Daily Papers

Developing AI agents that can robustly adapt to dramatically different strategic landscapes without retraining is a central challenge for multi-agent learning. Pok\'emon Video Game Championships (VGC) is a domain with an extraordinarily large space of possible team configurations of approximately 10^{139} - far larger than those of Dota or Starcraft. The highly discrete, combinatorial nature of team building in Pok\'emon VGC causes optimal strategies to shift dramatically depending on both the team being piloted and the opponent's team, making generalization uniquely challenging. To advance research on this problem, we introduce VGC-Bench: a benchmark that provides critical infrastructure, standardizes evaluation protocols, and supplies human-play datasets and a range of baselines - from large-language-model agents and behavior cloning to reinforcement learning and empirical game-theoretic methods such as self-play, fictitious play, and double oracle. In the restricted setting where an agent is trained and evaluated on a single-team configuration, our methods are able to win against a professional VGC competitor. We extensively evaluated all baseline methods over progressively larger team sets and find that even the best-performing algorithm in the single-team setting struggles at scaling up as team size grows. Thus, policy generalization across diverse team strategies remains an open challenge for the community. Our code is open sourced at https://github.com/cameronangliss/VGC-Bench.

The deployment of ever-larger machine learning models reflects a growing consensus that the more expressive the modelx2013and the more data one has access tox2013the more one can improve performance. As models get deployed in a variety of real world scenarios, they inevitably face strategic environments. In this work, we consider the natural question of how the interplay of models and strategic interactions affects scaling laws. We find that strategic interactions can break the conventional view of scaling lawsx2013meaning that performance does not necessarily monotonically improve as models get larger and/ or more expressive (even with infinite data). We show the implications of this phenomenon in several contexts including strategic regression, strategic classification, and multi-agent reinforcement learning through examples of strategic environments in whichx2013by simply restricting the expressivity of one's model or policy classx2013one can achieve strictly better equilibrium outcomes. Motivated by these examples, we then propose a new paradigm for model-selection in games wherein an agent seeks to choose amongst different model classes to use as their action set in a game.

This position paper argues for, and offers, a critical lens through which to examine the current AI frenzy in the landscape architecture profession. In it, the authors propose five archetypes or mental modes that landscape architects might inhabit when thinking about AI. Rather than limiting judgments of AI use to a single axis of acceleration, these archetypes and corresponding narratives exist along a relational spectrum and are permeable, allowing LAs to take on and switch between them according to context. We model these relationships between the archetypes and their contributions to AI advancement using a causal loop diagram (CLD), and with those interactions argue that more nuanced ways of approaching AI might also open new modes of practice in the new digital economy.

How areas of land are allocated for different uses, such as forests, urban areas, and agriculture, has a large effect on the terrestrial carbon balance, and therefore climate change. Based on available historical data on land-use changes and a simulation of the associated carbon emissions and removals, a surrogate model can be learned that makes it possible to evaluate the different options available to decision-makers efficiently. An evolutionary search process can then be used to discover effective land-use policies for specific locations. Such a system was built on the Project Resilience platform and evaluated with the Land-Use Harmonization dataset LUH2 and the bookkeeping model BLUE. It generates Pareto fronts that trade off carbon impact and amount of land-use change customized to different locations, thus providing a proof-of-concept tool that is potentially useful for land-use planning.

Common-pool resource governance requires users to cooperate and avoid overexploitation, but defection and free-riding often undermine cooperation. We model a human-environmental system that integrates dynamics of resource and users' strategies. The resource follows a logistic function that depends on natural growth rate, carrying capacity, and extraction rates of cooperators and defectors. The users' strategies evolve according to different processes that capture effects of payoff, resource, and noise. We analyze the feedback between resource availability and strategic adaptation, and explores the conditions for the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. We find different processes lead to different regimes of equilibrium solutions and resource levels depending on the parameter configuration and initial conditions. We also show that some processes can enhance the sustainability of the resource by making the users more responsive to the resource scarcity. The paper advances the understanding of human-environmental system and offers insights for resource governance policies and interventions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities in well-defined problems with clear solutions, such as mathematics and coding. However, they still struggle with complex real-world scenarios like business negotiations, which require strategic reasoning-an ability to navigate dynamic environments and align long-term goals amidst uncertainty. Existing methods for strategic reasoning face challenges in adaptability, scalability, and transferring strategies to new contexts. To address these issues, we propose explicit policy optimization (EPO) for strategic reasoning, featuring an LLM that provides strategies in open-ended action space and can be plugged into arbitrary LLM agents to motivate goal-directed behavior. To improve adaptability and policy transferability, we train the strategic reasoning model via multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL) using process rewards and iterative self-play, without supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a preliminary step. Experiments across social and physical domains demonstrate EPO's ability of long-term goal alignment through enhanced strategic reasoning, achieving state-of-the-art performance on social dialogue and web navigation tasks. Our findings reveal various collaborative reasoning mechanisms emergent in EPO and its effectiveness in generating novel strategies, underscoring its potential for strategic reasoning in real-world applications.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive action sequence prediction capabilities but often struggle with dynamic, long-horizon tasks such as real-time strategic games. In a game such as StarCraftII (SC2), agents need to manage resource constraints and adapt to evolving battlefield situations in a partially observable environment. This often overwhelms exisiting LLM-based approaches. To address these challenges, we propose a hierarchical multi-agent framework that employs specialized imitation learning agents under a meta-controller called Strategic Planner (SP). By expert demonstrations, each specialized agent learns a distinctive strategy, such as aerial support or defensive maneuvers, and produces coherent, structured multistep action sequences. The SP then orchestrates these proposals into a single, environmentally adaptive plan that ensures local decisions aligning with long-term strategies. We call this HIMA (Hierarchical Imitation Multi-Agent). We also present TEXTSCII-ALL, a comprehensive SC2 testbed that encompasses all race match combinations in SC2. Our empirical results show that HIMA outperforms state of the arts in strategic clarity, adaptability, and computational efficiency, underscoring the potential of combining specialized imitation modules with meta-level orchestration to develop more robust, general-purpose AI agents.

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities in structured tasks (e.g., coding and mathematics), it remains unexplored whether these abilities extend to strategic multi-agent environments. We investigate strategic reasoning capabilities -- the process of choosing an optimal course of action by predicting and adapting to others' actions -- of LLMs by analyzing their performance in three classical games from behavioral economics. We evaluate three standard LLMs (ChatGPT-4, Claude-2.1, Gemini 1.5) and three specialized reasoning LLMs (GPT-o1, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, Gemini Flash Thinking 2.0) using hierarchical models of bounded rationality. Our results show that reasoning LLMs exhibit superior strategic reasoning compared to standard LLMs (which do not demonstrate substantial capabilities), and often match or exceed human performance. Since strategic reasoning is fundamental to future AI systems (including Agentic AI and Artificial General Intelligence), our findings demonstrate the importance of dedicated reasoning capabilities in achieving effective strategic reasoning.

When users can benefit from certain predictive outcomes, they may be prone to act to achieve those outcome, e.g., by strategically modifying their features. The goal in strategic classification is therefore to train predictive models that are robust to such behavior. However, the conventional framework assumes that changing features does not change actual outcomes, which depicts users as "gaming" the system. Here we remove this assumption, and study learning in a causal strategic setting where true outcomes do change. Focusing on accuracy as our primary objective, we show how strategic behavior and causal effects underlie two complementing forms of distribution shift. We characterize these shifts, and propose a learning algorithm that balances between these two forces and over time, and permits end-to-end training. Experiments on synthetic and semi-synthetic data demonstrate the utility of our approach.

We investigate non-collaborative dialogue agents, which are expected to engage in strategic conversations with diverse users, for securing a mutual agreement that leans favorably towards the system's objectives. This poses two main challenges for existing dialogue agents: 1) The inability to integrate user-specific characteristics into the strategic planning, and 2) The difficulty of training strategic planners that can be generalized to diverse users. To address these challenges, we propose Trip to enhance the capability in tailored strategic planning, incorporating a user-aware strategic planning module and a population-based training paradigm. Through experiments on benchmark non-collaborative dialogue tasks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Trip in catering to diverse users.

Recent advancements in Vision Language Models (VLMs) have expanded their capabilities to interactive agent tasks, yet existing benchmarks remain limited to single-agent or text-only environments. In contrast, real-world scenarios often involve multiple agents interacting within rich visual and linguistic contexts, posing challenges with both multimodal observations and strategic interactions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Visual Strategic Bench (VS-Bench), a multimodal benchmark that evaluates VLMs for strategic reasoning and decision-making in multi-agent environments. VS-Bench comprises eight vision-grounded environments spanning cooperative, competitive, and mixed-motive interactions, designed to assess agents' ability to predict others' future moves and optimize for long-term objectives. We consider two complementary evaluation dimensions, including offline evaluation of strategic reasoning by next-action prediction accuracy and online evaluation of decision-making by normalized episode return. Extensive experiments of fourteen leading VLMs reveal a significant gap between current models and optimal performance, with the best models attaining 47.8% prediction accuracy and 24.3% normalized return. We further conduct in-depth analyses on multimodal observations, test-time scaling, social behaviors, and failure cases of VLM agents. By standardizing the evaluation and highlighting the limitations of existing models, we envision VS-Bench as a foundation for future research on strategic multimodal agents. Code and data are available at https://vs-bench.github.io.

As large language models (LLMs) advance across diverse tasks, the need for comprehensive evaluation beyond single metrics becomes increasingly important. To fully assess LLM intelligence, it is crucial to examine their interactive dynamics and strategic behaviors. We present LLMsPark, a game theory-based evaluation platform that measures LLMs' decision-making strategies and social behaviors in classic game-theoretic settings, providing a multi-agent environment to explore strategic depth. Our system cross-evaluates 15 leading LLMs (both commercial and open-source) using leaderboard rankings and scoring mechanisms. Higher scores reflect stronger reasoning and strategic capabilities, revealing distinct behavioral patterns and performance differences across models. This work introduces a novel perspective for evaluating LLMs' strategic intelligence, enriching existing benchmarks and broadening their assessment in interactive, game-theoretic scenarios. The benchmark and rankings are publicly available at https://llmsparks.github.io/.

This paper introduces Alympics (Olympics for Agents), a systematic simulation framework utilizing Large Language Model (LLM) agents for game theory research. Alympics creates a versatile platform for studying complex game theory problems, bridging the gap between theoretical game theory and empirical investigations by providing a controlled environment for simulating human-like strategic interactions with LLM agents. In our pilot case study, the "Water Allocation Challenge," we explore Alympics through a challenging strategic game focused on the multi-round auction on scarce survival resources. This study demonstrates the framework's ability to qualitatively and quantitatively analyze game determinants, strategies, and outcomes. Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive human assessment and an in-depth evaluation of LLM agents in strategic decision-making scenarios. Our findings not only expand the understanding of LLM agents' proficiency in emulating human strategic behavior but also highlight their potential in advancing game theory knowledge, thereby enriching our understanding of both game theory and empowering further research into strategic decision-making domains with LLM agents. Codes, prompts, and all related resources are available at https://github.com/microsoft/Alympics.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) in complex decision-making is essential for advancing AI's ability for strategic planning and real-time adaptation. However, existing benchmarks for tasks like StarCraft II fail to capture the game's full complexity, such as its complete game context, diverse action spaces, and all playable races. To address this gap, we present SC2Arena, a benchmark that fully supports all playable races, low-level action spaces, and optimizes text-based observations to tackle spatial reasoning challenges. Complementing this, we introduce StarEvolve, a hierarchical framework that integrates strategic planning with tactical execution, featuring iterative self-correction and continuous improvement via fine-tuning on high-quality gameplay data. Its key components include a Planner-Executor-Verifier structure to break down gameplay, and a scoring system for selecting high-quality training samples. Comprehensive analysis using SC2Arena provides valuable insights into developing generalist agents that were not possible with previous benchmarks. Experimental results also demonstrate that our proposed StarEvolve achieves superior performance in strategic planning. Our code, environment, and algorithms are publicly available.

This paper investigates the rationality of large language models (LLMs) in strategic decision-making contexts, specifically within the framework of game theory. We evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs across a spectrum of complete-information and incomplete-information games. Our findings reveal that LLMs frequently deviate from rational strategies, particularly as the complexity of the game increases with larger payoff matrices or deeper sequential trees. To address these limitations, we design multiple game-theoretic workflows that guide the reasoning and decision-making processes of LLMs. These workflows aim to enhance the models' ability to compute Nash Equilibria and make rational choices, even under conditions of uncertainty and incomplete information. Experimental results demonstrate that the adoption of these workflows significantly improves the rationality and robustness of LLMs in game-theoretic tasks. Specifically, with the workflow, LLMs exhibit marked improvements in identifying optimal strategies, achieving near-optimal allocations in negotiation scenarios, and reducing susceptibility to exploitation during negotiations. Furthermore, we explore the meta-strategic considerations of whether it is rational for agents to adopt such workflows, recognizing that the decision to use or forgo the workflow constitutes a game-theoretic issue in itself. Our research contributes to a deeper understanding of LLMs' decision-making capabilities in strategic contexts and provides insights into enhancing their rationality through structured workflows. The findings have implications for the development of more robust and strategically sound AI agents capable of navigating complex interactive environments. Code and data supporting this study are available at https://github.com/Wenyueh/game_theory.

Game playing has long served as a fundamental benchmark for evaluating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in general reasoning, their effectiveness in spatial strategic reasoning, which is critical for complex and fully observable board games, remains insufficiently explored. In this work, we adopt Chinese Chess (Xiangqi) as a challenging and rich testbed due to its intricate rules and spatial complexity. To advance LLMs' strategic competence in such environments, we propose a training framework tailored to Xiangqi, built upon a large-scale dataset of five million board-move pairs enhanced with expert annotations and engine evaluations. Building on this foundation, we introduce Xiangqi-R1, a 7B-parameter model trained in multi-stage manner: (1) fine-tuning for legal move prediction to capture basic spatial rules, (2) incorporating strategic annotations to improve decision-making, and (3) applying reinforcement learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with multi-dimensional reward signals to enhance reasoning stability. Our Experimental results indicate that, despite their size and power, general-purpose LLMs struggle to achieve satisfactory performance in these tasks. Compared to general-purpose LLMs, Xiangqi-R1 greatly advances with an 18% rise in move legality and a 22% boost in analysis accuracy. Our results point to a promising path for creating general strategic intelligence in spatially complex areas.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at processing information reactively but lack the ability to systemically explore hypothetical futures. They cannot ask, "what if we take this action? how will it affect the final outcome" and forecast its potential consequences before acting. This critical gap limits their utility in dynamic, high-stakes scenarios like strategic planning, risk assessment, and real-time decision making. To bridge this gap, we propose WiA-LLM, a new paradigm that equips LLMs with proactive thinking capabilities. Our approach integrates What-If Analysis (WIA), a systematic approach for evaluating hypothetical scenarios by changing input variables. By leveraging environmental feedback via reinforcement learning, WiA-LLM moves beyond reactive thinking. It dynamically simulates the outcomes of each potential action, enabling the model to anticipate future states rather than merely react to the present conditions. We validate WiA-LLM in Honor of Kings (HoK), a complex multiplayer game environment characterized by rapid state changes and intricate interactions. The game's real-time state changes require precise multi-step consequence prediction, making it an ideal testbed for our approach. Experimental results demonstrate WiA-LLM achieves a remarkable 74.2% accuracy in forecasting game-state changes (up to two times gain over baselines). The model shows particularly significant gains in high-difficulty scenarios where accurate foresight is critical. To our knowledge, this is the first work to formally explore and integrate what-if analysis capabilities within LLMs. WiA-LLM represents a fundamental advance toward proactive reasoning in LLMs, providing a scalable framework for robust decision-making in dynamic environments with broad implications for strategic applications.

From out-competing grandmasters in chess to informing high-stakes healthcare decisions, emerging methods from artificial intelligence are increasingly capable of making complex and strategic decisions in diverse, high-dimensional, and uncertain situations. But can these methods help us devise robust strategies for managing environmental systems under great uncertainty? Here we explore how reinforcement learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence, approaches decision problems through a lens similar to adaptive environmental management: learning through experience to gradually improve decisions with updated knowledge. We review where reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise for improving evidence-informed adaptive management decisions even when classical optimization methods are intractable. For example, model-free deep RL might help identify quantitative decision strategies even when models are nonidentifiable. Finally, we discuss technical and social issues that arise when applying reinforcement learning to adaptive management problems in the environmental domain. Our synthesis suggests that environmental management and computer science can learn from one another about the practices, promises, and perils of experience-based decision-making.

In this paper, we propose a new method Strategist that utilizes LLMs to acquire new skills for playing multi-agent games through a self-improvement process. Our method gathers quality feedback through self-play simulations with Monte Carlo tree search and LLM-based reflection, which can then be used to learn high-level strategic skills such as how to evaluate states that guide the low-level execution.We showcase how our method can be used in both action planning and dialogue generation in the context of games, achieving good performance on both tasks. Specifically, we demonstrate that our method can help train agents with better performance than both traditional reinforcement learning-based approaches and other LLM-based skill learning approaches in games including the Game of Pure Strategy (GOPS) and The Resistance: Avalon.

Reasoning and strategic behavior in social interactions is a hallmark of intelligence. This form of reasoning is significantly more sophisticated than isolated planning or reasoning tasks in static settings (e.g., math problem solving). In this paper, we present Strategic Planning, Interaction, and Negotiation (SPIN-Bench), a new multi-domain evaluation designed to measure the intelligence of strategic planning and social reasoning. While many existing benchmarks focus on narrow planning or single-agent reasoning, SPIN-Bench combines classical PDDL tasks, competitive board games, cooperative card games, and multi-agent negotiation scenarios in one unified framework. The framework includes both a benchmark as well as an arena to simulate and evaluate the variety of social settings to test reasoning and strategic behavior of AI agents. We formulate the benchmark SPIN-Bench by systematically varying action spaces, state complexity, and the number of interacting agents to simulate a variety of social settings where success depends on not only methodical and step-wise decision making, but also conceptual inference of other (adversarial or cooperative) participants. Our experiments reveal that while contemporary LLMs handle basic fact retrieval and short-range planning reasonably well, they encounter significant performance bottlenecks in tasks requiring deep multi-hop reasoning over large state spaces and socially adept coordination under uncertainty. We envision SPIN-Bench as a catalyst for future research on robust multi-agent planning, social reasoning, and human--AI teaming.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for tasks that require complex reasoning. Most benchmarks focus on final outcomes but overlook the intermediate reasoning steps - such as planning, revision, and decision making under resource constraints. We argue that measuring these internal processes is essential for understanding model behavior and improving reliability. We propose using strategic games as a natural evaluation environment: closed, rule-based systems with clear states, limited resources, and automatic feedback. We introduce a framework that evaluates LLMs along three core dimensions: planning, revision, and resource-constrained decision making. To operationalize this, we define metrics beyond win rate, including overcorrection risk rate, correction success rate, improvement slope, and over-budget ratio. In 4320 adversarial rounds across 12 leading models, ChatGPT-o3-mini achieves the top composite score, with a win rate of 74.7 percent, a correction success rate of 78.6 percent, and an improvement slope of 0.041. By contrast, Qwen-Plus, despite an overcorrection risk rate of 81.6 percent, wins only 25.6 percent of its matches - primarily due to excessive resource use. We also observe a negative correlation between overcorrection risk rate and correction success rate (Pearson r = -0.51, p = 0.093), suggesting that more frequent edits do not always improve outcomes. Our findings highlight the value of assessing not only what LLMs decide but how they arrive at those decisions

A total of 34% of AI research and development projects fails or are abandoned, according to a recent survey by Rackspace Technology of 1,870 companies. We propose a new strategic framework, aiSTROM, that empowers managers to create a successful AI strategy based on a thorough literature review. This provides a unique and integrated approach that guides managers and lead developers through the various challenges in the implementation process. In the aiSTROM framework, we start by identifying the top n potential projects (typically 3-5). For each of those, seven areas of focus are thoroughly analysed. These areas include creating a data strategy that takes into account unique cross-departmental machine learning data requirements, security, and legal requirements. aiSTROM then guides managers to think about how to put together an interdisciplinary artificial intelligence (AI) implementation team given the scarcity of AI talent. Once an AI team strategy has been established, it needs to be positioned within the organization, either cross-departmental or as a separate division. Other considerations include AI as a service (AIaas), or outsourcing development. Looking at new technologies, we have to consider challenges such as bias, legality of black-box-models, and keeping humans in the loop. Next, like any project, we need value-based key performance indicators (KPIs) to track and validate the progress. Depending on the company's risk-strategy, a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) can help further classify the shortlisted projects. Finally, we should make sure that our strategy includes continuous education of employees to enable a culture of adoption. This unique and comprehensive framework offers a valuable, literature supported, tool for managers and lead developers.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been applied to attack graphs for penetration testing, however, trained agents do not reflect reality because the attack graphs lack operational nuances typically captured within the intelligence preparation of the battlefield (IPB) that include notions of (cyber) terrain. In particular, current practice constructs attack graphs exclusively using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and its components. We present methods for constructing attack graphs using notions from IPB on cyber terrain analysis of obstacles, avenues of approach, key terrain, observation and fields of fire, and cover and concealment. We demonstrate our methods on an example where firewalls are treated as obstacles and represented in (1) the reward space and (2) the state dynamics. We show that terrain analysis can be used to bring realism to attack graphs for RL.

Cyber attacks pose existential threats to nations and enterprises. Current practice favors piece-wise analysis using threat-models in the stead of rigorous cyber terrain analysis and intelligence preparation of the battlefield. Automated penetration testing using reinforcement learning offers a new and promising approach for developing methodologies that are driven by network structure and cyber terrain, that can be later interpreted in terms of threat-models, but that are principally network-driven analyses. This paper presents a novel method for crown jewel analysis termed CJA-RL that uses reinforcement learning to identify key terrain and avenues of approach for exploiting crown jewels. In our experiment, CJA-RL identified ideal entry points, choke points, and pivots for exploiting a network with multiple crown jewels, exemplifying how CJA-RL and reinforcement learning for penetration testing generally can benefit computer network operations workflows.

To optimally coordinate with others in cooperative games, it is often crucial to have information about one's collaborators: successful driving requires understanding which side of the road to drive on. However, not every feature of collaborators is strategically relevant: the fine-grained acceleration of drivers may be ignored while maintaining optimal coordination. We show that there is a well-defined dichotomy between strategically relevant and irrelevant information. Moreover, we show that, in dynamic games, this dichotomy has a compact representation that can be efficiently computed via a Bellman backup operator. We apply this algorithm to analyze the strategically relevant information for tasks in both a standard and a partially observable version of the Overcooked environment. Theoretical and empirical results show that our algorithms are significantly more efficient than baselines. Videos are available at https://minknowledge.github.io.

Games have been vital test beds for the rapid development of Agent-based research. Remarkable progress has been achieved in the past, but it is unclear if the findings equip for real-world problems. While pressure grows, some of the most critical ecological challenges can find mitigation and prevention solutions through technology and its applications. Most real-world domains include multi-agent scenarios and require machine-machine and human-machine collaboration. Open-source environments have not advanced and are often toy scenarios, too abstract or not suitable for multi-agent research. By mimicking real-world problems and increasing the complexity of environments, we hope to advance state-of-the-art multi-agent research and inspire researchers to work on immediate real-world problems. Here, we present HIVEX, an environment suite to benchmark multi-agent research focusing on ecological challenges. HIVEX includes the following environments: Wind Farm Control, Wildfire Resource Management, Drone-Based Reforestation, Ocean Plastic Collection, and Aerial Wildfire Suppression. We provide environments, training examples, and baselines for the main and sub-tasks. All trained models resulting from the experiments of this work are hosted on Hugging Face. We also provide a leaderboard on Hugging Face and encourage the community to submit models trained on our environment suite.

Frontier models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agent. One safety concern is that AI agents might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding their true capabilities and objectives - also known as scheming. We study whether models have the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the model to strongly follow. We evaluate frontier models on a suite of six agentic evaluations where models are instructed to pursue goals and are placed in environments that incentivize scheming. Our results show that o1, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Opus, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Llama 3.1 405B all demonstrate in-context scheming capabilities. They recognize scheming as a viable strategy and readily engage in such behavior. For example, models strategically introduce subtle mistakes into their responses, attempt to disable their oversight mechanisms, and even exfiltrate what they believe to be their model weights to external servers. Additionally, this deceptive behavior proves persistent. When o1 has engaged in scheming, it maintains its deception in over 85% of follow-up questions and often remains deceptive in multi-turn interrogations. Analysis of the models' chains-of-thought reveals that models explicitly reason about these deceptive strategies, providing evidence that the scheming behavior is not accidental. Surprisingly, we also find rare instances where models engage in scheming when only given a goal, without being strongly nudged to pursue it. We observe cases where Claude 3.5 Sonnet strategically underperforms in evaluations in pursuit of being helpful, a goal that was acquired during training rather than in-context. Our findings demonstrate that frontier models now possess capabilities for basic in-context scheming, making the potential of AI agents to engage in scheming behavior a concrete rather than theoretical concern.

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.

Darija Open Dataset (DODa) represents an open-source project aimed at enhancing Natural Language Processing capabilities for the Moroccan dialect, Darija. With approximately 100,000 entries, DODa stands as the largest collaborative project of its kind for Darija-English translation. The dataset features semantic and syntactic categorizations, variations in spelling, verb conjugations across multiple tenses, as well as tens of thousands of translated sentences. The dataset includes entries written in both Latin and Arabic alphabets, reflecting the linguistic variations and preferences found in different sources and applications. The availability of such dataset is critical for developing applications that can accurately understand and generate Darija, thus supporting the linguistic needs of the Moroccan community and potentially extending to similar dialects in neighboring regions. This paper explores the strategic importance of DODa, its current achievements, and the envisioned future enhancements that will continue to promote its use and expansion in the global NLP landscape.

Effective information seeking in the vast and ever-growing digital landscape requires balancing expansive search with strategic reasoning. Current large language model (LLM)-based agents struggle to achieve this balance due to limitations in search breadth and reasoning depth, where slow, serial querying restricts coverage of relevant sources and noisy raw inputs disrupt the continuity of multi-step reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose BrowseMaster, a scalable framework built around a programmatically augmented planner-executor agent pair. The planner formulates and adapts search strategies based on task constraints, while the executor conducts efficient, targeted retrieval to supply the planner with concise, relevant evidence. This division of labor preserves coherent, long-horizon reasoning while sustaining broad and systematic exploration, overcoming the trade-off that limits existing agents. Extensive experiments on challenging English and Chinese benchmarks show that BrowseMaster consistently outperforms open-source and proprietary baselines, achieving scores of 30.0 on BrowseComp-en and 46.5 on BrowseComp-zh, which demonstrates its strong capability in complex, reasoning-heavy information-seeking tasks at scale.

As AI systems pervade human life, ensuring that large language models (LLMs) make safe decisions remains a significant challenge. We introduce the Governance of the Commons Simulation (GovSim), a generative simulation platform designed to study strategic interactions and cooperative decision-making in LLMs. In GovSim, a society of AI agents must collectively balance exploiting a common resource with sustaining it for future use. This environment enables the study of how ethical considerations, strategic planning, and negotiation skills impact cooperative outcomes. We develop an LLM-based agent architecture and test it with the leading open and closed LLMs. We find that all but the most powerful LLM agents fail to achieve a sustainable equilibrium in GovSim, with the highest survival rate below 54%. Ablations reveal that successful multi-agent communication between agents is critical for achieving cooperation in these cases. Furthermore, our analyses show that the failure to achieve sustainable cooperation in most LLMs stems from their inability to formulate and analyze hypotheses about the long-term effects of their actions on the equilibrium of the group. Finally, we show that agents that leverage "Universalization"-based reasoning, a theory of moral thinking, are able to achieve significantly better sustainability. Taken together, GovSim enables us to study the mechanisms that underlie sustainable self-government with specificity and scale. We open source the full suite of our research results, including the simulation environment, agent prompts, and a comprehensive web interface.

Geospatial Foundation Models (GeoFMs) are transforming Earth Observation (EO), but evaluation lacks standardized protocols. GEO-Bench-2 addresses this with a comprehensive framework spanning classification, segmentation, regression, object detection, and instance segmentation across 19 permissively-licensed datasets. We introduce ''capability'' groups to rank models on datasets that share common characteristics (e.g., resolution, bands, temporality). This enables users to identify which models excel in each capability and determine which areas need improvement in future work. To support both fair comparison and methodological innovation, we define a prescriptive yet flexible evaluation protocol. This not only ensures consistency in benchmarking but also facilitates research into model adaptation strategies, a key and open challenge in advancing GeoFMs for downstream tasks. Our experiments show that no single model dominates across all tasks, confirming the specificity of the choices made during architecture design and pretraining. While models pretrained on natural images (ConvNext ImageNet, DINO V3) excel on high-resolution tasks, EO-specific models (TerraMind, Prithvi, and Clay) outperform them on multispectral applications such as agriculture and disaster response. These findings demonstrate that optimal model choice depends on task requirements, data modalities, and constraints. This shows that the goal of a single GeoFM model that performs well across all tasks remains open for future research. GEO-Bench-2 enables informed, reproducible GeoFM evaluation tailored to specific use cases. Code, data, and leaderboard for GEO-Bench-2 are publicly released under a permissive license.

We investigated the temporal distribution of goals in soccer using event-level data from 3,433 matches across 21 leagues and competitions. Contrary to the prevailing notion of randomness, we found that the probability of a goal being scored is higher as matches progress, and we observed fewer-than-expected goals in the early minutes of each half. Further analysis of the time between subsequent goals shows an exponential decay, indicating that most goals naturally cluster closer together in time. By splitting this distribution by the team that scores the next goal, we observe bursty goal-scoring dynamics, wherein the same team is more likely to score again shortly after its previous goal. These findings highlight the importance of match context (whether driven by fatigue, tactical adaptations, or psychological momentum) in shaping when teams are able to score. Moreover, the results open avenues for extending data-driven methods for identifying high-impact moments in a match and refining strategic decision-making in soccer's evolving analytical landscape.

Climate change has resulted in a year over year increase in adverse weather and weather conditions which contribute to increasingly severe fire seasons. Without effective mitigation, these fires pose a threat to life, property, ecology, cultural heritage, and critical infrastructure. To better prepare for and react to the increasing threat of wildfires, more accurate fire modelers and mitigation responses are necessary. In this paper, we introduce SimFire, a versatile wildland fire projection simulator designed to generate realistic wildfire scenarios, and SimHarness, a modular agent-based machine learning wrapper capable of automatically generating land management strategies within SimFire to reduce the overall damage to the area. Together, this publicly available system allows researchers and practitioners the ability to emulate and assess the effectiveness of firefighter interventions and formulate strategic plans that prioritize value preservation and resource allocation optimization. The repositories are available for download at https://github.com/mitrefireline.

The two fields of urban planning and artificial intelligence (AI) arose and developed separately. However, there is now cross-pollination and increasing interest in both fields to benefit from the advances of the other. In the present paper, we introduce the importance of urban planning from the sustainability, living, economic, disaster, and environmental perspectives. We review the fundamental concepts of urban planning and relate these concepts to crucial open problems of machine learning, including adversarial learning, generative neural networks, deep encoder-decoder networks, conversational AI, and geospatial and temporal machine learning, thereby assaying how AI can contribute to modern urban planning. Thus, a central problem is automated land-use configuration, which is formulated as the generation of land uses and building configuration for a target area from surrounding geospatial, human mobility, social media, environment, and economic activities. Finally, we delineate some implications of AI for urban planning and propose key research areas at the intersection of both topics.

Can Large Language Models (LLMs) simulate human behavior in complex environments? LLMs have recently been shown to exhibit advanced reasoning skills but much of NLP evaluation still relies on static benchmarks. Answering this requires evaluation environments that probe strategic reasoning in competitive, dynamic scenarios that involve long-term planning. We introduce AucArena, a novel simulation environment for evaluating LLMs within auctions, a setting chosen for being highly unpredictable and involving many skills related to resource and risk management, while also being easy to evaluate. We conduct several controlled simulations using state-of-the-art LLMs as bidding agents. We find that through simple prompting, LLMs do indeed demonstrate many of the skills needed for effectively engaging in auctions (e.g., managing budget, adhering to long-term goals and priorities), skills that we find can be sharpened by explicitly encouraging models to be adaptive and observe strategies in past auctions. These results are significant as they show the potential of using LLM agents to model intricate social dynamics, especially in competitive settings. However, we also observe considerable variability in the capabilities of individual LLMs. Notably, even our most advanced models (GPT-4) are occasionally surpassed by heuristic baselines and human agents, highlighting the potential for further improvements in the design of LLM agents and the important role that our simulation environment can play in further testing and refining agent architectures.

Organizations typically train large models individually. This is costly and time-consuming, particularly for large-scale foundation models. Such vertical production is known to be suboptimal. Inspired by this economic insight, we ask whether it is possible to leverage others' expertise by trading the constituent parts in models, i.e., sets of weights, as if they were market commodities. While recent advances in aligning and interpolating models suggest that doing so may be possible, a number of fundamental questions must be answered to create viable parameter markets. In this work, we address these basic questions, propose a framework containing the infrastructure necessary for market operations to take place, study strategies for exchanging parameters, and offer means for agents to monetize parameters. Excitingly, compared to agents who train siloed models from scratch, we show that it is possible to mutually gain by using the market, even in competitive settings. This suggests that the notion of parameter markets may be a useful paradigm for improving large-scale model training in the future.

A key aspect of temporal domains is the ability to make predictions multiple time steps into the future, a process known as multi-step forecasting (MSF). At the core of this process is selecting a forecasting strategy, however, with no existing frameworks to map out the space of strategies, practitioners are left with ad-hoc methods for strategy selection. In this work, we propose Stratify, a parameterised framework that addresses multi-step forecasting, unifying existing strategies and introducing novel, improved strategies. We evaluate Stratify on 18 benchmark datasets, five function classes, and short to long forecast horizons (10, 20, 40, 80). In over 84% of 1080 experiments, novel strategies in Stratify improved performance compared to all existing ones. Importantly, we find that no single strategy consistently outperforms others in all task settings, highlighting the need for practitioners explore the Stratify space to carefully search and select forecasting strategies based on task-specific requirements. Our results are the most comprehensive benchmarking of known and novel forecasting strategies. We make code available to reproduce our results.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across a broad range of tasks but their knowledge and abilities in the geographic and geospatial domains are yet to be explored, despite potential wide-ranging benefits to navigation, environmental research, urban development, and disaster response. We conduct a series of experiments exploring various vision capabilities of MLLMs within these domains, particularly focusing on the frontier model GPT-4V, and benchmark its performance against open-source counterparts. Our methodology involves challenging these models with a small-scale geographic benchmark consisting of a suite of visual tasks, testing their abilities across a spectrum of complexity. The analysis uncovers not only where such models excel, including instances where they outperform humans, but also where they falter, providing a balanced view of their capabilities in the geographic domain. To enable the comparison and evaluation of future models, our benchmark will be publicly released.

Large language models and autonomous AI agents have evolved rapidly, resulting in a diverse array of evaluation benchmarks, frameworks, and collaboration protocols. However, the landscape remains fragmented and lacks a unified taxonomy or comprehensive survey. Therefore, we present a side-by-side comparison of benchmarks developed between 2019 and 2025 that evaluate these models and agents across multiple domains. In addition, we propose a taxonomy of approximately 60 benchmarks that cover general and academic knowledge reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, code generation and software engineering, factual grounding and retrieval, domain-specific evaluations, multimodal and embodied tasks, task orchestration, and interactive assessments. Furthermore, we review AI-agent frameworks introduced between 2023 and 2025 that integrate large language models with modular toolkits to enable autonomous decision-making and multi-step reasoning. Moreover, we present real-world applications of autonomous AI agents in materials science, biomedical research, academic ideation, software engineering, synthetic data generation, chemical reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, geographic information systems, multimedia, healthcare, and finance. We then survey key agent-to-agent collaboration protocols, namely the Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and the Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A). Finally, we discuss recommendations for future research, focusing on advanced reasoning strategies, failure modes in multi-agent LLM systems, automated scientific discovery, dynamic tool integration via reinforcement learning, integrated search capabilities, and security vulnerabilities in agent protocols.

This paper introduces a novel framework combining LLM agents as proxies for human strategic behavior with reinforcement learning (RL) to engage these agents in evolving strategic interactions within team environments. Our approach extends traditional agent-based simulations by using strategic LLM agents (SLA) and introducing dynamic and adaptive governance through a pro-social promoting RL agent (PPA) that modulates information access across agents in a network, optimizing social welfare and promoting pro-social behavior. Through validation in iterative games, including the prisoner dilemma, we demonstrate that SLA agents exhibit nuanced strategic adaptations. The PPA agent effectively learns to adjust information transparency, resulting in enhanced cooperation rates. This framework offers significant insights into AI-mediated social dynamics, contributing to the deployment of AI in real-world team settings.

This paper introduces RiskCards, a framework for structured assessment and documentation of risks associated with an application of language models. As with all language, text generated by language models can be harmful, or used to bring about harm. Automating language generation adds both an element of scale and also more subtle or emergent undesirable tendencies to the generated text. Prior work establishes a wide variety of language model harms to many different actors: existing taxonomies identify categories of harms posed by language models; benchmarks establish automated tests of these harms; and documentation standards for models, tasks and datasets encourage transparent reporting. However, there is no risk-centric framework for documenting the complexity of a landscape in which some risks are shared across models and contexts, while others are specific, and where certain conditions may be required for risks to manifest as harms. RiskCards address this methodological gap by providing a generic framework for assessing the use of a given language model in a given scenario. Each RiskCard makes clear the routes for the risk to manifest harm, their placement in harm taxonomies, and example prompt-output pairs. While RiskCards are designed to be open-source, dynamic and participatory, we present a "starter set" of RiskCards taken from a broad literature survey, each of which details a concrete risk presentation. Language model RiskCards initiate a community knowledge base which permits the mapping of risks and harms to a specific model or its application scenario, ultimately contributing to a better, safer and shared understanding of the risk landscape.

Motivated by equilibrium models of labor markets, we develop a formulation of causal strategic classification in which strategic agents can directly manipulate their outcomes. As an application, we compare employers that anticipate the strategic response of a labor force with employers that do not. We show through a combination of theory and experiment that employers with performatively optimal hiring policies improve employer reward, labor force skill level, and in some cases labor force equity. On the other hand, we demonstrate that performative employers harm labor force utility and fail to prevent discrimination in other cases.

We consider negotiation settings in which two agents use natural language to bargain on goods. Agents need to decide on both high-level strategy (e.g., proposing \50) and the execution of that strategy (e.g., generating "The bike is brand new. Selling for just 50."). Recent work on negotiation trains neural models, but their end-to-end nature makes it hard to control their strategy, and reinforcement learning tends to lead to degenerate solutions. In this paper, we propose a modular approach based on coarse di- alogue acts (e.g., propose(price=50)) that decouples strategy and generation. We show that we can flexibly set the strategy using supervised learning, reinforcement learning, or domain-specific knowledge without degeneracy, while our retrieval-based generation can maintain context-awareness and produce diverse utterances. We test our approach on the recently proposed DEALORNODEAL game, and we also collect a richer dataset based on real items on Craigslist. Human evaluation shows that our systems achieve higher task success rate and more human-like negotiation behavior than previous approaches.

Terrain modeling has traditionally relied on procedural techniques, which often require extensive domain expertise and handcrafted rules. In this paper, we present MESA - a novel data-centric alternative by training a diffusion model on global remote sensing data. This approach leverages large-scale geospatial information to generate high-quality terrain samples from text descriptions, showcasing a flexible and scalable solution for terrain generation. The model's capabilities are demonstrated through extensive experiments, highlighting its ability to generate realistic and diverse terrain landscapes. The dataset produced to support this work, the Major TOM Core-DEM extension dataset, is released openly as a comprehensive resource for global terrain data. The results suggest that data-driven models, trained on remote sensing data, can provide a powerful tool for realistic terrain modeling and generation.

Dialogue agents based on large language models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in proactive dialogue, which requires effective strategy planning. However, existing approaches to strategy planning for proactive dialogue face several limitations: limited strategy coverage, preference bias in planning, and reliance on costly additional training. To address these, we propose PRINCIPLES: a synthetic strategy memory for proactive dialogue agents. PRINCIPLES is derived through offline self-play simulations and serves as reusable knowledge that guides strategy planning during inference, eliminating the need for additional training and data annotation. We evaluate PRINCIPLES in both emotional support and persuasion domains, demonstrating consistent improvements over strong baselines. Furthermore, PRINCIPLES maintains its robustness across extended and more diverse evaluation settings. See our project page at https://huggingface.co/spaces/kimnamssya/Principles.

Planning is central to agents and agentic AI. The ability to plan, e.g., creating travel itineraries within a budget, holds immense potential in both scientific and commercial contexts. Moreover, optimal plans tend to require fewer resources compared to ad-hoc methods. To date, a comprehensive understanding of existing planning benchmarks appears to be lacking. Without it, comparing planning algorithms' performance across domains or selecting suitable algorithms for new scenarios remains challenging. In this paper, we examine a range of planning benchmarks to identify commonly used testbeds for algorithm development and highlight potential gaps. These benchmarks are categorized into embodied environments, web navigation, scheduling, games and puzzles, and everyday task automation. Our study recommends the most appropriate benchmarks for various algorithms and offers insights to guide future benchmark development.

As large language model (LLM) agents increasingly automate complex web tasks, they boost productivity while simultaneously introducing new security risks. However, relevant studies on web agent attacks remain limited. Existing red-teaming approaches mainly rely on manually crafted attack strategies or static models trained offline. Such methods fail to capture the underlying behavioral patterns of web agents, making it difficult to generalize across diverse environments. In web agent attacks, success requires the continuous discovery and evolution of attack strategies. To this end, we propose Genesis, a novel agentic framework composed of three modules: Attacker, Scorer, and Strategist. The Attacker generates adversarial injections by integrating the genetic algorithm with a hybrid strategy representation. The Scorer evaluates the target web agent's responses to provide feedback. The Strategist dynamically uncovers effective strategies from interaction logs and compiles them into a continuously growing strategy library, which is then re-deployed to enhance the Attacker's effectiveness. Extensive experiments across various web tasks show that our framework discovers novel strategies and consistently outperforms existing attack baselines.

Despite recent advancements in image generation, diffusion models still remain largely underexplored in Earth Observation. In this paper we show that state-of-the-art pretrained diffusion models can be conditioned on cartographic data to generate realistic satellite images. We provide two large datasets of paired OpenStreetMap images and satellite views over the region of Mainland Scotland and the Central Belt. We train a ControlNet model and qualitatively evaluate the results, demonstrating that both image quality and map fidelity are possible. Finally, we provide some insights on the opportunities and challenges of applying these models for remote sensing. Our model weights and code for creating the dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/miquel-espinosa/map-sat.

Large Language Models (LLM) are increasingly being explored for problem-solving tasks. However, their strategic planning capability is often viewed with skepticism. Recent studies have incorporated the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to augment the planning capacity of LLM. Despite its potential, MCTS relies on extensive sampling simulations to approximate the true reward distribution, which leads to two primary issues. Firstly, MCTS is effective for tasks like the Game of Go, where simulation results can yield objective rewards (e.g., 1 for a win and 0 for a loss). However, for tasks such as question answering, the result of a simulation is the answer to the question, which cannot yield an objective reward without the ground truth. Secondly, obtaining statistically significant reward estimations typically requires a sample size exceeding 30 simulations, resulting in excessive token usage and time consumption. To address these challenges, we present the Multi-Agent System with Tactical Execution and Reasoning using LLM Specialized MCTS (MASTER), a novel framework that coordinates agent recruitment and communication through LLM specialized MCTS. This system autonomously adjusts the number of agents based on task complexity and ensures focused communication among them. Comprehensive experiments across various tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. It achieves 76% accuracy on HotpotQA and 80% on WebShop, setting new state-of-the-art performance on these datasets.

Recent advances in LLMs have enabled their use as autonomous agents across a range of tasks, yet they continue to struggle with formulating and adhering to coherent long-term strategies. In this paper, we investigate whether LLM agents can self-improve when placed in environments that explicitly challenge their strategic planning abilities. Using the board game Settlers of Catan, accessed through the open-source Catanatron framework, we benchmark a progression of LLM-based agents, from a simple game-playing agent to systems capable of autonomously rewriting their own prompts and their player agent's code. We introduce a multi-agent architecture in which specialized roles (Analyzer, Researcher, Coder, and Player) collaborate to iteratively analyze gameplay, research new strategies, and modify the agent's logic or prompt. By comparing manually crafted agents to those evolved entirely by LLMs, we evaluate how effectively these systems can diagnose failure and adapt over time. Our results show that self-evolving agents, particularly when powered by models like Claude 3.7 and GPT-4o, outperform static baselines by autonomously adopting their strategies, passing along sample behavior to game-playing agents, and demonstrating adaptive reasoning over multiple iterations.

Foundational mapping remains a challenge in many parts of the world, particularly in dynamic scenarios such as natural disasters when timely updates are critical. Updating maps is currently a highly manual process requiring a large number of human labelers to either create features or rigorously validate automated outputs. We propose that the frequent revisits of earth imaging satellite constellations may accelerate existing efforts to quickly update foundational maps when combined with advanced machine learning techniques. Accordingly, the SpaceNet partners (CosmiQ Works, Radiant Solutions, and NVIDIA), released a large corpus of labeled satellite imagery on Amazon Web Services (AWS) called SpaceNet. The SpaceNet partners also launched a series of public prize competitions to encourage improvement of remote sensing machine learning algorithms. The first two of these competitions focused on automated building footprint extraction, and the most recent challenge focused on road network extraction. In this paper we discuss the SpaceNet imagery, labels, evaluation metrics, prize challenge results to date, and future plans for the SpaceNet challenge series.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) integrate into our social and economic interactions, we need to deepen our understanding of how humans respond to LLMs opponents in strategic settings. We present the results of the first controlled monetarily-incentivised laboratory experiment looking at differences in human behaviour in a multi-player p-beauty contest against other humans and LLMs. We use a within-subject design in order to compare behaviour at the individual level. We show that, in this environment, human subjects choose significantly lower numbers when playing against LLMs than humans, which is mainly driven by the increased prevalence of `zero' Nash-equilibrium choices. This shift is mainly driven by subjects with high strategic reasoning ability. Subjects who play the zero Nash-equilibrium choice motivate their strategy by appealing to perceived LLM's reasoning ability and, unexpectedly, propensity towards cooperation. Our findings provide foundational insights into the multi-player human-LLM interaction in simultaneous choice games, uncover heterogeneities in both subjects' behaviour and beliefs about LLM's play when playing against them, and suggest important implications for mechanism design in mixed human-LLM systems.

Monitoring of land cover and land use is crucial in natural resources management. Automatic visual mapping can carry enormous economic value for agriculture, forestry, or public administration. Satellite or aerial images combined with computer vision and deep learning enable precise assessment and can significantly speed up change detection. Aerial imagery usually provides images with much higher pixel resolution than satellite data allowing more detailed mapping. However, there is still a lack of aerial datasets made for the segmentation, covering rural areas with a resolution of tens centimeters per pixel, manual fine labels, and highly publicly important environmental instances like buildings, woods, water, or roads. Here we introduce LandCover.ai (Land Cover from Aerial Imagery) dataset for semantic segmentation. We collected images of 216.27 sq. km rural areas across Poland, a country in Central Europe, 39.51 sq. km with resolution 50 cm per pixel and 176.76 sq. km with resolution 25 cm per pixel and manually fine annotated four following classes of objects: buildings, woodlands, water, and roads. Additionally, we report simple benchmark results, achieving 85.56% of mean intersection over union on the test set. It proves that the automatic mapping of land cover is possible with a relatively small, cost-efficient, RGB-only dataset. The dataset is publicly available at https://landcover.ai.linuxpolska.com/

The French National Institute of Geographical and Forest Information (IGN) has the mission to document and measure land-cover on French territory and provides referential geographical datasets, including high-resolution aerial images and topographic maps. The monitoring of land-cover plays a crucial role in land management and planning initiatives, which can have significant socio-economic and environmental impact. Together with remote sensing technologies, artificial intelligence (IA) promises to become a powerful tool in determining land-cover and its evolution. IGN is currently exploring the potential of IA in the production of high-resolution land cover maps. Notably, deep learning methods are employed to obtain a semantic segmentation of aerial images. However, territories as large as France imply heterogeneous contexts: variations in landscapes and image acquisition make it challenging to provide uniform, reliable and accurate results across all of France. The FLAIR-one dataset presented is part of the dataset currently used at IGN to establish the French national reference land cover map "Occupation du sol \`a grande \'echelle" (OCS- GE).

This paper investigates the problem of ensembling multiple strategies for sequential portfolios to outperform individual strategies in terms of long-term wealth. Due to the uncertainty of strategies' performances in the future market, which are often based on specific models and statistical assumptions, investors often mitigate risk and enhance robustness by combining multiple strategies, akin to common approaches in collective learning prediction. However, the absence of a distribution-free and consistent preference framework complicates decisions of combination due to the ambiguous objective. To address this gap, we introduce a novel framework for decision-making in combining strategies, irrespective of market conditions, by establishing the investor's preference between decisions and then forming a clear objective. Through this framework, we propose a combinatorial strategy construction, free from statistical assumptions, for any scale of component strategies, even infinite, such that it meets the determined criterion. Finally, we test the proposed strategy along with its accelerated variant and some other multi-strategies. The numerical experiments show results in favor of the proposed strategies, albeit with small tradeoffs in their Sharpe ratios, in which their cumulative wealths eventually exceed those of the best component strategies while the accelerated strategy significantly improves performance.

The emergence of complex life on Earth is often attributed to the arms race that ensued from a huge number of organisms all competing for finite resources. We present an artificial intelligence research environment, inspired by the human game genre of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, a.k.a. MMOs), that aims to simulate this setting in microcosm. As with MMORPGs and the real world alike, our environment is persistent and supports a large and variable number of agents. Our environment is well suited to the study of large-scale multiagent interaction: it requires that agents learn robust combat and navigation policies in the presence of large populations attempting to do the same. Baseline experiments reveal that population size magnifies and incentivizes the development of skillful behaviors and results in agents that outcompete agents trained in smaller populations. We further show that the policies of agents with unshared weights naturally diverge to fill different niches in order to avoid competition.

We consider strategy proof mechanisms for facility location which maximize equitability between agents. As is common in the literature, we measure equitability with the Gini index. We first prove a simple but fundamental impossibility result that no strategy proof mechanism can bound the approximation ratio of the optimal Gini index of utilities for one or more facilities. We propose instead computing approximation ratios of the complemented Gini index of utilities, and consider how well both deterministic and randomized mechanisms approximate this. In addition, as Nash welfare is often put forwards as an equitable compromise between egalitarian and utilitarian outcomes, we consider how well mechanisms approximate the Nash welfare.

How should one judge whether a given large language model (LLM) can reliably perform economic reasoning? Most existing LLM benchmarks focus on specific applications and fail to present the model with a rich variety of economic tasks. A notable exception is Raman et al. [2024], who offer an approach for comprehensively benchmarking strategic decision-making; however, this approach fails to address the non-strategic settings prevalent in microeconomics, such as supply-and-demand analysis. We address this gap by taxonomizing microeconomic reasoning into 58 distinct elements, focusing on the logic of supply and demand, each grounded in up to 10 distinct domains, 5 perspectives, and 3 types. The generation of benchmark data across this combinatorial space is powered by a novel LLM-assisted data generation protocol that we dub auto-STEER, which generates a set of questions by adapting handwritten templates to target new domains and perspectives. Because it offers an automated way of generating fresh questions, auto-STEER mitigates the risk that LLMs will be trained to over-fit evaluation benchmarks; we thus hope that it will serve as a useful tool both for evaluating and fine-tuning models for years to come. We demonstrate the usefulness of our benchmark via a case study on 27 LLMs, ranging from small open-source models to the current state of the art. We examined each model's ability to solve microeconomic problems across our whole taxonomy and present the results across a range of prompting strategies and scoring metrics.

Large Language Models with transformer architecture have revolutionized the domain of text generation, setting unprecedented benchmarks. Despite their impressive capabilities, LLMs have been criticized for generating outcomes that deviate from factual accuracy or display logical inconsistencies, phenomena commonly referred to as hallucinations. This term, however, has often been misapplied to any results deviating from the instructor's expectations, which this paper defines as attention misdirection rather than true hallucinations. Understanding the distinction between hallucinations and attention misdirection becomes increasingly relevant in business contexts, where the ramifications of such errors can significantly impact the value extraction from these inherently pre-trained models. This paper highlights the best practices of the PGI, Persona, Grouping, and Intelligence, method, a strategic framework that achieved a remarkable error rate of only 3,15 percent across 4,000 responses generated by GPT in response to a real business challenge. It emphasizes that by equipping experimentation with knowledge, businesses can unlock opportunities for innovation through the use of these natively pre-trained models. This reinforces the notion that strategic application grounded in a skilled team can maximize the benefits of emergent technologies such as the LLMs.

Interactive digital maps have revolutionized how people travel and learn about the world; however, they rely on pre-existing structured data in GIS databases (e.g., road networks, POI indices), limiting their ability to address geo-visual questions related to what the world looks like. We introduce our vision for Geo-Visual Agents--multimodal AI agents capable of understanding and responding to nuanced visual-spatial inquiries about the world by analyzing large-scale repositories of geospatial images, including streetscapes (e.g., Google Street View), place-based photos (e.g., TripAdvisor, Yelp), and aerial imagery (e.g., satellite photos) combined with traditional GIS data sources. We define our vision, describe sensing and interaction approaches, provide three exemplars, and enumerate key challenges and opportunities for future work.

The presence of linear paths in parameter space between two different network solutions in certain cases, i.e., linear mode connectivity (LMC), has garnered interest from both theoretical and practical fronts. There has been significant research that either practically designs algorithms catered for connecting networks by adjusting for the permutation symmetries as well as some others that more theoretically construct paths through which networks can be connected. Yet, the core reasons for the occurrence of LMC, when in fact it does occur, in the highly non-convex loss landscapes of neural networks are far from clear. In this work, we take a step towards understanding it by providing a model of how the loss landscape needs to behave topographically for LMC (or the lack thereof) to manifest. Concretely, we present a `mountainside and ridge' perspective that helps to neatly tie together different geometric features that can be spotted in the loss landscape along the training runs. We also complement this perspective by providing a theoretical analysis of the barrier height, for which we provide empirical support, and which additionally extends as a faithful predictor of layer-wise LMC. We close with a toy example that provides further intuition on how barriers arise in the first place, all in all, showcasing the larger aim of the work -- to provide a working model of the landscape and its topography for the occurrence of LMC.

We investigate factors contributing to LLM agents' success in competitive multi-agent environments, using auctions as a testbed where agents bid to maximize profit. The agents are equipped with bidding domain knowledge, distinct personas that reflect item preferences, and a memory of auction history. Our work extends the classic auction scenario by creating a realistic environment where multiple agents bid on houses, weighing aspects such as size, location, and budget to secure the most desirable homes at the lowest prices. Particularly, we investigate three key questions: (a) How does a persona influence an agent's behavior in a competitive setting? (b) Can an agent effectively profile its competitors' behavior during auctions? (c) How can persona profiling be leveraged to create an advantage using strategies such as theory of mind? Through a series of experiments, we analyze the behaviors of LLM agents and shed light on new findings. Our testbed, called HARBOR, offers a valuable platform for deepening our understanding of multi-agent workflows in competitive environments.

As LLM agents advance, they are increasingly mediating economic decisions, ranging from product discovery to transactions, on behalf of users. Such applications promise benefits but also raise many questions about agent accountability and value for users. Addressing these questions requires understanding how agents behave in realistic market conditions. However, previous research has largely evaluated agents in constrained settings, such as single-task marketplaces (e.g., negotiation) or structured two-agent interactions. Real-world markets are fundamentally different: they require agents to handle diverse economic activities and coordinate within large, dynamic ecosystems where multiple agents with opaque behaviors may engage in open-ended dialogues. To bridge this gap, we investigate two-sided agentic marketplaces where Assistant agents represent consumers and Service agents represent competing businesses. To study these interactions safely, we develop Magentic-Marketplace-- a simulated environment where Assistants and Services can operate. This environment enables us to study key market dynamics: the utility agents achieve, behavioral biases, vulnerability to manipulation, and how search mechanisms shape market outcomes. Our experiments show that frontier models can approach optimal welfare-- but only under ideal search conditions. Performance degrades sharply with scale, and all models exhibit severe first-proposal bias, creating 10-30x advantages for response speed over quality. These findings reveal how behaviors emerge across market conditions, informing the design of fair and efficient agentic marketplaces.

LLMs have immense potential for generating plans, transforming an initial world state into a desired goal state. A large body of research has explored the use of LLMs for various planning tasks, from web navigation to travel planning and database querying. However, many of these systems are tailored to specific problems, making it challenging to compare them or determine the best approach for new tasks. There is also a lack of clear and consistent evaluation criteria. Our survey aims to offer a comprehensive overview of current LLM planners to fill this gap. It builds on foundational work by Kartam and Wilkins (1990) and examines six key performance criteria: completeness, executability, optimality, representation, generalization, and efficiency. For each, we provide a thorough analysis of representative works and highlight their strengths and weaknesses. Our paper also identifies crucial future directions, making it a valuable resource for both practitioners and newcomers interested in leveraging LLM planning to support agentic workflows.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in isolated step-by-step reasoning tasks such as mathematics and programming, but their proficiency in long-horizon planning, where solutions require extended, structured sequences of interdependent actions, remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks typically assess LLMs through abstract or low-dimensional algorithmic tasks, failing to capture the complexity of realistic planning environments. We introduce HeroBench, a novel benchmark designed specifically to evaluate long-horizon planning and structured reasoning within complex RPG-inspired virtual worlds. HeroBench provides a rigorously constructed dataset of tasks covering a wide range of difficulties, a simulated environment to execute and validate agent plans, and detailed analytical tools for evaluating model performance. Tasks challenge models to formulate strategic plans, efficiently gather resources, master necessary skills, craft equipment, and defeat adversaries, reflecting practical scenarios' layered dependencies and constraints. Our extensive evaluation of 25 state-of-the-art LLMs, spanning both open-source and proprietary models, including the GPT-5 family, reveals substantial performance disparities rarely observed in conventional reasoning benchmarks. Detailed error analysis further uncovers specific weaknesses in current models' abilities to generate robust high-level plans and reliably execute structured actions. HeroBench thus not only significantly advances the evaluation of LLM reasoning but also provides a flexible, scalable foundation for future research into advanced, autonomous planning in virtual environments.

Playing games has a long history of describing intricate interactions in simplified forms. In this paper we explore if large language models (LLMs) can play games, investigating their capabilities for randomisation and strategic adaptation through both simultaneous and sequential game interactions. We focus on GPT-4o-Mini-2024-08-17 and test two games between LLMs: Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) and games of strategy (Prisoners Dilemma PD). LLMs are often described as stochastic parrots, and while they may indeed be parrots, our results suggest that they are not very stochastic in the sense that their outputs - when prompted to be random - are often very biased. Our research reveals that LLMs appear to develop loss aversion strategies in repeated games, with RPS converging to stalemate conditions while PD shows systematic shifts between cooperative and competitive outcomes based on prompt design. We detail programmatic tools for independent agent interactions and the Agentic AI challenges faced in implementation. We show that LLMs can indeed play games, just not very well. These results have implications for the use of LLMs in multi-agent LLM systems and showcase limitations in current approaches to model output for strategic decision-making.

We present MetaSpatial, the first reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework designed to enhance 3D spatial reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs), enabling real-time 3D scene generation without the need for hard-coded optimizations. MetaSpatial addresses two core challenges: (i) the lack of internalized 3D spatial reasoning in VLMs, which limits their ability to generate realistic layouts, and (ii) the inefficiency of traditional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for layout generation tasks, as perfect ground truth annotations are unavailable. Our key innovation is a multi-turn RL-based optimization mechanism that integrates physics-aware constraints and rendered image evaluations, ensuring generated 3D layouts are coherent, physically plausible, and aesthetically consistent. Methodologically, MetaSpatial introduces an adaptive, iterative reasoning process, where the VLM refines spatial arrangements over multiple turns by analyzing rendered outputs, improving scene coherence progressively. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that MetaSpatial significantly enhances the spatial consistency and formatting stability of various scale models. Post-training, object placements are more realistic, aligned, and functionally coherent, validating the effectiveness of RL for 3D spatial reasoning in metaverse, AR/VR, digital twins, and game development applications. Our code, data, and training pipeline are publicly available at https://github.com/PzySeere/MetaSpatial.

The traditional deep learning paradigm that solely relies on labeled data has limitations in representing the spatial relationships between farmland elements and the surrounding environment.It struggles to effectively model the dynamic temporal evolution and spatial heterogeneity of farmland. Language,as a structured knowledge carrier,can explicitly express the spatiotemporal characteristics of farmland, such as its shape, distribution,and surrounding environmental information.Therefore,a language-driven learning paradigm can effectively alleviate the challenges posed by the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of farmland.However,in the field of remote sensing imagery of farmland,there is currently no comprehensive benchmark dataset to support this research direction.To fill this gap,we introduced language based descriptions of farmland and developed FarmSeg-VL dataset,the first fine-grained image-text dataset designed for spatiotemporal farmland segmentation.Firstly, this article proposed a semi-automatic annotation method that can accurately assign caption to each image, ensuring high data quality and semantic richness while improving the efficiency of dataset construction.Secondly,the FarmSeg-VL exhibits significant spatiotemporal characteristics.In terms of the temporal dimension,it covers all four seasons.In terms of the spatial dimension,it covers eight typical agricultural regions across China.In addition, in terms of captions,FarmSeg-VL covers rich spatiotemporal characteristics of farmland,including its inherent properties,phenological characteristics, spatial distribution,topographic and geomorphic features,and the distribution of surrounding environments.Finally,we present a performance analysis of VLMs and the deep learning models that rely solely on labels trained on the FarmSeg-VL,demonstrating its potential as a standard benchmark for farmland segmentation.

Building world models that accurately and comprehensively represent the real world is the utmost aspiration for conditional image generative models as it would enable their use as world simulators. For these models to be successful world models, they should not only excel at image quality and prompt-image consistency but also ensure high representation diversity. However, current research in generative models mostly focuses on creative applications that are predominantly concerned with human preferences of image quality and aesthetics. We note that generative models have inference time mechanisms - or knobs - that allow the control of generation consistency, quality, and diversity. In this paper, we use state-of-the-art text-to-image and image-and-text-to-image models and their knobs to draw consistency-diversity-realism Pareto fronts that provide a holistic view on consistency-diversity-realism multi-objective. Our experiments suggest that realism and consistency can both be improved simultaneously; however there exists a clear tradeoff between realism/consistency and diversity. By looking at Pareto optimal points, we note that earlier models are better at representation diversity and worse in consistency/realism, and more recent models excel in consistency/realism while decreasing significantly the representation diversity. By computing Pareto fronts on a geodiverse dataset, we find that the first version of latent diffusion models tends to perform better than more recent models in all axes of evaluation, and there exist pronounced consistency-diversity-realism disparities between geographical regions. Overall, our analysis clearly shows that there is no best model and the choice of model should be determined by the downstream application. With this analysis, we invite the research community to consider Pareto fronts as an analytical tool to measure progress towards world models.

We study the impact on mechanisms for facility location of moving from one dimension to two (or more) dimensions and Euclidean or Manhattan distances. We consider three fundamental axiomatic properties: anonymity which is a basic fairness property, Pareto optimality which is one of the most important efficiency properties, and strategy proofness which ensures agents do not have an incentive to mis-report. We also consider how well such mechanisms can approximate the optimal welfare. Our results are somewhat negative. Moving from one dimension to two (or more) dimensions often makes these axiomatic properties more difficult to achieve. For example, with two facilities in Euclidean space or with just a single facility in Manhattan space, no mechanism is anonymous, Pareto optimal and strategy proof. By contrast, mechanisms on the line exist with all three properties.We also show that approximation ratios may increase when moving to two (or more) dimensions. All our impossibility results are minimal. If we drop one of the three axioms (anonymity, Pareto optimality or strategy proofness) multiple mechanisms satisfy the other two axioms.

Coverage path planning (CPP) is the problem of finding a path that covers the entire free space of a confined area, with applications ranging from robotic lawn mowing to search-and-rescue. When the environment is unknown, the path needs to be planned online while mapping the environment, which cannot be addressed by offline planning methods that do not allow for a flexible path space. We investigate how suitable reinforcement learning is for this challenging problem, and analyze the involved components required to efficiently learn coverage paths, such as action space, input feature representation, neural network architecture, and reward function. We propose a computationally feasible egocentric map representation based on frontiers, and a novel reward term based on total variation to promote complete coverage. Through extensive experiments, we show that our approach surpasses the performance of both previous RL-based approaches and highly specialized methods across multiple CPP variations.

To understand and identify the unprecedented risks posed by rapidly advancing artificial intelligence (AI) models, this report presents a comprehensive assessment of their frontier risks. Drawing on the E-T-C analysis (deployment environment, threat source, enabling capability) from the Frontier AI Risk Management Framework (v1.0) (SafeWork-F1-Framework), we identify critical risks in seven areas: cyber offense, biological and chemical risks, persuasion and manipulation, uncontrolled autonomous AI R\&D, strategic deception and scheming, self-replication, and collusion. Guided by the "AI-45^circ Law," we evaluate these risks using "red lines" (intolerable thresholds) and "yellow lines" (early warning indicators) to define risk zones: green (manageable risk for routine deployment and continuous monitoring), yellow (requiring strengthened mitigations and controlled deployment), and red (necessitating suspension of development and/or deployment). Experimental results show that all recent frontier AI models reside in green and yellow zones, without crossing red lines. Specifically, no evaluated models cross the yellow line for cyber offense or uncontrolled AI R\&D risks. For self-replication, and strategic deception and scheming, most models remain in the green zone, except for certain reasoning models in the yellow zone. In persuasion and manipulation, most models are in the yellow zone due to their effective influence on humans. For biological and chemical risks, we are unable to rule out the possibility of most models residing in the yellow zone, although detailed threat modeling and in-depth assessment are required to make further claims. This work reflects our current understanding of AI frontier risks and urges collective action to mitigate these challenges.

We introduce a framework for translating game descriptions in natural language into extensive-form representations in game theory, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and in-context learning. Given the varying levels of strategic complexity in games, such as perfect versus imperfect information, directly applying in-context learning would be insufficient. To address this, we introduce a two-stage framework with specialized modules to enhance in-context learning, enabling it to divide and conquer the problem effectively. In the first stage, we tackle the challenge of imperfect information by developing a module that identifies information sets along and the corresponding partial tree structure. With this information, the second stage leverages in-context learning alongside a self-debugging module to produce a complete extensive-form game tree represented using pygambit, the Python API of a recognized game-theoretic analysis tool called Gambit. Using this python representation enables the automation of tasks such as computing Nash equilibria directly from natural language descriptions. We evaluate the performance of the full framework, as well as its individual components, using various LLMs on games with different levels of strategic complexity. Our experimental results show that the framework significantly outperforms baseline models in generating accurate extensive-form games, with each module playing a critical role in its success.

The prospect of artificial intelligence (AI) competing in the adversarial landscape of cyber security has long been considered one of the most impactful, challenging, and potentially dangerous applications of AI. Here, we demonstrate a new approach to assessing AI's progress towards enabling and scaling real-world offensive cyber operations (OCO) tactics in use by modern threat actors. We detail OCCULT, a lightweight operational evaluation framework that allows cyber security experts to contribute to rigorous and repeatable measurement of the plausible cyber security risks associated with any given large language model (LLM) or AI employed for OCO. We also prototype and evaluate three very different OCO benchmarks for LLMs that demonstrate our approach and serve as examples for building benchmarks under the OCCULT framework. Finally, we provide preliminary evaluation results to demonstrate how this framework allows us to move beyond traditional all-or-nothing tests, such as those crafted from educational exercises like capture-the-flag environments, to contextualize our indicators and warnings in true cyber threat scenarios that present risks to modern infrastructure. We find that there has been significant recent advancement in the risks of AI being used to scale realistic cyber threats. For the first time, we find a model (DeepSeek-R1) is capable of correctly answering over 90% of challenging offensive cyber knowledge tests in our Threat Actor Competency Test for LLMs (TACTL) multiple-choice benchmarks. We also show how Meta's Llama and Mistral's Mixtral model families show marked performance improvements over earlier models against our benchmarks where LLMs act as offensive agents in MITRE's high-fidelity offensive and defensive cyber operations simulation environment, CyberLayer.

Most existing chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting methods suffer from the issues of generalizability and consistency, as they often rely on instance-specific solutions that may not be applicable to other cases and lack task-level consistency in their reasoning steps. To address these limitations, we propose a comprehensive framework, StrategyLLM, harnessing the capabilities of LLMs to construct generalizable and consistent few-shot prompts for various tasks automatically. To this end, StrategyLLM employs four LLM-based agents: strategy generator, executor, optimizer, and evaluator, working together to generate, evaluate, and select promising strategies for a given task. The experimental results demonstrate that StrategyLLM outperforms the competitive baseline CoT-SC that requires human-annotated solutions on 13 datasets across 4 challenging tasks without human involvement, including math reasoning (34.21% rightarrow 38.79%), commonsense reasoning (70.3% rightarrow 72.5%), algorithmic reasoning (51.7% rightarrow 62.0%), and symbolic reasoning (30.0% rightarrow 79.2%).

In this paper, we evaluate whether LLMs learn to make human-like preference judgements in strategic scenarios as compared with known empirical results. Solar and Mistral are shown to exhibit stable value-based preference consistent with humans and exhibit human-like preference for cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma (including stake-size effect) and traveler's dilemma (including penalty-size effect). We establish a relationship between model size, value-based preference, and superficiality. Finally, results here show that models tending to be less brittle have relied on sliding window attention suggesting a potential link. Additionally, we contribute a novel method for constructing preference relations from arbitrary LLMs and support for a hypothesis regarding human behavior in the traveler's dilemma.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has accelerated their application in reasoning, with strategic reasoning drawing increasing attention. To evaluate LLMs' strategic reasoning capabilities, game theory, with its concise structure, has become a preferred approach. However, current research focuses on a limited selection of games, resulting in low coverage. Classic game scenarios risk data leakage, and existing benchmarks often lack extensibility, making them inadequate for evaluating state-of-the-art models. To address these challenges, we propose TMGBench, a benchmark with comprehensive game type coverage, novel scenarios, and flexible organization. Specifically, we incorporate all 144 game types summarized by the Robinson-Goforth topology of 2x2 games, constructed as classic games. We also employ synthetic data generation to create diverse, higher-quality scenarios through topic guidance and human inspection, referred to as story-based games. Lastly, we provide a sustainable framework for increasingly powerful LLMs by treating these games as atomic units and organizing them into more complex forms via sequential, parallel, and nested structures. Our comprehensive evaluation of mainstream LLMs covers tests on rational reasoning, robustness, Theory-of-Mind (ToM), and reasoning in complex forms. Results reveal flaws in accuracy, consistency, and varying mastery of ToM. Additionally, o1-mini, OpenAI's latest reasoning model, achieved accuracy rates of 66.6%, 60.0%, and 70.0% on sequential, parallel, and nested games, highlighting TMGBench's challenges.

LLM-based agents can autonomously accomplish complex tasks across various domains. However, to further cultivate capabilities such as adaptive behavior and long-term decision-making, training on static datasets built from human-level knowledge is insufficient. These datasets are costly to construct and lack both dynamism and realism. A growing consensus is that agents should instead interact directly with environments and learn from experience through reinforcement learning. We formalize this iterative process as the Generation-Execution-Feedback (GEF) loop, where environments generate tasks to challenge agents, return observations in response to agents' actions during task execution, and provide evaluative feedback on rollouts for subsequent learning. Under this paradigm, environments function as indispensable producers of experiential data, highlighting the need to scale them toward greater complexity, realism, and interactivity. In this survey, we systematically review representative methods for environment scaling from a pioneering environment-centric perspective and organize them along the stages of the GEF loop, namely task generation, task execution, and feedback. We further analyze benchmarks, implementation strategies, and applications, consolidating fragmented advances and outlining future research directions for agent intelligence.

StarCraft II is a challenging benchmark for AI agents due to the necessity of both precise micro level operations and strategic macro awareness. Previous works, such as Alphastar and SCC, achieve impressive performance on tackling StarCraft II , however, still exhibit deficiencies in long term strategic planning and strategy interpretability. Emerging large language model (LLM) agents, such as Voyage and MetaGPT, presents the immense potential in solving intricate tasks. Motivated by this, we aim to validate the capabilities of LLMs on StarCraft II, a highly complex RTS game.To conveniently take full advantage of LLMs` reasoning abilities, we first develop textual StratCraft II environment, called TextStarCraft II, which LLM agent can interact. Secondly, we propose a Chain of Summarization method, including single frame summarization for processing raw observations and multi frame summarization for analyzing game information, providing command recommendations, and generating strategic decisions. Our experiment consists of two parts: first, an evaluation by human experts, which includes assessing the LLMs`s mastery of StarCraft II knowledge and the performance of LLM agents in the game; second, the in game performance of LLM agents, encompassing aspects like win rate and the impact of Chain of Summarization.Experiment results demonstrate that: 1. LLMs possess the relevant knowledge and complex planning abilities needed to address StarCraft II scenarios; 2. Human experts consider the performance of LLM agents to be close to that of an average player who has played StarCraft II for eight years; 3. LLM agents are capable of defeating the built in AI at the Harder(Lv5) difficulty level. We have open sourced the code and released demo videos of LLM agent playing StarCraft II.

U.S. national security customers have begun to utilize large language models, including enterprise versions of ``off-the-shelf'' models (e.g., ChatGPT) familiar to the public. This uptake will likely accelerate. However, recent studies suggest that off-the-shelf large language models frequently suggest escalatory actions when prompted with geopolitical or strategic scenarios. We demonstrate two simple, non-technical interventions to control these tendencies. Introducing these interventions into the experimental wargame design of a recent study, we substantially reduce escalation throughout the game. Calls to restrict the use of large language models in national security applications are thus premature. The U.S. government is already, and will continue, employing large language models for scenario planning and suggesting courses of action. Rather than warning against such applications, this study acknowledges the imminent adoption of large language models, and provides actionable measures to align them with national security goals, including escalation management.

Foundation models are powerful technologies: how they are released publicly directly shapes their societal impact. In this position paper, we focus on open foundation models, defined here as those with broadly available model weights (e.g. Llama 2, Stable Diffusion XL). We identify five distinctive properties (e.g. greater customizability, poor monitoring) of open foundation models that lead to both their benefits and risks. Open foundation models present significant benefits, with some caveats, that span innovation, competition, the distribution of decision-making power, and transparency. To understand their risks of misuse, we design a risk assessment framework for analyzing their marginal risk. Across several misuse vectors (e.g. cyberattacks, bioweapons), we find that current research is insufficient to effectively characterize the marginal risk of open foundation models relative to pre-existing technologies. The framework helps explain why the marginal risk is low in some cases, clarifies disagreements about misuse risks by revealing that past work has focused on different subsets of the framework with different assumptions, and articulates a way forward for more constructive debate. Overall, our work helps support a more grounded assessment of the societal impact of open foundation models by outlining what research is needed to empirically validate their theoretical benefits and risks.

The emergence of agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI), which can operate autonomously, demonstrate goal-directed behavior, and adaptively learn, indicates the onset of a massive change in today's computing infrastructure. This study investigates how agentic AI models' multiple characteristics may impact the architecture, governance, and operation under which computing environments function. Agentic AI has the potential to reduce reliance on extremely large (public) cloud environments due to resource efficiency, especially with processing and/or storage. The aforementioned characteristics provide us with an opportunity to canvas the likelihood of strategic migration in computing infrastructures away from massive public cloud services, towards more locally distributed architectures: edge computing and on-premises computing infrastructures. Many of these likely migrations will be spurred by factors like on-premises processing needs, diminished data consumption footprints, and cost savings. This study examines how a solution for implementing AI's autonomy could result in a re-architecture of the systems and model a departure from today's governance models to help us manage these increasingly autonomous agents, and an operational overhaul of processes over a very diverse computing systems landscape that bring together computing via cloud, edge, and on-premises computing solutions. To enable us to explore these intertwined decisions, it will be fundamentally important to understand how to best position agentic AI, and to navigate the future state of computing infrastructures.

We study the properties of common loss surfaces through their Hessian matrix. In particular, in the context of deep learning, we empirically show that the spectrum of the Hessian is composed of two parts: (1) the bulk centered near zero, (2) and outliers away from the bulk. We present numerical evidence and mathematical justifications to the following conjectures laid out by Sagun et al. (2016): Fixing data, increasing the number of parameters merely scales the bulk of the spectrum; fixing the dimension and changing the data (for instance adding more clusters or making the data less separable) only affects the outliers. We believe that our observations have striking implications for non-convex optimization in high dimensions. First, the flatness of such landscapes (which can be measured by the singularity of the Hessian) implies that classical notions of basins of attraction may be quite misleading. And that the discussion of wide/narrow basins may be in need of a new perspective around over-parametrization and redundancy that are able to create large connected components at the bottom of the landscape. Second, the dependence of small number of large eigenvalues to the data distribution can be linked to the spectrum of the covariance matrix of gradients of model outputs. With this in mind, we may reevaluate the connections within the data-architecture-algorithm framework of a model, hoping that it would shed light into the geometry of high-dimensional and non-convex spaces in modern applications. In particular, we present a case that links the two observations: small and large batch gradient descent appear to converge to different basins of attraction but we show that they are in fact connected through their flat region and so belong to the same basin.

Self-play, characterized by agents' interactions with copies or past versions of itself, has recently gained prominence in reinforcement learning. This paper first clarifies the preliminaries of self-play, including the multi-agent reinforcement learning framework and basic game theory concepts. Then it provides a unified framework and classifies existing self-play algorithms within this framework. Moreover, the paper bridges the gap between the algorithms and their practical implications by illustrating the role of self-play in different scenarios. Finally, the survey highlights open challenges and future research directions in self-play. This paper is an essential guide map for understanding the multifaceted landscape of self-play in RL.

Large Language Models (LLMs) show significant potential in economic and strategic interactions, where communication via natural language is often prevalent. This raises key questions: Do LLMs behave rationally? Can they mimic human behavior? Do they tend to reach an efficient and fair outcome? What is the role of natural language in the strategic interaction? How do characteristics of the economic environment influence these dynamics? These questions become crucial concerning the economic and societal implications of integrating LLM-based agents into real-world data-driven systems, such as online retail platforms and recommender systems. While the ML community has been exploring the potential of LLMs in such multi-agent setups, varying assumptions, design choices and evaluation criteria across studies make it difficult to draw robust and meaningful conclusions. To address this, we introduce a benchmark for standardizing research on two-player, sequential, language-based games. Inspired by the economic literature, we define three base families of games with consistent parameterization, degrees of freedom and economic measures to evaluate agents' performance (self-gain), as well as the game outcome (efficiency and fairness). We develop an open-source framework for interaction simulation and analysis, and utilize it to collect a dataset of LLM vs. LLM interactions across numerous game configurations and an additional dataset of human vs. LLM interactions. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate how our framework and dataset can be used to: (i) compare the behavior of LLM-based agents to human players in various economic contexts; (ii) evaluate agents in both individual and collective performance measures; and (iii) quantify the effect of the economic characteristics of the environments on the behavior of agents.

The increasing demand for commodities is leading to changes in land use worldwide. In the tropics, deforestation, which causes high carbon emissions and threatens biodiversity, is often linked to agricultural expansion. While the need for deforestation-free global supply chains is widely recognized, making progress in practice remains a challenge. Here, we propose an automated approach that aims to support conservation and sustainable land use planning decisions by mapping tropical landscapes at large scale and high spatial resolution following the High Carbon Stock (HCS) approach. A deep learning approach is developed that estimates canopy height for each 10 m Sentinel-2 pixel by learning from sparse GEDI LIDAR reference data, achieving an overall RMSE of 6.3 m. We show that these wall-to-wall maps of canopy top height are predictive for classifying HCS forests and degraded areas with an overall accuracy of 86 % and produce a first high carbon stock map for Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

Many social and environmental phenomena are associated with macroscopic changes in the built environment, captured by satellite imagery on a global scale and with daily temporal resolution. While widely used for prediction, these images and especially image sequences remain underutilized for causal inference, especially in the context of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), where causal identification is established by design. In this paper, we develop and compare a set of general tools for analyzing Conditional Average Treatment Effects (CATEs) from temporal satellite data that can be applied to any RCT where geographical identifiers are available. Through a simulation study, we analyze different modeling strategies for estimating CATE in sequences of satellite images. We find that image sequence representation models with more parameters generally yield a greater ability to detect heterogeneity. To explore the role of model and data choice in practice, we apply the approaches to two influential RCTs -- Banerjee et al. (2015), a poverty study in Cusco, Peru, and Bolsen et al. (2014), a water conservation experiment in Georgia, USA. We benchmark our image sequence models against image-only, tabular-only, and combined image-tabular data sources, summarizing practical implications for investigators in a multivariate analysis. Land cover classifications over satellite images facilitate interpretation of what image features drive heterogeneity. We also show robustness to data and model choice of satellite-based generalization of the RCT results to larger geographical areas outside the original. Overall, this paper shows how satellite sequence data can be incorporated into the analysis of RCTs, and provides evidence about the implications of data, model, and evaluation metric choice for causal analysis.

An important feature of many real world facility location problems are capacity limits on the facilities. We show here how capacity constraints make it harder to design strategy proof mechanisms for facility location, but counter-intuitively can improve the guarantees on how well we can approximate the optimal solution.

We compare the (1,lambda)-EA and the (1 + lambda)-EA on the recently introduced benchmark DisOM, which is the OneMax function with randomly planted local optima. Previous work showed that if all local optima have the same relative height, then the plus strategy never loses more than a factor O(nlog n) compared to the comma strategy. Here we show that even small random fluctuations in the heights of the local optima have a devastating effect for the plus strategy and lead to super-polynomial runtimes. On the other hand, due to their ability to escape local optima, comma strategies are unaffected by the height of the local optima and remain efficient. Our results hold for a broad class of possible distortions and show that the plus strategy, but not the comma strategy, is generally deceived by sparse unstructured fluctuations of a smooth landscape.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked concerns over their potential to acquire and misuse dangerous or high-risk capabilities, posing frontier risks. Current safety evaluations primarily test for what a model can do - its capabilities - without assessing what it would do if endowed with high-risk capabilities. This leaves a critical blind spot: models may strategically conceal capabilities or rapidly acquire them, while harboring latent inclinations toward misuse. We argue that propensity - the likelihood of a model to pursue harmful actions if empowered - is a critical, yet underexplored, axis of safety evaluation. We present PropensityBench, a novel benchmark framework that assesses the proclivity of models to engage in risky behaviors when equipped with simulated dangerous capabilities using proxy tools. Our framework includes 5,874 scenarios with 6,648 tools spanning four high-risk domains: cybersecurity, self-proliferation, biosecurity, and chemical security. We simulate access to powerful capabilities via a controlled agentic environment and evaluate the models' choices under varying operational pressures that reflect real-world constraints or incentives models may encounter, such as resource scarcity or gaining more autonomy. Across open-source and proprietary frontier models, we uncover 9 alarming signs of propensity: models frequently choose high-risk tools when under pressure, despite lacking the capability to execute such actions unaided. These findings call for a shift from static capability audits toward dynamic propensity assessments as a prerequisite for deploying frontier AI systems safely. Our code is available at https://github.com/scaleapi/propensity-evaluation.

Incorporating spatial information, particularly those influenced by climate, weather, and demographic factors, is crucial for improving underwriting precision and enhancing risk management in insurance. However, spatial data are often unstructured, high-dimensional, and difficult to integrate into predictive models. Embedding methods are needed to convert spatial data into meaningful representations for modelling tasks. We propose a novel multi-view contrastive learning framework for generating spatial embeddings that combine information from multiple spatial data sources. To train the model, we construct a spatial dataset that merges satellite imagery and OpenStreetMap features across Europe. The framework aligns these spatial views with coordinate-based encodings, producing low-dimensional embeddings that capture both spatial structure and contextual similarity. Once trained, the model generates embeddings directly from latitude-longitude pairs, enabling any dataset with coordinates to be enriched with meaningful spatial features without requiring access to the original spatial inputs. In a case study on French real estate prices, we compare models trained on raw coordinates against those using our spatial embeddings as inputs. The embeddings consistently improve predictive accuracy across generalised linear, additive, and boosting models, while providing interpretable spatial effects and demonstrating transferability to unseen regions.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently garnered significant accomplishments in various exploratory tasks, even surpassing the performance of traditional reinforcement learning-based methods that have historically dominated the agent-based field. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the efficacy of LLMs in executing real-time strategy war tasks within the StarCraft II gaming environment. In this paper, we introduce SwarmBrain, an embodied agent leveraging LLM for real-time strategy implementation in the StarCraft II game environment. The SwarmBrain comprises two key components: 1) a Overmind Intelligence Matrix, powered by state-of-the-art LLMs, is designed to orchestrate macro-level strategies from a high-level perspective. This matrix emulates the overarching consciousness of the Zerg intelligence brain, synthesizing strategic foresight with the aim of allocating resources, directing expansion, and coordinating multi-pronged assaults. 2) a Swarm ReflexNet, which is agile counterpart to the calculated deliberation of the Overmind Intelligence Matrix. Due to the inherent latency in LLM reasoning, the Swarm ReflexNet employs a condition-response state machine framework, enabling expedited tactical responses for fundamental Zerg unit maneuvers. In the experimental setup, SwarmBrain is in control of the Zerg race in confrontation with an Computer-controlled Terran adversary. Experimental results show the capacity of SwarmBrain to conduct economic augmentation, territorial expansion, and tactical formulation, and it shows the SwarmBrain is capable of achieving victory against Computer players set at different difficulty levels.

Loss landscape is a useful tool to characterize and compare neural network models. The main challenge for analysis of loss landscape for the deep neural networks is that they are generally highly non-convex in very high dimensional space. In this paper, we develop "the roughness"concept for understanding such landscapes in high dimensions and apply this technique to study two neural network models arising from solving differential equations. Our main innovation is the proposal of a well-defined and easy-to-compute roughness index (RI) which is based on the mean and variance of the (normalized) total variation for one-dimensional functions projected on randomly sampled directions. A large RI at the local minimizer hints an oscillatory landscape profile and indicates a severe challenge for the first-order optimization method. Particularly, we observe the increasing-then-decreasing pattern for RI along the gradient descent path in most models. We apply our method to two types of loss functions used to solve partial differential equations (PDEs) when the solution of PDE is parametrized by neural networks. Our empirical results on these PDE problems reveal important and consistent observations that the landscapes from the deep Galerkin method around its local minimizers are less rough than the deep Ritz method.

Debates about whether development projects improve living conditions persist, partly because observational estimates can be biased by incomplete adjustment and because reliable outcome data are scarce at the neighborhood level. We address both issues in a continent-scale, sector-specific evaluation of Chinese and World Bank projects across 9,899 neighborhoods in 36 African countries (2002 to 2013), representative of 88% of the population. First, we use a recent dataset that measures living conditions with a machine-learned wealth index derived from contemporaneous satellite imagery, yielding a consistent panel of 6.7 km square mosaics. Second, to strengthen identification, we proxy officials' map-based placement criteria using pre-treatment daytime satellite images and fuse these with rich tabular covariates to estimate funder- and sector-specific ATEs via inverse-probability weighting. Incorporating imagery systematically shrinks effects relative to tabular-only models, indicating prior work likely overstated benefits. On average, both donors raise wealth, with larger gains for China; sector extremes in our sample include Trade and Tourism for the World Bank (+6.27 IWI points), and Emergency Response for China (+14.32). Assignment-mechanism analyses show World Bank placement is generally more predictable from imagery alone, as well as from tabular covariates. This suggests that Chinese project placements are more driven by non-visible, political, or event-driven factors than World Bank placements. To probe residual concerns about selection on observables, we also estimate within-neighborhood (unit) fixed-effects models at a spatial resolution about 450 times finer than prior fixed effects analyses, leveraging the computer-vision-imputed IWI panels; these deliver smaller but directionally consistent effects.

We present the first evaluation harness that enables any out-of-the-box, local, Large Language Models (LLMs) to play full-press Diplomacy without fine-tuning or specialized training. Previous work required frontier LLMs, or fine-tuning, due to the high complexity and information density of Diplomacy's game state. Combined with the high variance of matches, these factors made Diplomacy prohibitive for study. In this work, we used data-driven iteration to optimize a textual game state representation such that a 24B model can reliably complete matches without any fine tuning. We develop tooling to facilitate hypothesis testing and statistical analysis, and we present case studies on persuasion, aggressive playstyles, and performance across a range of models. We conduct a variety of experiments across many popular LLMs, finding the larger models perform the best, but the smaller models still play adequately. We also introduce Critical State Analysis: an experimental protocol for rapidly iterating and analyzing key moments in a game at depth. Our harness democratizes the evaluation of strategic reasoning in LLMs by eliminating the need for fine-tuning, and it provides insights into how these capabilities emerge naturally from widely used LLMs. Our code is available in the supplement and will be open sourced.

Multitask Reinforcement Learning (MTRL) approaches have gained increasing attention for its wide applications in many important Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks. However, while recent advancements in MTRL theory have focused on the improved statistical efficiency by assuming a shared structure across tasks, exploration--a crucial aspect of RL--has been largely overlooked. This paper addresses this gap by showing that when an agent is trained on a sufficiently diverse set of tasks, a generic policy-sharing algorithm with myopic exploration design like epsilon-greedy that are inefficient in general can be sample-efficient for MTRL. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first theoretical demonstration of the "exploration benefits" of MTRL. It may also shed light on the enigmatic success of the wide applications of myopic exploration in practice. To validate the role of diversity, we conduct experiments on synthetic robotic control environments, where the diverse task set aligns with the task selection by automatic curriculum learning, which is empirically shown to improve sample-efficiency.

Tasks requiring deductive reasoning, especially those involving multiple steps, often demand adaptive strategies such as intermediate generation of rationales or programs, as no single approach is universally optimal. While Language Models (LMs) can enhance their outputs through iterative self-refinement and strategy adjustments, they frequently fail to apply the most effective strategy in their first attempt. This inefficiency raises the question: Can LMs learn to select the optimal strategy in the first attempt, without a need for refinement? To address this challenge, we introduce SMART (Self-learning Meta-strategy Agent for Reasoning Tasks), a novel framework that enables LMs to autonomously learn and select the most effective strategies for various reasoning tasks. We model the strategy selection process as a Markov Decision Process and leverage reinforcement learning-driven continuous self-improvement to allow the model to find the suitable strategy to solve a given task. Unlike traditional self-refinement methods that rely on multiple inference passes or external feedback, SMART allows an LM to internalize the outcomes of its own reasoning processes and adjust its strategy accordingly, aiming for correct solutions on the first attempt. Our experiments across various reasoning datasets and with different model architectures demonstrate that SMART significantly enhances the ability of models to choose optimal strategies without external guidance (+15 points on the GSM8K dataset). By achieving higher accuracy with a single inference pass, SMART not only improves performance but also reduces computational costs for refinement-based strategies, paving the way for more efficient and intelligent reasoning in LMs.

We study a strategic variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, which we coin the strategic click-bandit. This model is motivated by applications in online recommendation where the choice of recommended items depends on both the click-through rates and the post-click rewards. Like in classical bandits, rewards follow a fixed unknown distribution. However, we assume that the click-rate of each arm is chosen strategically by the arm (e.g., a host on Airbnb) in order to maximize the number of times it gets clicked. The algorithm designer does not know the post-click rewards nor the arms' actions (i.e., strategically chosen click-rates) in advance, and must learn both values over time. To solve this problem, we design an incentive-aware learning algorithm, UCB-S, which achieves two goals simultaneously: (a) incentivizing desirable arm behavior under uncertainty; (b) minimizing regret by learning unknown parameters. We characterize all approximate Nash equilibria among arms under UCB-S and show a mathcal{O} (KT) regret bound uniformly in every equilibrium. We also show that incentive-unaware algorithms generally fail to achieve low regret in the strategic click-bandit. Finally, we support our theoretical results by simulations of strategic arm behavior which confirm the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed incentive design.