Decentralized and Lifelong-Adaptive Multi-Agent Collaborative Learning

Decentralized and lifelong-adaptive multi-agent collaborative learning aims to enhance collaboration among multiple agents without a central server, with each agent solving varied tasks over time. To achieve efficient collaboration, agents should: i) autonomously identify beneficial collaborative relationships in a decentralized manner; and ii) adapt to dynamically changing task observations. In this paper, we propose DeLAMA, a decentralized multi-agent lifelong collaborative learning algorithm with dynamic collaboration graphs. To promote autonomous collaboration relationship learning, we propose a decentralized graph structure learning algorithm, eliminating the need for external priors. To facilitate adaptation to dynamic tasks, we design a memory unit to capture the agents' accumulated learning history and knowledge, while preserving finite storage consumption. To further augment the system's expressive capabilities and computational efficiency, we apply algorithm unrolling, leveraging the advantages of both mathematical optimization and neural networks. This allows the agents to `learn to collaborate' through the supervision of training tasks. Our theoretical analysis verifies that inter-agent collaboration is communication efficient under a small number of communication rounds. The experimental results verify its ability to facilitate the discovery of collaboration strategies and adaptation to dynamic learning scenarios, achieving a 98.80% reduction in MSE and a 188.87% improvement in classification accuracy. We expect our work can serve as a foundational technique to facilitate future works towards an intelligent, decentralized, and dynamic multi-agent system. Code is available at https://github.com/ShuoTang123/DeLAMA.

Self-Alignment of Large Language Models via Monopolylogue-based Social Scene Simulation

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values is imperative to mitigate potential adverse effects resulting from their misuse. Drawing from the sociological insight that acknowledging all parties' concerns is a key factor in shaping human values, this paper proposes a novel direction to align LLMs by themselves: social scene simulation. To achieve this, we present MATRIX, a novel social scene simulator that emulates realistic scenes around a user's input query, enabling the LLM to take social consequences into account before responding. MATRIX serves as a virtual rehearsal space, akin to a Monopolylogue, where the LLM performs diverse roles related to the query and practice by itself. To inject this alignment, we fine-tune the LLM with MATRIX-simulated data, ensuring adherence to human values without compromising inference speed. We theoretically show that the LLM with MATRIX outperforms Constitutional AI under mild assumptions. Finally, extensive experiments validate that our method outperforms over 10 baselines across 4 benchmarks. As evidenced by 875 user ratings, our tuned 13B-size LLM exceeds GPT-4 in aligning with human values. Code is available at https://github.com/pangxianghe/MATRIX.

Robust Interference Mitigation techniques for Direct Position Estimation

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is pervasive in navigation and positioning applications, where precise position and time referencing estimations are required. Conventional methods for GNSS positioning involve a two-step process, where intermediate measurements such as Doppler shift and time delay of received GNSS signals are computed and then used to solve for the receiver's position. Alternatively, Direct Position Estimation (DPE) was proposed to infer the position directly from the sampled signal without intermediate variables, yielding to superior levels of sensitivity and operation under challenging environments. However, the positioning resilience of DPE method is still under the threat of various interferences. Robust Interference Mitigation (RIM) processing has been studied and proved to be efficient against various interference in conventional two-step positioning (2SP) methods, and therefore worthy to be explored regarding its potential to enhance DPE. This article extends DPE methodology by incorporating RIM strategies that address the increasing need to protect GNSS receivers against intentional or unintentional interferences, such as jamming signals, which can deny GNSS-based positioning. RIM, which leverages robust statistics, was shown to provide competitive results in two-step approaches and is here employed in a high-sensitivity DPE framework with successful results. The article also provides a quantification of the loss of efficiency of using RIM when no interference is present and validates the proposed methodology on relevant interference cases, while the approach can be used to mitigate other common interference signals.

On Parametric Misspecified Bayesian Cramér-Rao bound: An application to linear Gaussian systems

A lower bound is an important tool for predicting the performance that an estimator can achieve under a particular statistical model. Bayesian bounds are a kind of such bounds which not only utilizes the observation statistics but also includes the prior model information. In reality, however, the true model generating the data is either unknown or simplified when deriving estimators, which motivates the works to derive estimation bounds under modeling mismatch situations. This paper provides a derivation of a Bayesian Cram\'{e}r-Rao bound under model misspecification, defining important concepts such as pseudotrue parameter that were not clearly identified in previous works. The general result is particularized in linear and Gaussian problems, where closed-forms are available and results are used to validate the results.

Unrolled Graph Learning for Multi-Agent Collaboration

Multi-agent learning has gained increasing attention to tackle distributed machine learning scenarios under constrictions of data exchanging. However, existing multi-agent learning models usually consider data fusion under fixed and compulsory collaborative relations among agents, which is not as flexible and autonomous as human collaboration. To fill this gap, we propose a distributed multi-agent learning model inspired by human collaboration, in which the agents can autonomously detect suitable collaborators and refer to collaborators' model for better performance. To implement such adaptive collaboration, we use a collaboration graph to indicate the pairwise collaborative relation. The collaboration graph can be obtained by graph learning techniques based on model similarity between different agents. Since model similarity can not be formulated by a fixed graphical optimization, we design a graph learning network by unrolling, which can learn underlying similar features among potential collaborators. By testing on both regression and classification tasks, we validate that our proposed collaboration model can figure out accurate collaborative relationship and greatly improve agents' learning performance.