforms existing baselines and exhibits strong cooperative planning abilities.

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling the collaborative training of models without centralized access to the raw data on local devices. In the typical FL paradigm (e.g., FedAvg), model weights are sent to and from the server each round to participating clients. Recently, the use of small pre-trained models has been shown to be effective in federated learning optimization and improving convergence. However, recent state-of-the-art pre-trained models are getting more capable but also have more parameters, known as the "Foundation Models." In conventional FL, sharing the enormous model weights can quickly put a massive communication burden on the system, especially if more capable models are employed. Can we find a solution to enable those strong and readily available pre-trained models in FL to achieve excellent performance while simultaneously reducing the communication burden? To this end, we investigate the use of parameter-efficient fine-tuning in federated learning and thus introduce a new framework: FedPEFT. Specifically, we systemically evaluate the performance of FedPEFT across a variety of client stability, data distribution, and differential privacy settings. By only locally tuning and globally sharing a small portion of the model weights, significant reductions in the total communication overhead can be achieved while maintaining competitive or even better performance in a wide range of federated learning scenarios, providing insight into a new paradigm for practical and effective federated systems.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable results across diverse downstream tasks, but their monolithic nature restricts scalability and efficiency in complex problem-solving. While recent research explores multi-agent collaboration among LLMs, most approaches rely on static organizational structures that struggle to adapt as task complexity and agent numbers grow, resulting in coordination overhead and inefficiencies. To this end, we propose a puppeteer-style paradigm for LLM-based multi-agent collaboration, where a centralized orchestrator ("puppeteer") dynamically directs agents ("puppets") in response to evolving task states. This orchestrator is trained via reinforcement learning to adaptively sequence and prioritize agents, enabling flexible and evolvable collective reasoning. Experiments on closed- and open-domain scenarios show that this method achieves superior performance with reduced computational costs. Analyses further reveal that the key improvements consistently stem from the emergence of more compact, cyclic reasoning structures under the orchestrator's evolution.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi), a financial ecosystem without centralized controlling organization, has introduced a new paradigm for lending and borrowing. However, its capital efficiency remains constrained by the inability to effectively assess the risk associated with each user/wallet. This paper introduces the 'On-Chain Credit Risk Score (OCCR Score) in DeFi', a probabilistic measure designed to quantify the credit risk associated with a wallet. By analyzing historical real-time on-chain activity as well as predictive scenarios, the OCCR Score may enable DeFi lending protocols to dynamically adjust Loan-to-Value (LTV) ratios and Liquidation Thresholds (LT) based on the risk profile of a wallet. Unlike existing wallet risk scoring models, which rely on heuristic-based evaluations, the OCCR Score offers a more objective and probabilistic approach, aligning closer to traditional credit risk assessment methodologies. This framework can further enhance DeFi's capital efficiency by incentivizing responsible borrowing behavior and optimizing risk-adjusted returns for lenders.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enabled the development of multi-agent systems where multiple LLM-based agents collaborate on complex tasks. However, existing systems often rely on centralized coordination, leading to scalability bottlenecks, reduced adaptability, and single points of failure. Privacy and proprietary knowledge concerns further hinder cross-organizational collaboration, resulting in siloed expertise. We propose AgentNet, a decentralized, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based framework that enables LLM-based agents to specialize, evolve, and collaborate autonomously in a dynamically structured Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Unlike prior approaches with static roles or centralized control, AgentNet allows agents to adjust connectivity and route tasks based on local expertise and context. AgentNet introduces three key innovations: (1) a fully decentralized coordination mechanism that eliminates the need for a central orchestrator, enhancing robustness and emergent intelligence; (2) dynamic agent graph topology that adapts in real time to task demands, ensuring scalability and resilience; and (3) a retrieval-based memory system for agents that supports continual skill refinement and specialization. By minimizing centralized control and data exchange, AgentNet enables fault-tolerant, privacy-preserving collaboration across organizations. Experiments show that AgentNet achieves higher task accuracy than both single-agent and centralized multi-agent baselines.

Two central paradigms have emerged in the reinforcement learning (RL) community: online RL and offline RL. In the online RL setting, the agent has no prior knowledge of the environment, and must interact with it in order to find an epsilon-optimal policy. In the offline RL setting, the learner instead has access to a fixed dataset to learn from, but is unable to otherwise interact with the environment, and must obtain the best policy it can from this offline data. Practical scenarios often motivate an intermediate setting: if we have some set of offline data and, in addition, may also interact with the environment, how can we best use the offline data to minimize the number of online interactions necessary to learn an epsilon-optimal policy? In this work, we consider this setting, which we call the FineTuneRL setting, for MDPs with linear structure. We characterize the necessary number of online samples needed in this setting given access to some offline dataset, and develop an algorithm, FTPedel, which is provably optimal. We show through an explicit example that combining offline data with online interactions can lead to a provable improvement over either purely offline or purely online RL. Finally, our results illustrate the distinction between verifiable learning, the typical setting considered in online RL, and unverifiable learning, the setting often considered in offline RL, and show that there is a formal separation between these regimes.

Transfer learning has recently become the dominant paradigm of machine learning. Pre-trained models fine-tuned for downstream tasks achieve better performance with fewer labelled examples. Nonetheless, it remains unclear how to develop models that specialise towards multiple tasks without incurring negative interference and that generalise systematically to non-identically distributed tasks. Modular deep learning has emerged as a promising solution to these challenges. In this framework, units of computation are often implemented as autonomous parameter-efficient modules. Information is conditionally routed to a subset of modules and subsequently aggregated. These properties enable positive transfer and systematic generalisation by separating computation from routing and updating modules locally. We offer a survey of modular architectures, providing a unified view over several threads of research that evolved independently in the scientific literature. Moreover, we explore various additional purposes of modularity, including scaling language models, causal inference, programme induction, and planning in reinforcement learning. Finally, we report various concrete applications where modularity has been successfully deployed such as cross-lingual and cross-modal knowledge transfer. Related talks and projects to this survey, are available at https://www.modulardeeplearning.com/.

Traffic incident detection plays a key role in intelligent transportation systems, which has gained great attention in transport engineering. In the past, traditional machine learning (ML) based detection methods achieved good performance under a centralised computing paradigm, where all data are transmitted to a central server for building ML models therein. Nowadays, deep neural networks based federated learning (FL) has become a mainstream detection approach to enable the model training in a decentralised manner while warranting local data governance. Such neural networks-centred techniques, however, have overshadowed the utility of well-established ML-based detection methods. In this work, we aim to explore the potential of potent conventional ML-based detection models in modern traffic scenarios featured by distributed data. We leverage an elegant but less explored distributed optimisation framework named Network Lasso, with guaranteed global convergence for convex problem formulations, integrate the potent convex ML model with it, and compare it with centralised learning, local learning, and federated learning methods atop a well-known traffic incident detection dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed network lasso-based approach provides a promising alternative to the FL-based approach in data-decentralised traffic scenarios, with a strong convergence guarantee while rekindling the significance of conventional ML-based detection methods.

The emergence of AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) marks a pivotal shift toward the Agentic Web, a new phase of the internet defined by autonomous, goal-driven interactions. In this paradigm, agents interact directly with one another to plan, coordinate, and execute complex tasks on behalf of users. This transition from human-driven to machine-to-machine interaction allows intent to be delegated, relieving users from routine digital operations and enabling a more interactive, automated web experience. In this paper, we present a structured framework for understanding and building the Agentic Web. We trace its evolution from the PC and Mobile Web eras and identify the core technological foundations that support this shift. Central to our framework is a conceptual model consisting of three key dimensions: intelligence, interaction, and economics. These dimensions collectively enable the capabilities of AI agents, such as retrieval, recommendation, planning, and collaboration. We analyze the architectural and infrastructural challenges involved in creating scalable agentic systems, including communication protocols, orchestration strategies, and emerging paradigms such as the Agent Attention Economy. We conclude by discussing the potential applications, societal risks, and governance issues posed by agentic systems, and outline research directions for developing open, secure, and intelligent ecosystems shaped by both human intent and autonomous agent behavior. A continuously updated collection of relevant studies for agentic web is available at: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/agentic-web.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) conferences are essential for advancing research, sharing knowledge, and fostering academic community. However, their rapid expansion has rendered the centralized conference model increasingly unsustainable. This paper offers a data-driven diagnosis of a structural crisis that threatens the foundational goals of scientific dissemination, equity, and community well-being. We identify four key areas of strain: (1) scientifically, with per-author publication rates more than doubling over the past decade to over 4.5 papers annually; (2) environmentally, with the carbon footprint of a single conference exceeding the daily emissions of its host city; (3) psychologically, with 71% of online community discourse reflecting negative sentiment and 35% referencing mental health concerns; and (4) logistically, with attendance at top conferences such as NeurIPS 2024 beginning to outpace venue capacity. These pressures point to a system that is misaligned with its core mission. In response, we propose the Community-Federated Conference (CFC) model, which separates peer review, presentation, and networking into globally coordinated but locally organized components, offering a more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient path forward for AI research.

Large language models (LLMs) mark a key shift in natural language processing (NLP), having advanced text generation, translation, and domain-specific reasoning. Closed-source models like GPT-4, powered by proprietary datasets and extensive computational resources, lead with state-of-the-art performance today. However, they face criticism for their "black box" nature and for limiting accessibility in a manner that hinders reproducibility and equitable AI development. By contrast, open-source initiatives like LLaMA and BLOOM prioritize democratization through community-driven development and computational efficiency. These models have significantly reduced performance gaps, particularly in linguistic diversity and domain-specific applications, while providing accessible tools for global researchers and developers. Notably, both paradigms rely on foundational architectural innovations, such as the Transformer framework by Vaswani et al. (2017). Closed-source models excel by scaling effectively, while open-source models adapt to real-world applications in underrepresented languages and domains. Techniques like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and instruction-tuning datasets enable open-source models to achieve competitive results despite limited resources. To be sure, the tension between closed-source and open-source approaches underscores a broader debate on transparency versus proprietary control in AI. Ethical considerations further highlight this divide. Closed-source systems restrict external scrutiny, while open-source models promote reproducibility and collaboration but lack standardized auditing documentation frameworks to mitigate biases. Hybrid approaches that leverage the strengths of both paradigms are likely to shape the future of LLM innovation, ensuring accessibility, competitive technical performance, and ethical deployment.

This study evaluates and extends the findings made by Piatti et al., who introduced GovSim, a simulation framework designed to assess the cooperative decision-making capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in resource-sharing scenarios. By replicating key experiments, we validate claims regarding the performance of large models, such as GPT-4-turbo, compared to smaller models. The impact of the universalization principle is also examined, with results showing that large models can achieve sustainable cooperation, with or without the principle, while smaller models fail without it. In addition, we provide multiple extensions to explore the applicability of the framework to new settings. We evaluate additional models, such as DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4o-mini, to test whether cooperative behavior generalizes across different architectures and model sizes. Furthermore, we introduce new settings: we create a heterogeneous multi-agent environment, study a scenario using Japanese instructions, and explore an "inverse environment" where agents must cooperate to mitigate harmful resource distributions. Our results confirm that the benchmark can be applied to new models, scenarios, and languages, offering valuable insights into the adaptability of LLMs in complex cooperative tasks. Moreover, the experiment involving heterogeneous multi-agent systems demonstrates that high-performing models can influence lower-performing ones to adopt similar behaviors. This finding has significant implications for other agent-based applications, potentially enabling more efficient use of computational resources and contributing to the development of more effective cooperative AI systems.

Graphs have often been used to answer questions about the interaction between real-world entities by taking advantage of their capacity to represent complex topologies. Complex networks are known to be graphs that capture such non-trivial topologies; they are able to represent human phenomena such as epidemic processes, the dynamics of populations, and the urbanization of cities. The investigation of complex networks has been extrapolated to many fields of science, with particular emphasis on computing techniques, including artificial intelligence. In such a case, the analysis of the interaction between entities of interest is transposed to the internal learning of algorithms, a paradigm whose investigation is able to expand the state of the art in Computer Science. By exploring this paradigm, this thesis puts together complex networks and machine learning techniques to improve the understanding of the human phenomena observed in pandemics, pendular migration, and street networks. Accordingly, we contribute with: (i) a new neural network architecture capable of modeling dynamic processes observed in spatial and temporal data with applications in epidemics propagation, weather forecasting, and patient monitoring in intensive care units; (ii) a machine-learning methodology for analyzing and predicting links in the scope of human mobility between all the cities of Brazil; and, (iii) techniques for identifying inconsistencies in the urban planning of cities while tracking the most influential vertices, with applications over Brazilian and worldwide cities. We obtained results sustained by sound evidence of advances to the state of the art in artificial intelligence, rigorous formalisms, and ample experimentation. Our findings rely upon real-world applications in a range of domains, demonstrating the applicability of our methodologies.

With the growing attention and investment in recent AI approaches such as large language models, the narrative that the larger the AI system the more valuable, powerful and interesting it is is increasingly seen as common sense. But what is this assumption based on, and how are we measuring value, power, and performance? And what are the collateral consequences of this race to ever-increasing scale? Here, we scrutinize the current scaling trends and trade-offs across multiple axes and refute two common assumptions underlying the 'bigger-is-better' AI paradigm: 1) that improved performance is a product of increased scale, and 2) that all interesting problems addressed by AI require large-scale models. Rather, we argue that this approach is not only fragile scientifically, but comes with undesirable consequences. First, it is not sustainable, as its compute demands increase faster than model performance, leading to unreasonable economic requirements and a disproportionate environmental footprint. Second, it implies focusing on certain problems at the expense of others, leaving aside important applications, e.g. health, education, or the climate. Finally, it exacerbates a concentration of power, which centralizes decision-making in the hands of a few actors while threatening to disempower others in the context of shaping both AI research and its applications throughout society.

In multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), independent learning (IL) often shows remarkable performance and easily scales with the number of agents. Yet, using IL can be inefficient and runs the risk of failing to successfully train, particularly in scenarios that require agents to coordinate their actions. Using centralised learning (CL) enables MARL agents to quickly learn how to coordinate their behaviour but employing CL everywhere is often prohibitively expensive in real-world applications. Besides, using CL in value-based methods often needs strong representational constraints (e.g. individual-global-max condition) that can lead to poor performance if violated. In this paper, we introduce a novel plug & play IL framework named Multi-Agent Network Selection Algorithm (MANSA) which selectively employs CL only at states that require coordination. At its core, MANSA has an additional agent that uses switching controls to quickly learn the best states to activate CL during training, using CL only where necessary and vastly reducing the computational burden of CL. Our theory proves MANSA preserves cooperative MARL convergence properties, boosts IL performance and can optimally make use of a fixed budget on the number CL calls. We show empirically in Level-based Foraging (LBF) and StarCraft Multi-agent Challenge (SMAC) that MANSA achieves fast, superior and more reliable performance while making 40% fewer CL calls in SMAC and using CL at only 1% CL calls in LBF.

The most popular framework for distributed training of machine learning models is the (synchronous) parameter server (PS). This paradigm consists of n workers, which iteratively compute updates of the model parameters, and a stateful PS, which waits and aggregates all updates to generate a new estimate of model parameters and sends it back to the workers for a new iteration. Transient computation slowdowns or transmission delays can intolerably lengthen the time of each iteration. An efficient way to mitigate this problem is to let the PS wait only for the fastest n-b updates, before generating the new parameters. The slowest b workers are called backup workers. The optimal number b of backup workers depends on the cluster configuration and workload, but also (as we show in this paper) on the hyper-parameters of the learning algorithm and the current stage of the training. We propose DBW, an algorithm that dynamically decides the number of backup workers during the training process to maximize the convergence speed at each iteration. Our experiments show that DBW 1) removes the necessity to tune b by preliminary time-consuming experiments, and 2) makes the training up to a factor 3 faster than the optimal static configuration.

Federated and decentralized machine learning leverage end-user devices for privacy-preserving training of models at lower operating costs than within a data center. In a round of Federated Learning (FL), a random sample of participants trains locally, then a central server aggregates the local models to produce a single model for the next round. In a round of Decentralized Learning (DL), all participants train locally and then aggregate with their immediate neighbors, resulting in many local models with residual variance between them. On the one hand, FL's sampling and lower model variance provides lower communication costs and faster convergence. On the other hand, DL removes the need for a central server and distributes the communication costs more evenly amongst nodes, albeit at a larger total communication cost and slower convergence. In this paper, we present MoDeST: Mostly-Consistent Decentralized Sampling Training. MoDeST implements decentralized sampling in which a random subset of nodes is responsible for training and aggregation every round: this provides the benefits of both FL and DL without their traditional drawbacks. Our evaluation of MoDeST on four common learning tasks: (i) confirms convergence as fast as FL, (ii) shows a 3x-14x reduction in communication costs compared to DL, and (iii) demonstrates that MoDeST quickly adapts to nodes joining, leaving, or failing, even when 80% of all nodes become unresponsive.

The deep neural nets of modern artificial intelligence (AI) have not achieved defining features of biological intelligence, including abstraction, causal learning, and energy-efficiency. While scaling to larger models has delivered performance improvements for current applications, more brain-like capacities may demand new theories, models, and methods for designing artificial learning systems. Here, we argue that this opportunity to reassess insights from the brain should stimulate cooperation between AI research and theory-driven computational neuroscience (CN). To motivate a brain basis of neural computation, we present a dynamical view of intelligence from which we elaborate concepts of sparsity in network structure, temporal dynamics, and interactive learning. In particular, we suggest that temporal dynamics, as expressed through neural synchrony, nested oscillations, and flexible sequences, provide a rich computational layer for reading and updating hierarchical models distributed in long-term memory networks. Moreover, embracing agent-centered paradigms in AI and CN will accelerate our understanding of the complex dynamics and behaviors that build useful world models. A convergence of AI/CN theories and objectives will reveal dynamical principles of intelligence for brains and engineered learning systems. This article was inspired by our symposium on dynamical neuroscience and machine learning at the 6th Annual US/NIH BRAIN Initiative Investigators Meeting.

AI agents have become increasingly adept at complex tasks such as coding, reasoning, and multimodal understanding. However, building generalist systems requires moving beyond individual agents to collective inference -- a paradigm where multi-agent systems with diverse, task-specialized agents complement one another through structured communication and collaboration. Today, coordination is usually handled with imprecise, ad-hoc natural language, which limits complex interaction and hinders interoperability with domain-specific agents. We introduce Agent context protocols (ACPs): a domain- and agent-agnostic family of structured protocols for agent-agent communication, coordination, and error handling. ACPs combine (i) persistent execution blueprints -- explicit dependency graphs that store intermediate agent outputs -- with (ii) standardized message schemas, enabling robust and fault-tolerant multi-agent collective inference. ACP-powered generalist systems reach state-of-the-art performance: 28.3 % accuracy on AssistantBench for long-horizon web assistance and best-in-class multimodal technical reports, outperforming commercial AI systems in human evaluation. ACPs are highly modular and extensible, allowing practitioners to build top-tier generalist agents quickly.

Many recent breakthroughs in deep learning were achieved by training increasingly larger models on massive datasets. However, training such models can be prohibitively expensive. For instance, the cluster used to train GPT-3 costs over \250 million. As a result, most researchers cannot afford to train state of the art models and contribute to their development. Hypothetically, a researcher could crowdsource the training of large neural networks with thousands of regular PCs provided by volunteers. The raw computing power of a hundred thousand 2500 desktops dwarfs that of a \$250M server pod, but one cannot utilize that power efficiently with conventional distributed training methods. In this work, we propose Learning@home: a novel neural network training paradigm designed to handle large amounts of poorly connected participants. We analyze the performance, reliability, and architectural constraints of this paradigm and compare it against existing distributed training techniques.

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has ushered in a new era of integrated systems that merge computational prowess with human decision-making. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Orchestrated Distributed Intelligence (ODI), a novel paradigm that reconceptualizes AI not as isolated autonomous agents, but as cohesive, orchestrated networks that work in tandem with human expertise. ODI leverages advanced orchestration layers, multi-loop feedback mechanisms, and a high cognitive density framework to transform static, record-keeping systems into dynamic, action-oriented environments. Through a comprehensive review of multi-agent system literature, recent technological advances, and practical insights from industry forums, we argue that the future of AI lies in integrating distributed intelligence within human-centric workflows. This approach not only enhances operational efficiency and strategic agility but also addresses challenges related to scalability, transparency, and ethical decision-making. Our work outlines key theoretical implications and presents a practical roadmap for future research and enterprise innovation, aiming to pave the way for responsible and adaptive AI systems that drive sustainable innovation in human organizations.

Pioneered by the foundational information theory by Claude Shannon and the visionary framework of machine intelligence by Alan Turing, the convergent evolution of information and communication technologies (IT/CT) has created an unbroken wave of connectivity and computation. This synergy has sparked a technological revolution, now reaching its peak with large artificial intelligence (AI) models that are reshaping industries and redefining human-machine collaboration. However, the realization of ubiquitous intelligence faces considerable challenges due to substantial resource consumption in large models and high communication bandwidth demands. To address these challenges, AI Flow has been introduced as a multidisciplinary framework that integrates cutting-edge IT and CT advancements, with a particular emphasis on the following three key points. First, device-edge-cloud framework serves as the foundation, which integrates end devices, edge servers, and cloud clusters to optimize scalability and efficiency for low-latency model inference. Second, we introduce the concept of familial models, which refers to a series of different-sized models with aligned hidden features, enabling effective collaboration and the flexibility to adapt to varying resource constraints and dynamic scenarios. Third, connectivity- and interaction-based intelligence emergence is a novel paradigm of AI Flow. By leveraging communication networks to enhance connectivity, the collaboration among AI models across heterogeneous nodes achieves emergent intelligence that surpasses the capability of any single model. The innovations of AI Flow provide enhanced intelligence, timely responsiveness, and ubiquitous accessibility to AI services, paving the way for the tighter fusion of AI techniques and communication systems.

Mathematical researchers, especially those in early-career positions, face critical decisions about topic specialization with limited information about the collaborative environments of different research areas. The aim of this paper is to study how the popularity of a research topic is associated with the structure of that topic's collaboration network, as observed by a suite of measures capturing organizational structure at several scales. We apply these measures to 1,938 algorithmically discovered topics across 121,391 papers sourced from arXiv metadata during the period 2020--2025. Our analysis, which controls for the confounding effects of network size, reveals a structural dichotomy--we find that popular topics organize into modular "schools of thought," while niche topics maintain hierarchical core-periphery structures centered around established experts. This divide is not an artifact of scale, but represents a size-independent structural pattern correlated with popularity. We also document a "constraint reversal": after controlling for size, researchers in popular fields face greater structural constraints on collaboration opportunities, contrary to conventional expectations. Our findings suggest that topic selection is an implicit choice between two fundamentally different collaborative environments, each with distinct implications for a researcher's career. To make these structural patterns transparent to the research community, we developed the Math Research Compass (https://mathresearchcompass.com), an interactive platform providing data on topic popularity and collaboration patterns across mathematical topics.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning based methods are significant for online planning of feasible and safe paths for agents in dynamic and uncertain scenarios. Although some methods like fully centralized and fully decentralized methods achieve a certain measure of success, they also encounter problems such as dimension explosion and poor convergence, respectively. In this paper, we propose a novel centralized training with decentralized execution method based on multi-agent reinforcement learning to solve the dynamic obstacle avoidance problem online. In this approach, each agent communicates only with the central planner or only with its neighbors, respectively, to plan feasible and safe paths online. We improve our methods based on the idea of model predictive control to increase the training efficiency and sample utilization of agents. The experimental results in both simulation, indoor, and outdoor environments validate the effectiveness of our method. The video is available at https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1gw41197hV/?vd_source=9de61aecdd9fb684e546d032ef7fe7bf

Conventional causal discovery methods rely on centralized data, which is inconsistent with the decentralized nature of data in many real-world situations. This discrepancy has motivated the development of federated causal discovery (FCD) approaches. However, existing FCD methods may be limited by their potentially restrictive assumptions of identifiable functional causal models or homogeneous data distributions, narrowing their applicability in diverse scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel FCD method attempting to accommodate arbitrary causal models and heterogeneous data. We first utilize a surrogate variable corresponding to the client index to account for the data heterogeneity across different clients. We then develop a federated conditional independence test (FCIT) for causal skeleton discovery and establish a federated independent change principle (FICP) to determine causal directions. These approaches involve constructing summary statistics as a proxy of the raw data to protect data privacy. Owing to the nonparametric properties, FCIT and FICP make no assumption about particular functional forms, thereby facilitating the handling of arbitrary causal models. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets to show the efficacy of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/lokali/FedCDH.git.

Present-day federated learning (FL) systems deployed over edge networks consists of a large number of workers with high degrees of heterogeneity in data and/or computing capabilities, which call for flexible worker participation in terms of timing, effort, data heterogeneity, etc. To satisfy the need for flexible worker participation, we consider a new FL paradigm called "Anarchic Federated Learning" (AFL) in this paper. In stark contrast to conventional FL models, each worker in AFL has the freedom to choose i) when to participate in FL, and ii) the number of local steps to perform in each round based on its current situation (e.g., battery level, communication channels, privacy concerns). However, such chaotic worker behaviors in AFL impose many new open questions in algorithm design. In particular, it remains unclear whether one could develop convergent AFL training algorithms, and if yes, under what conditions and how fast the achievable convergence speed is. Toward this end, we propose two Anarchic Federated Averaging (AFA) algorithms with two-sided learning rates for both cross-device and cross-silo settings, which are named AFA-CD and AFA-CS, respectively. Somewhat surprisingly, we show that, under mild anarchic assumptions, both AFL algorithms achieve the best known convergence rate as the state-of-the-art algorithms for conventional FL. Moreover, they retain the highly desirable {\em linear speedup effect} with respect of both the number of workers and local steps in the new AFL paradigm. We validate the proposed algorithms with extensive experiments on real-world datasets.

Interpretability is the study of explaining models in understandable terms to humans. At present, interpretability is divided into two paradigms: the intrinsic paradigm, which believes that only models designed to be explained can be explained, and the post-hoc paradigm, which believes that black-box models can be explained. At the core of this debate is how each paradigm ensures its explanations are faithful, i.e., true to the model's behavior. This is important, as false but convincing explanations lead to unsupported confidence in artificial intelligence (AI), which can be dangerous. This paper's position is that we should think about new paradigms while staying vigilant regarding faithfulness. First, by examining the history of paradigms in science, we see that paradigms are constantly evolving. Then, by examining the current paradigms, we can understand their underlying beliefs, the value they bring, and their limitations. Finally, this paper presents 3 emerging paradigms for interpretability. The first paradigm designs models such that faithfulness can be easily measured. Another optimizes models such that explanations become faithful. The last paradigm proposes to develop models that produce both a prediction and an explanation.

Fully decentralized learning enables the distribution of learning resources and decision-making capabilities across multiple user devices or nodes, and is rapidly gaining popularity due to its privacy-preserving and decentralized nature. Importantly, this crowdsourcing of the learning process allows the system to continue functioning even if some nodes are affected or disconnected. In a disaster scenario, communication infrastructure and centralized systems may be disrupted or completely unavailable, hindering the possibility of carrying out standard centralized learning tasks in these settings. Thus, fully decentralized learning can help in this case. However, transitioning from centralized to peer-to-peer communications introduces a dependency between the learning process and the topology of the communication graph among nodes. In a disaster scenario, even peer-to-peer communications are susceptible to abrupt changes, such as devices running out of battery or getting disconnected from others due to their position. In this study, we investigate the effects of various disruptions to peer-to-peer communications on decentralized learning in a disaster setting. We examine the resilience of a decentralized learning process when a subset of devices drop from the process abruptly. To this end, we analyze the difference between losing devices holding data, i.e., potential knowledge, vs. devices contributing only to the graph connectivity, i.e., with no data. Our findings on a Barabasi-Albert graph topology, where training data is distributed across nodes in an IID fashion, indicate that the accuracy of the learning process is more affected by a loss of connectivity than by a loss of data. Nevertheless, the network remains relatively robust, and the learning process can achieve a good level of accuracy.

The rapid expansion of distributed Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads beyond centralized data centers creates a demand for new communication substrates. These substrates must operate reliably in heterogeneous and permissionless environments, where Network Address Translators (NATs) and firewalls impose significant constraints. Existing solutions, however, are either designed for controlled data center deployments or implemented as monolithic systems that tightly couple machine learning logic with networking code. To address these limitations, we present Lattica, a decentralized cross-NAT communication framework designed to support distributed AI systems. Lattica integrates three core components. First, it employs a robust suite of NAT traversal mechanisms to establish a globally addressable peer-to-peer mesh. Second, it provides a decentralized data store based on Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs), ensuring verifiable and eventually consistent state replication. Third, it incorporates a content discovery layer that leverages distributed hash tables (DHTs) together with an optimized RPC protocol for efficient model synchronization. By integrating these components, Lattica delivers a complete protocol stack for sovereign, resilient, and scalable AI systems that operate independently of centralized intermediaries. It is directly applicable to edge intelligence, collaborative reinforcement learning, and other large-scale distributed machine learning scenarios.

The rapid advancement of ML models in critical sectors such as healthcare, finance, and security has intensified the need for robust data security, model integrity, and reliable outputs. Large multimodal foundational models, while crucial for complex tasks, present challenges in scalability, reliability, and potential misuse. Decentralized systems offer a solution by distributing workload and mitigating central points of failure, but they introduce risks of unauthorized access to sensitive data across nodes. We address these challenges with a comprehensive framework designed for responsible AI development. Our approach incorporates: 1) Zero-knowledge proofs for secure model verification, enhancing trust without compromising privacy. 2) Consensus-based verification checks to ensure consistent outputs across nodes, mitigating hallucinations and maintaining model integrity. 3) Split Learning techniques that segment models across different nodes, preserving data privacy by preventing full data access at any point. 4) Hardware-based security through trusted execution environments (TEEs) to protect data and computations. This framework aims to enhance security and privacy and improve the reliability and fairness of multimodal AI systems. Promoting efficient resource utilization contributes to more sustainable AI development. Our state-of-the-art proofs and principles demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in responsibly democratizing artificial intelligence, offering a promising approach for building secure and private foundational models.

Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities in data science, yet their practical deployment is often constrained by the challenge of discovering relevant data within large heterogeneous data lakes. Existing methods struggle with this: single-agent systems are quickly overwhelmed by large, heterogeneous files in the large data lakes, while multi-agent systems designed based on a master-slave paradigm depend on a rigid central controller for task allocation that requires precise knowledge of each sub-agent's capabilities. To address these limitations, we propose a novel multi-agent communication paradigm inspired by the blackboard architecture for traditional AI models. In this framework, a central agent posts requests to a shared blackboard, and autonomous subordinate agents -- either responsible for a partition of the data lake or general information retrieval -- volunteer to respond based on their capabilities. This design improves scalability and flexibility by eliminating the need for a central coordinator to have prior knowledge of all sub-agents' expertise. We evaluate our method on three benchmarks that require explicit data discovery: KramaBench and modified versions of DS-Bench and DA-Code to incorporate data discovery. Experimental results demonstrate that the blackboard architecture substantially outperforms baselines, including RAG and the master-slave multi-agent paradigm, achieving between 13% to 57% relative improvement in end-to-end task success and up to a 9% relative gain in F1 score for data discovery over the best-performing baselines across both proprietary and open-source LLMs. Our findings establish the blackboard paradigm as a scalable and generalizable communication framework for multi-agent systems.

Scaling has been critical in improving model performance and generalization in machine learning. It involves how a model's performance changes with increases in model size or input data, as well as how efficiently computational resources are utilized to support this growth. Despite successes in other areas, the study of scaling in Neural Network Interatomic Potentials (NNIPs) remains limited. NNIPs act as surrogate models for ab initio quantum mechanical calculations. The dominant paradigm here is to incorporate many physical domain constraints into the model, such as rotational equivariance. We contend that these complex constraints inhibit the scaling ability of NNIPs, and are likely to lead to performance plateaus in the long run. In this work, we take an alternative approach and start by systematically studying NNIP scaling strategies. Our findings indicate that scaling the model through attention mechanisms is efficient and improves model expressivity. These insights motivate us to develop an NNIP architecture designed for scalability: the Efficiently Scaled Attention Interatomic Potential (EScAIP). EScAIP leverages a multi-head self-attention formulation within graph neural networks, applying attention at the neighbor-level representations. Implemented with highly-optimized attention GPU kernels, EScAIP achieves substantial gains in efficiency--at least 10x faster inference, 5x less memory usage--compared to existing NNIPs. EScAIP also achieves state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of datasets including catalysts (OC20 and OC22), molecules (SPICE), and materials (MPTrj). We emphasize that our approach should be thought of as a philosophy rather than a specific model, representing a proof-of-concept for developing general-purpose NNIPs that achieve better expressivity through scaling, and continue to scale efficiently with increased computational resources and training data.

Natural language has long enabled human cooperation, but its lossy, ambiguous, and indirect nature limits the potential of collective intelligence. While machines are not subject to these constraints, most LLM-based multi-agent systems still rely solely on natural language, exchanging tokens or their embeddings. To go beyond language, we introduce a new paradigm, thought communication, which enables agents to interact directly mind-to-mind, akin to telepathy. To uncover these latent thoughts in a principled way, we formalize the process as a general latent variable model, where agent states are generated by an unknown function of underlying thoughts. We prove that, in a nonparametric setting without auxiliary information, both shared and private latent thoughts between any pair of agents can be identified. Moreover, the global structure of thought sharing, including which agents share which thoughts and how these relationships are structured, can also be recovered with theoretical guarantees. Guided by the established theory, we develop a framework that extracts latent thoughts from all agents prior to communication and assigns each agent the relevant thoughts, along with their sharing patterns. This paradigm naturally extends beyond LLMs to all modalities, as most observational data arise from hidden generative processes. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks validate the theory and demonstrate the collaborative advantages of thought communication. We hope this work illuminates the potential of leveraging the hidden world, as many challenges remain unsolvable through surface-level observation alone, regardless of compute or data scale.

In this paper, we focus on one centralized and one decentralized problem of active hypothesis testing in the presence of an eavesdropper. For the centralized problem including a single legitimate agent, we present a new framework based on NeuroEvolution (NE), whereas, for the decentralized problem, we develop a novel NE-based method for solving collaborative multi-agent tasks, which interestingly maintains all computational benefits of single-agent NE. The superiority of the proposed EAHT approaches over conventional active hypothesis testing policies, as well as learning-based methods, is validated through numerical investigations in an example use case of anomaly detection over wireless sensor networks.

Crowd workers are distributed and decentralized. While decentralization is designed to utilize independent judgment to promote high-quality results, it paradoxically undercuts behaviors and institutions that are critical to high-quality work. Reputation is one central example: crowdsourcing systems depend on reputation scores from decentralized workers and requesters, but these scores are notoriously inflated and uninformative. In this paper, we draw inspiration from historical worker guilds (e.g., in the silk trade) to design and implement crowd guilds: centralized groups of crowd workers who collectively certify each other's quality through double-blind peer assessment. A two-week field experiment compared crowd guilds to a traditional decentralized crowd work model. Crowd guilds produced reputation signals more strongly correlated with ground-truth worker quality than signals available on current crowd working platforms, and more accurate than in the traditional model.

Decentralised Machine Learning (DML) enables collaborative machine learning without centralised input data. Federated Learning (FL) and Edge Inference are examples of DML. While tools for DML (especially FL) are starting to flourish, many are not flexible and portable enough to experiment with novel processors (e.g., RISC-V), non-fully connected network topologies, and asynchronous collaboration schemes. We overcome these limitations via a domain-specific language allowing us to map DML schemes to an underlying middleware, i.e. the FastFlow parallel programming library. We experiment with it by generating different working DML schemes on x86-64 and ARM platforms and an emerging RISC-V one. We characterise the performance and energy efficiency of the presented schemes and systems. As a byproduct, we introduce a RISC-V porting of the PyTorch framework, the first publicly available to our knowledge.

Modern deep learning applications require increasingly more compute to train state-of-the-art models. To address this demand, large corporations and institutions use dedicated High-Performance Computing clusters, whose construction and maintenance are both environmentally costly and well beyond the budget of most organizations. As a result, some research directions become the exclusive domain of a few large industrial and even fewer academic actors. To alleviate this disparity, smaller groups may pool their computational resources and run collaborative experiments that benefit all participants. This paradigm, known as grid- or volunteer computing, has seen successful applications in numerous scientific areas. However, using this approach for machine learning is difficult due to high latency, asymmetric bandwidth, and several challenges unique to volunteer computing. In this work, we carefully analyze these constraints and propose a novel algorithmic framework designed specifically for collaborative training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for SwAV and ALBERT pretraining in realistic conditions and achieve performance comparable to traditional setups at a fraction of the cost. Finally, we provide a detailed report of successful collaborative language model pretraining with 40 participants.

The rapid development of machine learning and deep learning has introduced increasingly complex optimization challenges that must be addressed. Indeed, training modern, advanced models has become difficult to implement without leveraging multiple computing nodes in a distributed environment. Distributed optimization is also fundamental to emerging fields such as federated learning. Specifically, there is a need to organize the training process to minimize the time lost due to communication. A widely used and extensively researched technique to mitigate the communication bottleneck involves performing local training before communication. This approach is the focus of our paper. Concurrently, adaptive methods that incorporate scaling, notably led by Adam, have gained significant popularity in recent years. Therefore, this paper aims to merge the local training technique with the adaptive approach to develop efficient distributed learning methods. We consider the classical Local SGD method and enhance it with a scaling feature. A crucial aspect is that the scaling is described generically, allowing us to analyze various approaches, including Adam, RMSProp, and OASIS, in a unified manner. In addition to theoretical analysis, we validate the performance of our methods in practice by training a neural network.

Since the dawn of human civilization, trust has been the core challenge of social organization. Trust functions to reduce the effort spent in constantly monitoring others' actions in order to verify their assertions, thus facilitating cooperation by allowing groups to function with reduced complexity. To date, in modern societies, large scale trust is almost exclusively provided by large centralized institutions. Specifically in the case of the Internet, Big Tech companies maintain the largest Internet platforms where users can interact, transact and share information. Thus, they control who can interact and conduct transactions through their monopoly of online trust. However, as recent events have shown, allowing for-profit corporations to act as gatekeepers to the online world comes with a litany of problems. While so far ecosystems of trust on the Internet could only be feasibly created by large institutions, Web3 proponents have a vision of the Internet where trust is generated without centralised actors. They attempt to do so by creating an ecosystem of trust constructed using decentralised technology. This survey explores this elusive goal of Web3 to create a "Universal Trust Machine", which in a true decentralised paradigm would be owned by both nobody and everybody. In order to do so, we first motivate the decades-old problem of generating trust without an intermediary by discussing Robert Axelrod's research on the evolution of cooperation. Next, we present the challenges that would have to be overcome in order to enable long term cooperation. We proceed to present various reputation systems, all of which present promising techniques for encouraging trustworthy behaviour. Then, we discuss Distributed Ledger technologies whose secure transaction facilitating and privacy preserving techniques promise to be a good complement to the current limitations of vanilla reputation systems.

This document serves as a position paper that outlines the authors' vision for a potential pathway towards generalist robots. The purpose of this document is to share the excitement of the authors with the community and highlight a promising research direction in robotics and AI. The authors believe the proposed paradigm is a feasible path towards accomplishing the long-standing goal of robotics research: deploying robots, or embodied AI agents more broadly, in various non-factory real-world settings to perform diverse tasks. This document presents a specific idea for mining knowledge in the latest large-scale foundation models for robotics research. Instead of directly using or adapting these models to produce low-level policies and actions, it advocates for a fully automated generative pipeline (termed as generative simulation), which uses these models to generate diversified tasks, scenes and training supervisions at scale, thereby scaling up low-level skill learning and ultimately leading to a foundation model for robotics that empowers generalist robots. The authors are actively pursuing this direction, but in the meantime, they recognize that the ambitious goal of building generalist robots with large-scale policy training demands significant resources such as computing power and hardware, and research groups in academia alone may face severe resource constraints in implementing the entire vision. Therefore, the authors believe sharing their thoughts at this early stage could foster discussions, attract interest towards the proposed pathway and related topics from industry groups, and potentially spur significant technical advancements in the field.

In recent years, the state-of-the-art in deep learning has been dominated by very large models that have been pre-trained on vast amounts of data. The paradigm is very simple: Investing more computational resources (optimally) leads to better performance, and even predictably so; neural scaling laws have been derived that accurately forecast the performance of a network for a desired level of compute. This leads to the notion of a "compute-optimal" model, i.e. a model that allocates a given level of compute during training optimally to maximise performance. In this work, we extend the concept of optimality by allowing for an "adaptive" model, i.e. a model that can change its shape during the course of training. By allowing the shape to adapt, we can optimally traverse between the underlying scaling laws, leading to a significant reduction in the required compute to reach a given target performance. We focus on vision tasks and the family of Vision Transformers, where the patch size as well as the width naturally serve as adaptive shape parameters. We demonstrate that, guided by scaling laws, we can design compute-optimal adaptive models that beat their "static" counterparts.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked interest in their application to IoT and automation systems, particularly for facilitating device management through natural language instructions. However, existing centralized approaches face significant scalability challenges when managing and coordinating the collaboration between IoT devices of diverse capabilities in large-scale heterogeneous IoT systems. This paper introduces LLMind 2.0, a distributed IoT automation framework that addresses the scalability challenges through lightweight LLM-empowered device agents via natural language-based machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. Unlike previous LLM-controlled automation systems that rely on a centralized coordinator to generate device-specific code to be executed on individual devices, LLMind 2.0 distributes intelligence across individual devices through lightweight LLMs embedded in IoT devices. The central coordinator translates human instructions into simple subtasks described in natural human language, which are then processed by device-specific agents to generate device-specific code locally at the associated devices. This approach transcends device heterogeneity barriers by using natural language as a unified communication medium, enabling seamless collaboration between devices from different manufacturers. The system incorporates several key innovations: a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mechanism for accurate subtask-to-API mapping, fine-tuned lightweight LLMs for reliable code generation, and a finite state machine-based task execution framework. Experimental validation in multi-robot warehouse scenarios and real-world WiFi network deployments demonstrates significant improvements in scalability, reliability, and privacy protection compared to the centralized approach.

Foundation models have emerged as critical components in a variety of artificial intelligence applications, and showcase significant success in natural language processing and several other domains. Meanwhile, the field of graph machine learning is witnessing a paradigm transition from shallow methods to more sophisticated deep learning approaches. The capabilities of foundation models to generalize and adapt motivate graph machine learning researchers to discuss the potential of developing a new graph learning paradigm. This paradigm envisions models that are pre-trained on extensive graph data and can be adapted for various graph tasks. Despite this burgeoning interest, there is a noticeable lack of clear definitions and systematic analyses pertaining to this new domain. To this end, this article introduces the concept of Graph Foundation Models (GFMs), and offers an exhaustive explanation of their key characteristics and underlying technologies. We proceed to classify the existing work related to GFMs into three distinct categories, based on their dependence on graph neural networks and large language models. In addition to providing a thorough review of the current state of GFMs, this article also outlooks potential avenues for future research in this rapidly evolving domain.

Developing intelligent agents for long-term cooperation in dynamic open-world scenarios is a major challenge in multi-agent systems. Traditional Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) frameworks like centralized training decentralized execution (CTDE) struggle with scalability and flexibility. They require centralized long-term planning, which is difficult without custom reward functions, and face challenges in processing multi-modal data. CTDE approaches also assume fixed cooperation strategies, making them impractical in dynamic environments where agents need to adapt and plan independently. To address decentralized multi-agent cooperation, we propose Decentralized Adaptive Knowledge Graph Memory and Structured Communication System (DAMCS) in a novel Multi-agent Crafter environment. Our generative agents, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), are more scalable than traditional MARL agents by leveraging external knowledge and language for long-term planning and reasoning. Instead of fully sharing information from all past experiences, DAMCS introduces a multi-modal memory system organized as a hierarchical knowledge graph and a structured communication protocol to optimize agent cooperation. This allows agents to reason from past interactions and share relevant information efficiently. Experiments on novel multi-agent open-world tasks show that DAMCS outperforms both MARL and LLM baselines in task efficiency and collaboration. Compared to single-agent scenarios, the two-agent scenario achieves the same goal with 63% fewer steps, and the six-agent scenario with 74% fewer steps, highlighting the importance of adaptive memory and structured communication in achieving long-term goals. We publicly release our project at: https://happyeureka.github.io/damcs.

This paper proposes a Right to AI, which asserts that individuals and communities should meaningfully participate in the development and governance of the AI systems that shape their lives. Motivated by the increasing deployment of AI in critical domains and inspired by Henri Lefebvre's concept of the Right to the City, we reconceptualize AI as a societal infrastructure, rather than merely a product of expert design. In this paper, we critically evaluate how generative agents, large-scale data extraction, and diverse cultural values bring new complexities to AI oversight. The paper proposes that grassroots participatory methodologies can mitigate biased outcomes and enhance social responsiveness. It asserts that data is socially produced and should be managed and owned collectively. Drawing on Sherry Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen Participation and analyzing nine case studies, the paper develops a four-tier model for the Right to AI that situates the current paradigm and envisions an aspirational future. It proposes recommendations for inclusive data ownership, transparent design processes, and stakeholder-driven oversight. We also discuss market-led and state-centric alternatives and argue that participatory approaches offer a better balance between technical efficiency and democratic legitimacy.

Training dense LLMs requires enormous amounts of data and centralized compute, which introduces fundamental bottlenecks and ever-growing costs for large models. Several studies aim to reduce this dependency on centralization by reducing the communication overhead of training dense models. Taking this idea of reducing communication overhead to a natural extreme, by training embarrassingly parallelizable ensembles of small independent experts, has been shown to outperform large dense models trained in traditional centralized settings. However, existing studies do not take into account underlying differences amongst data domains and treat them as monolithic, regardless of their underlying complexity, size, or distribution. In this paper, we explore the effects of introducing heterogeneity to these ensembles of domain expert models. Specifically, by allowing models within the ensemble to vary in size--as well as the number of training steps taken depending on the training data's domain--we study the effect heterogeneity has on these ensembles when evaluated against domains included in, and excluded from, the training set. We use the same compute budget to train heterogeneous ensembles and homogeneous baselines for comparison. We show that the heterogeneous ensembles achieve the lowest perplexity scores in 20 out of the 21 data domains used in the evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/gensyn-ai/hdee.

Establishing a unified theory of cognition has been a major goal of psychology. While there have been previous attempts to instantiate such theories by building computational models, we currently do not have one model that captures the human mind in its entirety. Here we introduce Centaur, a computational model that can predict and simulate human behavior in any experiment expressible in natural language. We derived Centaur by finetuning a state-of-the-art language model on a novel, large-scale data set called Psych-101. Psych-101 reaches an unprecedented scale, covering trial-by-trial data from over 60,000 participants performing over 10,000,000 choices in 160 experiments. Centaur not only captures the behavior of held-out participants better than existing cognitive models, but also generalizes to new cover stories, structural task modifications, and entirely new domains. Furthermore, we find that the model's internal representations become more aligned with human neural activity after finetuning. Taken together, Centaur is the first real candidate for a unified model of human cognition. We anticipate that it will have a disruptive impact on the cognitive sciences, challenging the existing paradigm for developing computational models.

In numerous artificial intelligence applications, the collaborative efforts of multiple intelligent agents are imperative for the successful attainment of target objectives. To enhance coordination among these agents, a distributed communication framework is often employed. However, indiscriminate information sharing among all agents can be resource-intensive, and the adoption of manually pre-defined communication architectures imposes constraints on inter-agent communication, thus limiting the potential for effective collaboration. Moreover, the communication framework often remains static during inference, which may result in sustained high resource consumption, as in most cases, only key decisions necessitate information sharing among agents. In this study, we introduce a novel approach wherein we conceptualize the communication architecture among agents as a learnable graph. We formulate this problem as the task of determining the communication graph while enabling the architecture parameters to update normally, thus necessitating a bi-level optimization process. Utilizing continuous relaxation of the graph representation and incorporating attention units, our proposed approach, CommFormer, efficiently optimizes the communication graph and concurrently refines architectural parameters through gradient descent in an end-to-end manner. Additionally, we introduce a temporal gating mechanism for each agent, enabling dynamic decisions on whether to receive shared information at a given time, based on current observations, thus improving decision-making efficiency. Extensive experiments on a variety of cooperative tasks substantiate the robustness of our model across diverse cooperative scenarios, where agents are able to develop more coordinated and sophisticated strategies regardless of changes in the number of agents.

Many areas of deep learning benefit from using increasingly larger neural networks trained on public data, as is the case for pre-trained models for NLP and computer vision. Training such models requires a lot of computational resources (e.g., HPC clusters) that are not available to small research groups and independent researchers. One way to address it is for several smaller groups to pool their computational resources together and train a model that benefits all participants. Unfortunately, in this case, any participant can jeopardize the entire training run by sending incorrect updates, deliberately or by mistake. Training in presence of such peers requires specialized distributed training algorithms with Byzantine tolerance. These algorithms often sacrifice efficiency by introducing redundant communication or passing all updates through a trusted server, making it infeasible to apply them to large-scale deep learning, where models can have billions of parameters. In this work, we propose a novel protocol for secure (Byzantine-tolerant) decentralized training that emphasizes communication efficiency.

In this study, we introduce "CosmoAgent," an innovative artificial intelligence framework utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate complex interactions between human and extraterrestrial civilizations, with a special emphasis on Stephen Hawking's cautionary advice about not sending radio signals haphazardly into the universe. The goal is to assess the feasibility of peaceful coexistence while considering potential risks that could threaten well-intentioned civilizations. Employing mathematical models and state transition matrices, our approach quantitatively evaluates the development trajectories of civilizations, offering insights into future decision-making at critical points of growth and saturation. Furthermore, the paper acknowledges the vast diversity in potential living conditions across the universe, which could foster unique cosmologies, ethical codes, and worldviews among various civilizations. Recognizing the Earth-centric bias inherent in current LLM designs, we propose the novel concept of using LLMs with diverse ethical paradigms and simulating interactions between entities with distinct moral principles. This innovative research provides a new way to understand complex inter-civilizational dynamics, expanding our perspective while pioneering novel strategies for conflict resolution, crucial for preventing interstellar conflicts. We have also released the code and datasets to enable further academic investigation into this interesting area of research. The code is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/AlienAgent.

Meta-learning usually refers to a learning algorithm that learns from other learning algorithms. The problem of uncertainty in the predictions of neural networks shows that the world is only partially predictable and a learned neural network cannot generalize to its ever-changing surrounding environments. Therefore, the question is how a predictive model can represent multiple predictions simultaneously. We aim to provide a fundamental understanding of learning to learn in the contents of Decentralized Neural Networks (Decentralized NNs) and we believe this is one of the most important questions and prerequisites to building an autonomous intelligence machine. To this end, we shall demonstrate several pieces of evidence for tackling the problems above with Meta Learning in Decentralized NNs. In particular, we will present three different approaches to building such a decentralized learning system: (1) learning from many replica neural networks, (2) building the hierarchy of neural networks for different functions, and (3) leveraging different modality experts to learn cross-modal representations.

With recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), Agentic AI has become phenomenal in real-world applications, moving toward multiple LLM-based agents to perceive, learn, reason, and act collaboratively. These LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) enable groups of intelligent agents to coordinate and solve complex tasks collectively at scale, transitioning from isolated models to collaboration-centric approaches. This work provides an extensive survey of the collaborative aspect of MASs and introduces an extensible framework to guide future research. Our framework characterizes collaboration mechanisms based on key dimensions: actors (agents involved), types (e.g., cooperation, competition, or coopetition), structures (e.g., peer-to-peer, centralized, or distributed), strategies (e.g., role-based or model-based), and coordination protocols. Through a review of existing methodologies, our findings serve as a foundation for demystifying and advancing LLM-based MASs toward more intelligent and collaborative solutions for complex, real-world use cases. In addition, various applications of MASs across diverse domains, including 5G/6G networks, Industry 5.0, question answering, and social and cultural settings, are also investigated, demonstrating their wider adoption and broader impacts. Finally, we identify key lessons learned, open challenges, and potential research directions of MASs towards artificial collective intelligence.

Communication costs within Federated learning hinder the system scalability for reaching more data from more clients. The proposed FL adopts a hub-and-spoke network topology. All clients communicate through the central server. Hence, reducing communication overheads via techniques such as data compression has been proposed to mitigate this issue. Another challenge of federated learning is unbalanced data distribution, data on each client are not independent and identically distributed (non-IID) in a typical federated learning setting. In this paper, we proposed a new compression compensation scheme called Global Momentum Fusion (GMF) which reduces communication overheads between FL clients and the server and maintains comparable model accuracy in the presence of non-IID data. GitHub repository: https://github.com/tony92151/global-momentum-fusion-fl

Traditional recommender systems usually take the user-platform paradigm, where users are directly exposed under the control of the platform's recommendation algorithms. However, the defect of recommendation algorithms may put users in very vulnerable positions under this paradigm. First, many sophisticated models are often designed with commercial objectives in mind, focusing on the platform's benefits, which may hinder their ability to protect and capture users' true interests. Second, these models are typically optimized using data from all users, which may overlook individual user's preferences. Due to these shortcomings, users may experience several disadvantages under the traditional user-platform direct exposure paradigm, such as lack of control over the recommender system, potential manipulation by the platform, echo chamber effects, or lack of personalization for less active users due to the dominance of active users during collaborative learning. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop a new paradigm to protect user interests and alleviate these issues. Recently, some researchers have introduced LLM agents to simulate user behaviors, these approaches primarily aim to optimize platform-side performance, leaving core issues in recommender systems unresolved. To address these limitations, we propose a new user-agent-platform paradigm, where agent serves as the protective shield between user and recommender system that enables indirect exposure.

We define Agency as the emergent capacity of AI systems to function as autonomous agents actively discovering problems, formulating hypotheses, and executing solutions through self-directed engagement with environments and tools. This fundamental capability marks the dawn of the Age of AI Agency, driven by a critical industry shift: the urgent need for AI systems that don't just think, but work. While current AI excels at reasoning and generating responses, industries demand autonomous agents that can execute tasks, operate tools, and drive real-world outcomes. As agentic intelligence becomes the defining characteristic separating cognitive systems from productive workers, efficiently cultivating machine autonomy becomes paramount. Current approaches assume that more data yields better agency, following traditional scaling laws from language modeling. We fundamentally challenge this paradigm. LIMI (Less Is More for Intelligent Agency) demonstrates that agency follows radically different development principles. Through strategic focus on collaborative software development and scientific research workflows, we show that sophisticated agentic intelligence can emerge from minimal but strategically curated demonstrations of autonomous behavior. Using only 78 carefully designed training samples, LIMI achieves 73.5% on comprehensive agency benchmarks, dramatically outperforming state-of-the-art models: Kimi-K2-Instruct (24.1%), DeepSeek-V3.1 (11.9%), Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct (27.5%), and GLM-4.5 (45.1%). Most strikingly, LIMI demonstrates 53.7% improvement over models trained on 10,000 samples-achieving superior agentic intelligence with 128 times fewer samples. Our findings establish the Agency Efficiency Principle: machine autonomy emerges not from data abundance but from strategic curation of high-quality agentic demonstrations.

Catalyzed by the popularity of blockchain technology, there has recently been a renewed interest in the design, implementation and evaluation of decentralized systems. Most of these systems are intended to be deployed at scale and in heterogeneous environments with real users and unpredictable workloads. Nevertheless, most research in this field evaluates such systems in controlled environments that poorly reflect the complex conditions of real-world environments. In this work, we argue that deployment is crucial to understanding decentralized mechanisms in a real-world environment and an enabler to building more robust and sustainable systems. We highlight the merits of deployment by comparing this approach with other experimental setups and show how our lab applied a deployment-first methodology. We then outline how we use Tribler, our peer-to-peer file-sharing application, to deploy and monitor decentralized mechanisms at scale. We illustrate the application of our methodology by describing a deployment trial in experimental tokenomics. Finally, we summarize four lessons learned from multiple deployment trials where we applied our methodology.

Federated learning is a distributed machine learning paradigm in which a large number of clients coordinate with a central server to learn a model without sharing their own training data. Standard federated optimization methods such as Federated Averaging (FedAvg) are often difficult to tune and exhibit unfavorable convergence behavior. In non-federated settings, adaptive optimization methods have had notable success in combating such issues. In this work, we propose federated versions of adaptive optimizers, including Adagrad, Adam, and Yogi, and analyze their convergence in the presence of heterogeneous data for general non-convex settings. Our results highlight the interplay between client heterogeneity and communication efficiency. We also perform extensive experiments on these methods and show that the use of adaptive optimizers can significantly improve the performance of federated learning.

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has led to the widespread deployment of LLM agents across diverse industries, including customer service, content generation, data analysis, and even healthcare. However, as more LLM agents are deployed, a major issue has emerged: there is no standard way for these agents to communicate with external tools or data sources. This lack of standardized protocols makes it difficult for agents to work together or scale effectively, and it limits their ability to tackle complex, real-world tasks. A unified communication protocol for LLM agents could change this. It would allow agents and tools to interact more smoothly, encourage collaboration, and triggering the formation of collective intelligence. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of existing agent protocols, proposing a systematic two-dimensional classification that differentiates context-oriented versus inter-agent protocols and general-purpose versus domain-specific protocols. Additionally, we conduct a comparative performance analysis of these protocols across key dimensions such as security, scalability, and latency. Finally, we explore the future landscape of agent protocols by identifying critical research directions and characteristics necessary for next-generation protocols. These characteristics include adaptability, privacy preservation, and group-based interaction, as well as trends toward layered architectures and collective intelligence infrastructures. We expect this work to serve as a practical reference for both researchers and engineers seeking to design, evaluate, or integrate robust communication infrastructures for intelligent agents.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has ushered in a transformative paradigm in artificial intelligence, Agentic AI, where intelligent agents exhibit goal-directed autonomy, contextual reasoning, and dynamic multi-agent coordination. This paper provides a systematic review and comparative analysis of leading Agentic AI frameworks, including CrewAI, LangGraph, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, Agno, Google ADK, and MetaGPT, evaluating their architectural principles, communication mechanisms, memory management, safety guardrails, and alignment with service-oriented computing paradigms. Furthermore, we identify key limitations, emerging trends, and open challenges in the field. To address the issue of agent communication, we conduct an in-depth analysis of protocols such as the Contract Net Protocol (CNP), Agent-to-Agent (A2A), Agent Network Protocol (ANP), and Agora. Our findings not only establish a foundational taxonomy for Agentic AI systems but also propose future research directions to enhance scalability, robustness, and interoperability. This work serves as a comprehensive reference for researchers and practitioners working to advance the next generation of autonomous AI systems.

AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.

Decentralized learning provides a scalable alternative to traditional parameter-server-based training, yet its performance is often hindered by limited peer-to-peer communication. In this paper, we study how communication should be scheduled over time, including determining when and how frequently devices synchronize. Our empirical results show that concentrating communication budgets in the later stages of decentralized training markedly improves global generalization. Surprisingly, we uncover that fully connected communication at the final step, implemented by a single global merging, is sufficient to match the performance of server-based training. We further show that low communication in decentralized learning preserves the mergeability of local models throughout training. Our theoretical contributions, which explains these phenomena, are first to establish that the globally merged model of decentralized SGD can converge faster than centralized mini-batch SGD. Technically, we novelly reinterpret part of the discrepancy among local models, which were previously considered as detrimental noise, as constructive components that accelerate convergence. This work challenges the common belief that decentralized learning generalizes poorly under data heterogeneity and limited communication, while offering new insights into model merging and neural network loss landscapes.

The mainstream paradigm behind continual learning has been to adapt the model parameters to non-stationary data distributions, where catastrophic forgetting is the central challenge. Typical methods rely on a rehearsal buffer or known task identity at test time to retrieve learned knowledge and address forgetting, while this work presents a new paradigm for continual learning that aims to train a more succinct memory system without accessing task identity at test time. Our method learns to dynamically prompt (L2P) a pre-trained model to learn tasks sequentially under different task transitions. In our proposed framework, prompts are small learnable parameters, which are maintained in a memory space. The objective is to optimize prompts to instruct the model prediction and explicitly manage task-invariant and task-specific knowledge while maintaining model plasticity. We conduct comprehensive experiments under popular image classification benchmarks with different challenging continual learning settings, where L2P consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods. Surprisingly, L2P achieves competitive results against rehearsal-based methods even without a rehearsal buffer and is directly applicable to challenging task-agnostic continual learning. Source code is available at https://github.com/google-research/l2p.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advancements in tackling agent-oriented tasks. Despite their potential, existing work faces challenges when deploying LLMs in agent-based environments. The widely adopted agent paradigm ReAct centers on integrating single-step reasoning with immediate action execution, which limits its effectiveness in complex tasks requiring long-term strategic planning. Furthermore, the coordination between the planner and executor during problem-solving is also a critical factor to consider in agent design. Additionally, current approaches predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning, which often leads models to memorize established task completion trajectories, thereby restricting their generalization ability when confronted with novel problem contexts. To address these challenges, we introduce an adaptive global plan-based agent paradigm AdaPlan, aiming to synergize high-level explicit guidance with execution to support effective long-horizon decision-making. Based on the proposed paradigm, we further put forward PilotRL, a global planning-guided training framework for LLM agents driven by progressive reinforcement learning. We first develop the model's ability to follow explicit guidance from global plans when addressing agent tasks. Subsequently, based on this foundation, we focus on optimizing the quality of generated plans. Finally, we conduct joint optimization of the model's planning and execution coordination. Experiments indicate that PilotRL could achieve state-of-the-art performances, with LLaMA3.1-8B-Instruct + PilotRL surpassing closed-sourced GPT-4o by 3.60%, while showing a more substantial gain of 55.78% comparing to GPT-4o-mini at a comparable parameter scale.

In order for agents in multi-agent systems (MAS) to be safe, they need to take into account the risks posed by the actions of other agents. However, the dominant paradigm in game theory (GT) assumes that agents are not affected by risk from other agents and only strive to maximise their expected utility. For example, in hybrid human-AI driving systems, it is necessary to limit large deviations in reward resulting from car crashes. Although there are equilibrium concepts in game theory that take into account risk aversion, they either assume that agents are risk-neutral with respect to the uncertainty caused by the actions of other agents, or they are not guaranteed to exist. We introduce a new GT-based Risk-Averse Equilibrium (RAE) that always produces a solution that minimises the potential variance in reward accounting for the strategy of other agents. Theoretically and empirically, we show RAE shares many properties with a Nash Equilibrium (NE), establishing convergence properties and generalising to risk-dominant NE in certain cases. To tackle large-scale problems, we extend RAE to the PSRO multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework. We empirically demonstrate the minimum reward variance benefits of RAE in matrix games with high-risk outcomes. Results on MARL experiments show RAE generalises to risk-dominant NE in a trust dilemma game and that it reduces instances of crashing by 7x in an autonomous driving setting versus the best performing baseline.

Personalized federated learning (PFL) reduces the impact of non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data among clients by allowing each client to train a personalized model when collaborating with others. A key question in PFL is to decide which parameters of a client should be localized or shared with others. In current mainstream approaches, all layers that are sensitive to non-IID data (such as classifier layers) are generally personalized. The reasoning behind this approach is understandable, as localizing parameters that are easily influenced by non-IID data can prevent the potential negative effect of collaboration. However, we believe that this approach is too conservative for collaboration. For example, for a certain client, even if its parameters are easily influenced by non-IID data, it can still benefit by sharing these parameters with clients having similar data distribution. This observation emphasizes the importance of considering not only the sensitivity to non-IID data but also the similarity of data distribution when determining which parameters should be localized in PFL. This paper introduces a novel guideline for client collaboration in PFL. Unlike existing approaches that prohibit all collaboration of sensitive parameters, our guideline allows clients to share more parameters with others, leading to improved model performance. Additionally, we propose a new PFL method named FedCAC, which employs a quantitative metric to evaluate each parameter's sensitivity to non-IID data and carefully selects collaborators based on this evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that FedCAC enables clients to share more parameters with others, resulting in superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, particularly in scenarios where clients have diverse distributions.

Most recently developed approaches to cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning in the centralized training with decentralized execution setting involve estimating a centralized, joint value function. In this paper, we demonstrate that, despite its various theoretical shortcomings, Independent PPO (IPPO), a form of independent learning in which each agent simply estimates its local value function, can perform just as well as or better than state-of-the-art joint learning approaches on popular multi-agent benchmark suite SMAC with little hyperparameter tuning. We also compare IPPO to several variants; the results suggest that IPPO's strong performance may be due to its robustness to some forms of environment non-stationarity.

Scientific innovation is undergoing a paradigm shift driven by the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs). As science faces mounting challenges including information overload, disciplinary silos, and diminishing returns on conventional research methods, LLMs are emerging as powerful agents capable not only of enhancing scientific workflows but also of participating in and potentially leading the innovation process. Existing surveys mainly focus on different perspectives, phrases, and tasks in scientific research and discovery, while they have limitations in understanding the transformative potential and role differentiation of LLM. This survey proposes a comprehensive framework to categorize the evolving roles of LLMs in scientific innovation across three hierarchical levels: Evaluator, Collaborator, and Scientist. We distinguish between LLMs' contributions to structured scientific research processes and open-ended scientific discovery, thereby offering a unified taxonomy that clarifies capability boundaries, evaluation criteria, and human-AI interaction patterns at each level. Through an extensive analysis of current methodologies, benchmarks, systems, and evaluation metrics, this survey delivers an in-depth and systematic synthesis on LLM-driven scientific innovation. We present LLMs not only as tools for automating existing processes, but also as catalysts capable of reshaping the epistemological foundations of science itself. This survey offers conceptual clarity, practical guidance, and theoretical foundations for future research, while also highlighting open challenges and ethical considerations in the pursuit of increasingly autonomous AI-driven science. Resources related to this survey can be accessed on GitHub at: https://github.com/haoxuan-unt2024/llm4innovation.

Federated learning has emerged as a promising distributed learning paradigm that facilitates collaborative learning among multiple parties without transferring raw data. However, most existing federated learning studies focus on either horizontal or vertical data settings, where the data of different parties are assumed to be from the same feature or sample space. In practice, a common scenario is the hybrid data setting, where data from different parties may differ both in the features and samples. To address this, we propose HybridTree, a novel federated learning approach that enables federated tree learning on hybrid data. We observe the existence of consistent split rules in trees. With the help of these split rules, we theoretically show that the knowledge of parties can be incorporated into the lower layers of a tree. Based on our theoretical analysis, we propose a layer-level solution that does not need frequent communication traffic to train a tree. Our experiments demonstrate that HybridTree can achieve comparable accuracy to the centralized setting with low computational and communication overhead. HybridTree can achieve up to 8 times speedup compared with the other baselines.

The recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) signifies an impressive stride towards artificial general intelligence. They have shown a promising prospect in automatically completing tasks upon user instructions, functioning as brain-like coordinators. The associated risks will be revealed as we delegate an increasing number of tasks to machines for automated completion. A big question emerges: how can we make machines behave responsibly when helping humans automate tasks as personal copilots? In this paper, we explore this question in depth from the perspectives of feasibility, completeness and security. In specific, we present Responsible Task Automation (ResponsibleTA) as a fundamental framework to facilitate responsible collaboration between LLM-based coordinators and executors for task automation with three empowered capabilities: 1) predicting the feasibility of the commands for executors; 2) verifying the completeness of executors; 3) enhancing the security (e.g., the protection of users' privacy). We further propose and compare two paradigms for implementing the first two capabilities. One is to leverage the generic knowledge of LLMs themselves via prompt engineering while the other is to adopt domain-specific learnable models. Moreover, we introduce a local memory mechanism for achieving the third capability. We evaluate our proposed ResponsibleTA on UI task automation and hope it could bring more attentions to ensuring LLMs more responsible in diverse scenarios. The research project homepage is at https://task-automation-research.github.io/responsible_task_automation.

This position paper argues that the field of LLM agents requires a unified, telecom-inspired communication protocol to ensure safety, interoperability, and scalability, especially within the context of Next Generation (NextG) networks. Current ad-hoc communication methods are creating a fragmented ecosystem, reminiscent of the early "protocol wars" in networking, which stifles innovation and poses significant risks. Drawing inspiration from the layered, standardized protocols that underpin modern telecommunications, we propose the LLM-Agent Communication Protocol (LACP). LACP establishes a three-layer architecture designed to ensure semantic clarity in communication, transactional integrity for complex tasks, and robust, built-in security. In this position paper, we argue that adopting a principled, universal protocol is not merely beneficial but essential for realizing the potential of distributed AI. Such a standard is critical for ensuring that multi-agent systems can operate safely and reliably in the complex, real-time applications envisioned for 6G and beyond.

Multi-agent systems powered by large language models exhibit strong capabilities in collaborative problem-solving. However, these systems suffer from substantial knowledge redundancy. Agents duplicate efforts in retrieval and reasoning processes. This inefficiency stems from a deeper issue: current architectures lack mechanisms to ensure agents share minimal sufficient information at each operational stage. Empirical analysis reveals an average knowledge duplication rate of 47.3\% across agent communications. We propose D3MAS (Decompose, Deduce, and Distribute), a hierarchical coordination framework addressing redundancy through structural design rather than explicit optimization. The framework organizes collaboration across three coordinated layers. Task decomposition filters irrelevant sub-problems early. Collaborative reasoning captures complementary inference paths across agents. Distributed memory provides access to non-redundant knowledge. These layers coordinate through structured message passing in a unified heterogeneous graph. This cross-layer alignment ensures information remains aligned with actual task needs. Experiments on four challenging datasets show that D3MAS consistently improves reasoning accuracy by 8.7\% to 15.6\% and reduces knowledge redundancy by 46\% on average.

The paradigm of machine learning and artificial intelligence has pervaded our everyday life in such a way that it is no longer an area for esoteric academics and scientists putting their effort to solve a challenging research problem. The evolution is quite natural rather than accidental. With the exponential growth in processing speed and with the emergence of smarter algorithms for solving complex and challenging problems, organizations have found it possible to harness a humongous volume of data in realizing solutions that have far-reaching business values. This introductory chapter highlights some of the challenges and barriers that organizations in the financial services sector at the present encounter in adopting machine learning and artificial intelligence-based models and applications in their day-to-day operations.

This study critically distinguishes between AI Agents and Agentic AI, offering a structured conceptual taxonomy, application mapping, and challenge analysis to clarify their divergent design philosophies and capabilities. We begin by outlining the search strategy and foundational definitions, characterizing AI Agents as modular systems driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Image Models (LIMs) for narrow, task-specific automation. Generative AI is positioned as a precursor, with AI Agents advancing through tool integration, prompt engineering, and reasoning enhancements. In contrast, Agentic AI systems represent a paradigmatic shift marked by multi-agent collaboration, dynamic task decomposition, persistent memory, and orchestrated autonomy. Through a sequential evaluation of architectural evolution, operational mechanisms, interaction styles, and autonomy levels, we present a comparative analysis across both paradigms. Application domains such as customer support, scheduling, and data summarization are contrasted with Agentic AI deployments in research automation, robotic coordination, and medical decision support. We further examine unique challenges in each paradigm including hallucination, brittleness, emergent behavior, and coordination failure and propose targeted solutions such as ReAct loops, RAG, orchestration layers, and causal modeling. This work aims to provide a definitive roadmap for developing robust, scalable, and explainable AI agent and Agentic AI-driven systems. >AI Agents, Agent-driven, Vision-Language-Models, Agentic AI Decision Support System, Agentic-AI Applications

Most existing Large Language Model (LLM)-based agent frameworks rely on centralized orchestration, incurring high deployment costs, rigid communication topologies, and limited adaptability. To address these challenges, we introduce Symphony, a decentralized multi-agent system which enables lightweight LLMs on consumer-grade GPUs to coordinate. Symphony introduces three key mechanisms: (1) a decentralized ledger that records capabilities, (2) a Beacon-selection protocol for dynamic task allocation, and (3) weighted result voting based on CoTs. This design forms a privacy-saving, scalable, and fault-tolerant orchestration with low overhead. Empirically, Symphony outperforms existing baselines on reasoning benchmarks, achieving substantial accuracy gains and demonstrating robustness across models of varying capacities.

Convergent Cross Mapping (CCM) is a powerful method for detecting causality in coupled nonlinear dynamical systems, providing a model-free approach to capture dynamic causal interactions. Partial Cross Mapping (PCM) was introduced as an extension of CCM to address indirect causality in three-variable systems by comparing cross-mapping quality between direct cause-effect mapping and indirect mapping through an intermediate conditioning variable. However, PCM remains limited to univariate delay embeddings in its cross-mapping processes. In this work, we extend PCM to the multivariate setting, introducing multiPCM, which leverages multivariate embeddings to more effectively distinguish indirect causal relationships. We further propose a multivariate cross-mapping framework (MXMap) for causal discovery in dynamical systems. This two-phase framework combines (1) pairwise CCM tests to establish an initial causal graph and (2) multiPCM to refine the graph by pruning indirect causal connections. Through experiments on simulated data and the ERA5 Reanalysis weather dataset, we demonstrate the effectiveness of MXMap. Additionally, MXMap is compared against several baseline methods, showing advantages in accuracy and causal graph refinement.

Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm that safeguards privacy by retaining client data on edge devices. However, optimizing FL in practice can be challenging due to the diverse and heterogeneous nature of the learning system. Though recent research has focused on improving the optimization of FL when distribution shifts occur among clients, ensuring global performance when multiple types of distribution shifts occur simultaneously among clients -- such as feature distribution shift, label distribution shift, and concept shift -- remain under-explored. In this paper, we identify the learning challenges posed by the simultaneous occurrence of diverse distribution shifts and propose a clustering principle to overcome these challenges. Through our research, we find that existing methods fail to address the clustering principle. Therefore, we propose a novel clustering algorithm framework, dubbed as FedRC, which adheres to our proposed clustering principle by incorporating a bi-level optimization problem and a novel objective function. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedRC significantly outperforms other SOTA cluster-based FL methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/LINs-lab/FedRC.

Large Transformer networks are increasingly used in settings where low inference latency can improve the end-user experience and enable new applications. However, autoregressive inference is resource intensive and requires parallelism for efficiency. Parallelism introduces collective communication that is both expensive and represents a phase when hardware resources are underutilized. Towards mitigating this, Kraken is an evolution of the standard Transformer architecture that is designed to complement existing tensor parallelism schemes for efficient inference on multi-device systems. By introducing a fixed degree of intra-layer model parallelism, the architecture allows collective operations to be overlapped with compute, decreasing latency and increasing hardware utilization. When trained on OpenWebText, Kraken models reach a similar perplexity as standard Transformers while also preserving their language modeling capabilities when evaluated on the SuperGLUE benchmark. Importantly, when tested on multi-GPU systems using TensorRT-LLM engines, Kraken speeds up Time To First Token by a mean of 35.6% across a range of model sizes, context lengths, and degrees of tensor parallelism.

Conventional federated learning (FL) frameworks follow a server-driven model where the server determines session initiation and client participation, which faces challenges in accommodating clients' asynchronous needs for model updates. We introduce Client-Driven Federated Learning (CDFL), a novel FL framework that puts clients at the driving role. In CDFL, each client independently and asynchronously updates its model by uploading the locally trained model to the server and receiving a customized model tailored to its local task. The server maintains a repository of cluster models, iteratively refining them using received client models. Our framework accommodates complex dynamics in clients' data distributions, characterized by time-varying mixtures of cluster distributions, enabling rapid adaptation to new tasks with superior performance. In contrast to traditional clustered FL protocols that send multiple cluster models to a client to perform distribution estimation, we propose a paradigm that offloads the estimation task to the server and only sends a single model to a client, and novel strategies to improve estimation accuracy. We provide a theoretical analysis of CDFL's convergence. Extensive experiments across various datasets and system settings highlight CDFL's substantial advantages in model performance and computation efficiency over baselines.

Learning causal structure from observational data often assumes that we observe independent and identically distributed (i.\,i.\,d) data. The traditional approach aims to find a graphical representation that encodes the same set of conditional independence relationships as those present in the observed distribution. It is known that under i.\,i.\,d assumption, even with infinite data, there is a limit to how fine-grained a causal structure we can identify. To overcome this limitation, recent work has explored using data originating from different, related environments to learn richer causal structure. These approaches implicitly rely on the independent causal mechanisms (ICM) principle, which postulates that the mechanism giving rise to an effect given its causes and the mechanism which generates the causes do not inform or influence each other. Thus, components of the causal model can independently change from environment to environment. Despite its wide application in machine learning and causal inference, there is a lack of statistical formalization of the ICM principle and how it enables identification of richer causal structures from grouped data. Here we present new causal de Finetti theorems which offer a first statistical formalization of ICM principle and show how causal structure identification is possible from exchangeable data. Our work provides theoretical justification for a broad range of techniques leveraging multi-environment data to learn causal structure.

Large ride-hailing platforms, such as DiDi, Uber and Lyft, connect tens of thousands of vehicles in a city to millions of ride demands throughout the day, providing great promises for improving transportation efficiency through the tasks of order dispatching and vehicle repositioning. Existing studies, however, usually consider the two tasks in simplified settings that hardly address the complex interactions between the two, the real-time fluctuations between supply and demand, and the necessary coordinations due to the large-scale nature of the problem. In this paper we propose a unified value-based dynamic learning framework (V1D3) for tackling both tasks. At the center of the framework is a globally shared value function that is updated continuously using online experiences generated from real-time platform transactions. To improve the sample-efficiency and the robustness, we further propose a novel periodic ensemble method combining the fast online learning with a large-scale offline training scheme that leverages the abundant historical driver trajectory data. This allows the proposed framework to adapt quickly to the highly dynamic environment, to generalize robustly to recurrent patterns and to drive implicit coordinations among the population of managed vehicles. Extensive experiments based on real-world datasets show considerably improvements over other recently proposed methods on both tasks. Particularly, V1D3 outperforms the first prize winners of both dispatching and repositioning tracks in the KDD Cup 2020 RL competition, achieving state-of-the-art results on improving both total driver income and user experience related metrics.

Compared with full client participation, partial client participation is a more practical scenario in federated learning, but it may amplify some challenges in federated learning, such as data heterogeneity. The lack of inactive clients' updates in partial client participation makes it more likely for the model aggregation to deviate from the aggregation based on full client participation. Training with large batches on individual clients is proposed to address data heterogeneity in general, but their effectiveness under partial client participation is not clear. Motivated by these challenges, we propose to develop a novel federated learning framework, referred to as FedAMD, for partial client participation. The core idea is anchor sampling, which separates partial participants into anchor and miner groups. Each client in the anchor group aims at the local bullseye with the gradient computation using a large batch. Guided by the bullseyes, clients in the miner group steer multiple near-optimal local updates using small batches and update the global model. By integrating the results of the two groups, FedAMD is able to accelerate the training process and improve the model performance. Measured by epsilon-approximation and compared to the state-of-the-art methods, FedAMD achieves the convergence by up to O(1/epsilon) fewer communication rounds under non-convex objectives. Empirical studies on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of FedAMD and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm: Not only does it considerably save computation and communication costs, but also the test accuracy significantly improves.

With the increasing importance of data sharing for collaboration and innovation, it is becoming more important to ensure that data is managed and shared in a secure and trustworthy manner. Data governance is a common approach to managing data, but it faces many challenges such as data silos, data consistency, privacy, security, and access control. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a comprehensive framework that integrates data trust in federated learning with InterPlanetary File System, blockchain, and smart contracts to facilitate secure and mutually beneficial data sharing while providing incentives, access control mechanisms, and penalizing any dishonest behavior. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model is effective in improving the accuracy of federated learning models while ensuring the security and fairness of the data-sharing process. The research paper also presents a decentralized federated learning platform that successfully trained a CNN model on the MNIST dataset using blockchain technology. The platform enables multiple workers to train the model simultaneously while maintaining data privacy and security. The decentralized architecture and use of blockchain technology allow for efficient communication and coordination between workers. This platform has the potential to facilitate decentralized machine learning and support privacy-preserving collaboration in various domains.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping scientific discovery, evolving from specialized computational tools into autonomous research partners. We position Agentic Science as a pivotal stage within the broader AI for Science paradigm, where AI systems progress from partial assistance to full scientific agency. Enabled by large language models (LLMs), multimodal systems, and integrated research platforms, agentic AI shows capabilities in hypothesis generation, experimental design, execution, analysis, and iterative refinement -- behaviors once regarded as uniquely human. This survey provides a domain-oriented review of autonomous scientific discovery across life sciences, chemistry, materials science, and physics. We unify three previously fragmented perspectives -- process-oriented, autonomy-oriented, and mechanism-oriented -- through a comprehensive framework that connects foundational capabilities, core processes, and domain-specific realizations. Building on this framework, we (i) trace the evolution of AI for Science, (ii) identify five core capabilities underpinning scientific agency, (iii) model discovery as a dynamic four-stage workflow, (iv) review applications across the above domains, and (v) synthesize key challenges and future opportunities. This work establishes a domain-oriented synthesis of autonomous scientific discovery and positions Agentic Science as a structured paradigm for advancing AI-driven research.

Advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning have catalyzed the transformation of big data analytics and management into pivotal domains for research and application. This work explores the theoretical foundations, methodological advancements, and practical implementations of these technologies, emphasizing their role in uncovering actionable insights from massive, high-dimensional datasets. The study presents a systematic overview of data preprocessing techniques, including data cleaning, normalization, integration, and dimensionality reduction, to prepare raw data for analysis. Core analytics methodologies such as classification, clustering, regression, and anomaly detection are examined, with a focus on algorithmic innovation and scalability. Furthermore, the text delves into state-of-the-art frameworks for data mining and predictive modeling, highlighting the role of neural networks, support vector machines, and ensemble methods in tackling complex analytical challenges. Special emphasis is placed on the convergence of big data with distributed computing paradigms, including cloud and edge computing, to address challenges in storage, computation, and real-time analytics. The integration of ethical considerations, including data privacy and compliance with global standards, ensures a holistic perspective on data management. Practical applications across healthcare, finance, marketing, and policy-making illustrate the real-world impact of these technologies. Through comprehensive case studies and Python-based implementations, this work equips researchers, practitioners, and data enthusiasts with the tools to navigate the complexities of modern data analytics. It bridges the gap between theory and practice, fostering the development of innovative solutions for managing and leveraging data in the era of artificial intelligence.

Multi-agent coordination is crucial for reliable multi-robot navigation in shared spaces such as automated warehouses. In regions of dense robot traffic, local coordination methods may fail to find a deadlock-free solution. In these scenarios, it is appropriate to let a central unit generate a global schedule that decides the passing order of robots. However, the runtime of such centralized coordination methods increases significantly with the problem scale. In this paper, we propose to leverage Graph Neural Network Variational Autoencoders (GNN-VAE) to solve the multi-agent coordination problem at scale faster than through centralized optimization. We formulate the coordination problem as a graph problem and collect ground truth data using a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) solver. During training, our learning framework encodes good quality solutions of the graph problem into a latent space. At inference time, solution samples are decoded from the sampled latent variables, and the lowest-cost sample is selected for coordination. Finally, the feasible proposal with the highest performance index is selected for the deployment. By construction, our GNN-VAE framework returns solutions that always respect the constraints of the considered coordination problem. Numerical results show that our approach trained on small-scale problems can achieve high-quality solutions even for large-scale problems with 250 robots, being much faster than other baselines. Project page: https://mengyuest.github.io/gnn-vae-coord

The development of modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, particularly diffusion-based models employed in computer vision and image generation tasks, is undergoing a paradigmatic shift in development methodologies. Traditionally dominated by a "Model Centric" approach, in which performance gains were primarily pursued through increasingly complex model architectures and hyperparameter optimization, the field is now recognizing a more nuanced "Data-Centric" approach. This emergent framework foregrounds the quality, structure, and relevance of training data as the principal driver of model performance. To operationalize this paradigm shift, we introduce the DataSeeds.AI sample dataset (the "DSD"), initially comprised of approximately 10,610 high-quality human peer-ranked photography images accompanied by extensive multi-tier annotations. The DSD is a foundational computer vision dataset designed to usher in a new standard for commercial image datasets. Representing a small fraction of DataSeed.AI's 100 million-plus image catalog, the DSD provides a scalable foundation necessary for robust commercial and multimodal AI development. Through this in-depth exploratory analysis, we document the quantitative improvements generated by the DSD on specific models against known benchmarks and make the code and the trained models used in our evaluation publicly available.

This report presents the Prime Collective Communications Library (PCCL), a novel fault-tolerant collective communication library designed for distributed ML workloads over the public internet. PCCL introduces a new programming model that enables dynamic peer joining and failure recovery. The library implements efficient collective operations like all-reduce while providing robust fault tolerance mechanisms that allow the system to continue operating even when peers fail or join during ongoing operations. We demonstrate that PCCL's design enables practical solutions to dynamic membership challenges in workloads with repeated operations and deterministic state advancement. Our implementation passes extensive stress tests across all major operating systems, showing reliable operation even under rapid peer churn and concurrent collective operations. By dispatching to multiple connections, we can efficiently utilize cross-continental long-fat-pipe TCP WAN links, in our experiments achieving up to 45 Gbit/s of bandwidth utilization across Europe and 25 Gbit/s across North America and Europe. PCCL's architecture enables easy implementation of distributed low-communication optimization strategies like DiLoCo, which significantly reduce communication frequency. Combined with quantization, this leads to a significant reduction in the bandwidth required for distributed training workloads. PCCL also allows for concurrent collective operations, which enables optimization strategies like async DiLoCo, which can completely hide communication overhead by implementing one-step delayed parameter updates. PCCL can facilitate exact bit-parity of the shared state across peers in all cases induced by graceful or abrupt peer churn. While PCCL exposes a C99 API, Python bindings are available which are compatible with PyTorch alongside FSDP. PCCL is available under the open source MIT license.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has steadily improved across a wide range of tasks. However, the development and deployment of AI are almost entirely controlled by a few powerful organizations that are racing to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The centralized entities make decisions with little public oversight, shaping the future of humanity, often with unforeseen consequences. In this paper, we propose OML, which stands for Open, Monetizable, and Loyal AI, an approach designed to democratize AI development. OML is realized through an interdisciplinary framework spanning AI, blockchain, and cryptography. We present several ideas for constructing OML using technologies such as Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), traditional cryptographic primitives like fully homomorphic encryption and functional encryption, obfuscation, and AI-native solutions rooted in the sample complexity and intrinsic hardness of AI tasks. A key innovation of our work is introducing a new scientific field: AI-native cryptography. Unlike conventional cryptography, which focuses on discrete data and binary security guarantees, AI-native cryptography exploits the continuous nature of AI data representations and their low-dimensional manifolds, focusing on improving approximate performance. One core idea is to transform AI attack methods, such as data poisoning, into security tools. This novel approach serves as a foundation for OML 1.0 which uses model fingerprinting to protect the integrity and ownership of AI models. The spirit of OML is to establish a decentralized, open, and transparent platform for AI development, enabling the community to contribute, monetize, and take ownership of AI models. By decentralizing control and ensuring transparency through blockchain technology, OML prevents the concentration of power and provides accountability in AI development that has not been possible before.

In this paper, we propose a novel centralized Asynchronous Federated Learning (FL) framework, FAVANO, for training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in resource-constrained environments. Despite its popularity, ``classical'' federated learning faces the increasingly difficult task of scaling synchronous communication over large wireless networks. Moreover, clients typically have different computing resources and therefore computing speed, which can lead to a significant bias (in favor of ``fast'' clients) when the updates are asynchronous. Therefore, practical deployment of FL requires to handle users with strongly varying computing speed in communication/resource constrained setting. We provide convergence guarantees for FAVANO in a smooth, non-convex environment and carefully compare the obtained convergence guarantees with existing bounds, when they are available. Experimental results show that the FAVANO algorithm outperforms current methods on standard benchmarks.

We show that coherent, long-form musical composition can emerge from a decentralized swarm of identical, frozen foundation models that coordinate via stigmergic, peer-to-peer signals, without any weight updates. We compare a centralized multi-agent system with a global critic to a fully decentralized swarm in which bar-wise agents sense and deposit harmonic, rhythmic, and structural cues, adapt short-term memory, and reach consensus. Across symbolic, audio, and graph-theoretic analyses, the swarm yields superior quality while delivering greater diversity and structural variety and leads across creativity metrics. The dynamics contract toward a stable configuration of complementary roles, and self-similarity networks reveal a small-world architecture with efficient long-range connectivity and specialized bridging motifs, clarifying how local novelties consolidate into global musical form. By shifting specialization from parameter updates to interaction rules, shared memory, and dynamic consensus, MusicSwarm provides a compute- and data-efficient route to long-horizon creative structure that is immediately transferable beyond music to collaborative writing, design, and scientific discovery.

A multi-decade exploration into the theoretical foundations of artificial and natural general intelligence, which has been expressed in a series of books and papers and used to guide a series of practical and research-prototype software systems, is reviewed at a moderate level of detail. The review covers underlying philosophies (patternist philosophy of mind, foundational phenomenological and logical ontology), formalizations of the concept of intelligence, and a proposed high level architecture for AGI systems partly driven by these formalizations and philosophies. The implementation of specific cognitive processes such as logical reasoning, program learning, clustering and attention allocation in the context and language of this high level architecture is considered, as is the importance of a common (e.g. typed metagraph based) knowledge representation for enabling "cognitive synergy" between the various processes. The specifics of human-like cognitive architecture are presented as manifestations of these general principles, and key aspects of machine consciousness and machine ethics are also treated in this context. Lessons for practical implementation of advanced AGI in frameworks such as OpenCog Hyperon are briefly considered.

Despite efforts to mitigate the inherent risks and biases of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, these algorithms can disproportionately impact culturally marginalized groups. A range of approaches has been proposed to address or reduce these risks, including the development of ethical guidelines and principles for responsible AI, as well as technical solutions that promote algorithmic fairness. Drawing on design justice, expansive learning theory, and recent empirical work on participatory AI, we argue that mitigating these harms requires a fundamental re-architecture of the AI production pipeline. This re-design should center co-production, diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), and multidisciplinary collaboration. We introduce an augmented AI lifecycle consisting of five interconnected phases: co-framing, co-design, co-implementation, co-deployment, and co-maintenance. The lifecycle is informed by four multidisciplinary workshops and grounded in themes of distributed authority and iterative knowledge exchange. Finally, we relate the proposed lifecycle to several leading ethical frameworks and outline key research questions that remain for scaling participatory governance.

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed learning method that offers medical institutes the prospect of collaboration in a global model while preserving the privacy of their patients. Although most medical centers conduct similar medical imaging tasks, their differences, such as specializations, number of patients, and devices, lead to distinctive data distributions. Data heterogeneity poses a challenge for FL and the personalization of the local models. In this work, we investigate an adaptive hierarchical clustering method for FL to produce intermediate semi-global models, so clients with similar data distribution have the chance of forming a more specialized model. Our method forms several clusters consisting of clients with the most similar data distributions; then, each cluster continues to train separately. Inside the cluster, we use meta-learning to improve the personalization of the participants' models. We compare the clustering approach with classical FedAvg and centralized training by evaluating our proposed methods on the HAM10k dataset for skin lesion classification with extreme heterogeneous data distribution. Our experiments demonstrate significant performance gain in heterogeneous distribution compared to standard FL methods in classification accuracy. Moreover, we show that the models converge faster if applied in clusters and outperform centralized training while using only a small subset of data.

Structured access is an emerging paradigm for the safe deployment of artificial intelligence (AI). Instead of openly disseminating AI systems, developers facilitate controlled, arm's length interactions with their AI systems. The aim is to prevent dangerous AI capabilities from being widely accessible, whilst preserving access to AI capabilities that can be used safely. The developer must both restrict how the AI system can be used, and prevent the user from circumventing these restrictions through modification or reverse engineering of the AI system. Structured access is most effective when implemented through cloud-based AI services, rather than disseminating AI software that runs locally on users' hardware. Cloud-based interfaces provide the AI developer greater scope for controlling how the AI system is used, and for protecting against unauthorized modifications to the system's design. This chapter expands the discussion of "publication norms" in the AI community, which to date has focused on the question of how the informational content of AI research projects should be disseminated (e.g., code and models). Although this is an important question, there are limits to what can be achieved through the control of information flows. Structured access views AI software not only as information that can be shared but also as a tool with which users can have arm's length interactions. There are early examples of structured access being practiced by AI developers, but there is much room for further development, both in the functionality of cloud-based interfaces and in the wider institutional framework.

The current intrusion detection systems have a number of problems that limit their configurability, scalability and efficiency. There have been some propositions about distributed architectures based on multiple independent agents working collectively for intrusion detection. However, these distributed intrusion detection systems are not fully distributed as most of them centrally analyze data collected from distributed nodes which may lead to a single point of failure. In this paper, a distributed intrusion detection architecture is presented that is based on autonomous and cooperating agents without any centralized analysis components. The agents cooperate by using a hierarchical communication of interests and data, and the analysis of intrusion data is made by the agents at the lowest level of the hierarchy. This architecture provides significant advantages in scalability, flexibility, extensibility, fault tolerance, and resistance to compromise. A proof-of-concept prototype is developed and experiments have been conducted on it. The results show the effectiveness of the system in detecting intrusive activities.

The emergence and impact of tipping points have garnered significant interest in both the social and natural sciences. Despite widespread recognition of the importance of feedbacks between human and natural systems, it is often assumed that the observed nonlinear dynamics in these coupled systems rests within either underlying human or natural processes, rather than the rates at which they interact. Using adoption of agricultural diversification practices as a case study, we show how two stable management paradigms (one dominated by conventional, homogeneous practices, the other by diversified practices) can emerge purely from temporal feedbacks between human decisions and ecological responses. We explore how this temporal mechanism of tipping points provides insight into designing more effective interventions that promote farmers transitions towards sustainable agriculture. Moreover, our flexible modeling framework could be applied to other cases to provide insight into numerous questions in social-ecological systems research and environmental policy.

Automatic speech recognition models require large amounts of speech recordings for training. However, the collection of such data often is cumbersome and leads to privacy concerns. Federated learning has been widely used as an effective decentralized technique that collaboratively learns a shared prediction model while keeping the data local on different clients. Unfortunately, client devices often feature limited computation and communication resources leading to practical difficulties for large models. In addition, the heterogeneity that characterizes edge devices makes it sub-optimal to generate a single model that fits all of them. Differently from the recent literature, where multiple models with different architectures are used, in this work, we propose using dynamical architectures which, employing early-exit solutions, can adapt their processing (i.e. traversed layers) depending on the input and on the operation conditions. This solution falls in the realm of partial training methods and brings two benefits: a single model is used on a variety of devices; federating the models after local training is straightforward. Experiments on public datasets show that our proposed approach is effective and can be combined with basic federated learning strategies.

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging machine learning (ML) training paradigm where clients own their data and collaborate to train a global model, without revealing any data to the server and other participants. Researchers commonly perform experiments in a simulation environment to quickly iterate on ideas. However, existing open-source tools do not offer the efficiency required to simulate FL on larger and more realistic FL datasets. We introduce pfl-research, a fast, modular, and easy-to-use Python framework for simulating FL. It supports TensorFlow, PyTorch, and non-neural network models, and is tightly integrated with state-of-the-art privacy algorithms. We study the speed of open-source FL frameworks and show that pfl-research is 7-72times faster than alternative open-source frameworks on common cross-device setups. Such speedup will significantly boost the productivity of the FL research community and enable testing hypotheses on realistic FL datasets that were previously too resource intensive. We release a suite of benchmarks that evaluates an algorithm's overall performance on a diverse set of realistic scenarios. The code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/apple/pfl-research.

Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized learning paradigm, in which multiple clients collaboratively train deep learning models without centralizing their local data, and hence preserve data privacy. Real-world applications usually involve a distribution shift across the datasets of the different clients, which hurts the generalization ability of the clients to unseen samples from their respective data distributions. In this work, we address the recently proposed feature shift problem where the clients have different feature distributions, while the label distribution is the same. We propose Federated Representation Augmentation (FRAug) to tackle this practical and challenging problem. Our approach generates synthetic client-specific samples in the embedding space to augment the usually small client datasets. For that, we train a shared generative model to fuse the clients knowledge learned from their different feature distributions. This generator synthesizes client-agnostic embeddings, which are then locally transformed into client-specific embeddings by Representation Transformation Networks (RTNets). By transferring knowledge across the clients, the generated embeddings act as a regularizer for the client models and reduce overfitting to the local original datasets, hence improving generalization. Our empirical evaluation on public benchmarks and a real-world medical dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method, which substantially outperforms the current state-of-the-art FL methods for non-IID features, including PartialFed and FedBN.

This white paper introduces my educational community initiative to learn how to run AI, ML and other emerging workloads in the most efficient and cost-effective way across diverse models, data sets, software and hardware. This project leverages Collective Mind (CM), virtualized MLOps and DevOps (CM4MLOps), MLPerf benchmarks, and the Collective Knowledge playground (CK), which I have developed in collaboration with the community and MLCommons. I created Collective Mind as a small and portable Python package with minimal dependencies, a unified CLI and Python API to help researchers and engineers automate repetitive, tedious, and time-consuming tasks. I also designed CM as a distributed framework, continuously enhanced by the community through the CM4* repositories, which function as the unified interface for organizing and managing various collections of automations and artifacts. For example, CM4MLOps repository includes many automations, also known as CM scripts, to streamline the process of building, running, benchmarking, and optimizing AI, ML, and other workflows across ever-evolving models, data, and systems. I donated CK, CM and CM4MLOps to MLCommons to foster collaboration between academia and industry to learn how to co-design more efficient and cost-effective AI systems while capturing and encoding knowledge within Collective Mind, protecting intellectual property, enabling portable skills, and accelerating the transition of the state-of-the-art research into production. My ultimate goal is to collaborate with the community to complete my two-decade journey toward creating self-optimizing software and hardware that can automatically learn how to run any workload in the most efficient and cost-effective manner based on user requirements and constraints such as cost, latency, throughput, accuracy, power consumption, size, and other critical factors.