The ability of Language Models (LMs) to understand natural language makes them a powerful tool for parsing human instructions into task plans for autonomous robots. Unlike traditional planning methods that rely on domain-specific knowledge and handcrafted rules, LMs generalize from diverse data and adapt to various tasks with minimal tuning, acting as a compressed knowledge base. However, LMs in their standard form face challenges with long-horizon tasks, particularly in partially observable multi-agent settings. We propose an LM-based Long-Horizon Planner for Multi-Agent Robotics (LLaMAR), a cognitive architecture for planning that achieves state-of-the-art results in long-horizon tasks within partially observable environments. LLaMAR employs a plan-act-correct-verify framework, allowing self-correction from action execution feedback without relying on oracles or simulators. Additionally, we present MAP-THOR, a comprehensive test suite encompassing household tasks of varying complexity within the AI2-THOR environment. Experiments show that LLaMAR achieves a 30\% higher success rate than other state-of-the-art LM-based multi-agent planners in MAP-THOR and Search \& Rescue tasks. Code can be found at [https://github.com/nsidn98/LLaMAR](https://github.com/nsidn98/LLaMAR)

In transportation networks, road tolling schemes are a method to cope with the efficiency losses due to selfish user routing, wherein users choose routes to minimize individual travel costs. However, the efficacy of tolling schemes often relies on access to complete information on users’ trip attributes, such as their origin-destination (O-D) travel information and their values of time, which may not be available in practice. Motivated by this practical consideration, we propose an online learning approach to set tolls in a traffic network to drive heterogeneous users with different values of time toward a system-efficient traffic pattern. In particular, we develop a simple yet effective algorithm that adjusts tolls at each time period solely based on the observed aggregate flows on the roads of the network without relying on any additional trip attributes of users, thereby preserving user privacy. In the setting where the O-D pairs and values of time of users are drawn i.i.d. at each period, we show that our approach obtains an expected regret and road capacity violation of $O(\sqrt{T})$, where $T$ is the number of periods over which tolls are updated. Our regret guarantee is relative to an offline oracle with complete information on users’ trip attributes. We further establish a $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ lower bound on the regret of any algorithm, which establishes that our algorithm is optimal up to constants. Finally, we demonstrate the superior performance of our approach relative to several benchmarks on a real-world traffic network, which highlights its practical applicability.

We consider the problem of multi-agent navigation and collision avoidance when observations are limited to the local neighborhood of each agent. We propose InforMARL, a novel architecture for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) which uses local information intelligently to compute paths for all the agents in a decentralized manner. Specifically, InforMARL aggregates information about the local neighborhood of agents for both the actor and the critic using a graph neural network and can be used in conjunction with any standard MARL algorithm. We show that (1) in training, InforMARL has better sample efficiency and performance than baseline approaches, despite using less information, and (2) in testing, it scales well to environments with arbitrary numbers of agents and obstacles. We illustrate these results using four task environments, including one with predetermined goals for each agent, and one in which the agents collectively try to cover all goals.

This paper studies the problem of allocating tasks from different customers to vehicles in mobility platforms, which are used for applications like food and package delivery, ridesharing, and mobile sensing. A mobility platform should allocate tasks to vehicles and schedule them in order to optimize both throughput and fairness across customers. However, existing approaches to scheduling tasks in mobility platforms ignore fairness.

As the demand for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) operations increases, UAS Traffic Flow Management (UTFM) initiatives are needed to mitigate congestion, and to ensure safety and efficiency. Congestion mitigation can be achieved by assigning airborne delays (through speed changes or path stretches) or ground delays (holds relative to the desired takeoff times) to aircraft. While the assignment of such delays may increase system efficiency, individual aircraft operators may be unfairly impacted. Dynamic traffic demand, variability in aircraft operator preferences, and differences in the market share of operators complicate the issue of fairness in UTFM. Our work considers the fairness of delay assignment in the context of UTFM. To this end, we formulate the UTFM problem with fairness and show through computational experiments that significant improvements in fairness can be attained at little cost to system efficiency. We demonstrate that when operators are not aligned in how they perceive or value fairness, there is a decrease in the overall fairness of the solution. We find that fairness decreases as the air-ground delay cost ratio increases and that it improves when the operator with dominant market share has a weak preference for the fairness of its allocated delays. Finally, we implemented UTFM in a rolling-horizon setting with dynamic traffic demand, and find that efficiency is adversely impacted. However, the impact on fairness is varied and depends on the metric used.

The rapid development of small aerial drones has enabled numerous drone-based applications, e.g., geographic mapping, air pollution sensing, and search and rescue. To assist the development of these applications, we propose BeeCluster, a drone orchestration system that manages a fleet of drones. BeeCluster provides a virtual drone abstraction that enables developers to express a sequence of geographical sensing tasks, and determines how to map these tasks to the fleet efficiently. BeeCluster's core contribution is predictive optimization, in which an inferred model of the future tasks of the application is used to generate an optimized flight and sensing schedule for the drones that aims to minimize the total expected execution time.

Video databases that enable queries with object-track predicates are useful in many applications. Such queries include selecting objects that move from one region of the camera frame to another (e.g., finding cars that turn right through a junction) and selecting objects with certain speeds (e.g., finding animals that stop to drink water from a lake). Processing such predicates efficiently is challenging because they involve the movement of an object over several video frames. We propose a novel query-driven tracking approach that integrates query processing with object tracking to efficiently process object track queries and address the computational complexity of object detection methods. By processing video at low framerates when possible, but increasing the framerate when needed to ensure high-accuracy on a query, our approach substantially speeds up query execution. We have implemented query-driven tracking in MIRIS, a video query processor, and compare MIRIS against four baselines on a diverse dataset consisting of five sources of video and nine distinct queries. We find that, at the same accuracy, MIRIS accelerates video query processing by 9x on average over the IOU tracker, an overlap-based tracking-by-detection method used in existing video database systems.