In complex cooperative tasks, Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) faces the dual challenges of an exponentially growing joint action space and the constraints of partial observability. While the Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) paradigm is widely adopted, it often leads to homogeneous policies that lack the necessary specialization for complex teamwork. While role-based methods encourage specialization, they often lack mechanisms for inter-agent interaction. Consequently, the lack of rich information for role assignment means their roles may be assigned ineffectively, hindering the convergence of the team policy to its optimum. To address this critical gap, we propose ROIS, a novel framework that enhances multi-agent collaboration by grounding dynamic role assignments in a context-time-aware information sharing mechanism. Our key insight is to leverage a dedicated information sharing module that captures multi-step temporal context, providing each agent with richer, tailored feedback from its teammates. This mechanism directly addresses the lack of inter-agent interaction, leading to more accurate and effective role assignments. This results in a more coherent task division, which guides specialized policies toward the optimal joint policy and drastically reduces ineffective exploration. We conduct extensive experiments on the demanding StarCraft II, SMACv2, and Multi-agent Particle Environment benchmarks. The results demonstrate that ROIS consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming a wide range of advanced baselines, particularly in scenarios requiring deep coordination and policy adaptation. Finally, comprehensive ablation studies confirm the essential contribution of each component to the framework’s success.

Achieving joint goals efficiently in complex real-world tasks demands effective collaboration among multiple agents. Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) faces two interrelated challenges: limited exploration leads to early convergence on suboptimal behaviors, which in turn exacerbates non-stationarity under partial observability. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework, Spatio-Temporal Multi-agent Population Evolution (STPE-MARL). By integrating Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) with MARL, our method enhances exploration diversity and facilitates global policy optimization. We further incorporate Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to mitigate partial observability by encoding permutation symmetry through graph-based message passing. Two GNN-based training modes, Graph Relation and Graph Decomposition, are introduced to extend agents’ receptive fields and capture spatio-temporal dependencies through time-series trajectory sampling. We evaluate STPE-MARL in two complex environments: micromanagement tasks in StarCraft II and large-scale traffic simulations in SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility). Experimental results demonstrate that STPE-MARL significantly improves policy convergence and outperforms baseline methods, highlighting the complementary roles of EAs in exploration and GNNs in addressing observation limitations.

Nowadays, detecting sentiment or emotion from user generated texts has been intensively studied in natural language understanding, especially via neural-based models based on text representation. However, the interpretability on how could the final text sentiment be determined by neural-based text representation has not been thoroughly unfolded yet. Consequently, in this paper, we proposeCogLignwhich injects theneural-cognitionderived from Electroencephalogram (EEG)-signal into theneural-basedtext sentiment analysis model, aimed at learning the activation of brain regions stimulated by different sentiments, so as to guide our proposedCogLignto make proper determination on text sentiment in brain-like way. Specifically, on the one hand, the given videos in different sentiments have been watched bysubjects, during which the EEG-signals are monitored to construct brain connectivity pattern asbrain graph(BG), attaining more obvious sentiment response on brain region activation forneural-cognition. On the other hand, we interpret the video-plots (or video-semantics) along timeline into text, where the entire video-interpreted-text will bestrictly boundwith the wholeEEG-signal-sequencebysegmentvia the fixed size oftime-window. Then, entities and relations are extracted from the video-interpreted-text to constructknowledge graph(KG), depicting text semantics. Next, mapping fromentities(or nodes) inKGtoEEG-Electrodes(or nodes) inBG, further dated back to different brain regions, has been learned viacognition alignmentbetween the EEG-derivedBGand text-derivedKG. In this way, by aligningneural cognitionfrombrain graphwith thesemantic cognitionfromknowledge graph, our proposed frameworkCogLigncan not only achieve the overall best sentiment analysis performance on thevideo-interpreted-text, but can also detect brain connectivity patterns in different sentiments more consistent with the prior conclusion of brain region sentiment preference, revealing competitiveinterpretabilityon text sentiment determination.

Object detection is a widely studied problem in existing works. However, in this paper, we turn to a more challenging problem of “ Covered Object Reasoning ”, aimed at reasoning the category label of target object in the given image particularly when it has been totally covered (or invisible ). To resolve this problem, we propose CoBjeason to seize the opportunity when visual reasoning meets the knowledge graph, where “ empirical cognition ” on common visual contexts have been incorporated as knowledge graph to conduct reinforced multi-hop reasoning via two collaborative agents. Such two agents, for one thing, stand at the covered object (or unknown entity ) to observe the surrounding visual cues in the given image and gradually select entities and relations from the global gallery-level knowledge graph which contains entity-pairs frequently occurring across the entire image-collection, so as to infer the main structure of image-level knowledge graph forward expanded from the unknown entity . In turn, for another, based on the reasoned image-level knowledge graph, the semantic context among entities will be aggregated backward into unknown entity to select an appropriate entity from the global gallery-level knowledge graph as the reasoning result. Moreover, such two agents will collaborate with each other, securing that the above Forward & Backward Reasoning will step towards the same destination of the higher performance on covered object reasoning. To our best knowledge, this is the first work on Covered Object Reasoning with Knowledge Graphs and reinforced Multi-Agent collaboration. Particularly, our study on Covered Object Reasoning and the proposed model CoBjeason could offer novel insights into more basic Computer Vision (CV) tasks, such as Semantic Segmentation with better understanding on the current scene when some objects are blurred or covered, Visual Question Answering with enhancement on the inference in more complicated visual context when some objects are covered or invisible, and Image Caption Generation with the augmentation on the richness of visual context for images containing partially visible objects. The improvement on the above basic CV tasks can further refine more complicated ones involved with nuanced visual interpretation like Autonomous Driving, where the recognition and reasoning on partially visible or covered object are critical. According to the experimental results, our proposed CoBjeason can achieve the best overall ranking performance on covered object reasoning compared with other models, meanwhile enjoying the advantage of lower “ exploration cost ”, with the insensitivity against the long-tail covered objects and the acceptable time complexity.

Online shopping has become a crucial way to encourage daily consumption, where the User-generated, or crowdsourced product comments, can offer a broad range of feedback on e-commerce products. As a result, integrating critical opinions or major attitudes from the crowdsourced comments can provide valuable feedback for marketing strategy adjustment or product-quality monitoring. Unfortunately, the scarcity of annotated ground truth on the integrated comment, or the limited gold integration reference, has incurred the infeasibility of the regular supervised-learning-based comment integration. To resolve this problem, in this article, inspired by the principle of Transfer Learning, we propose a three-stage transferable and generative crowdsourced comment integration framework ( TTGCIF ) based on zero-and-few-shot learning with the support of domain distribution alignment. The proposed framework aims at generating abstractive integrated comment in target domain via the enhanced neural text generation model, by referring the available integration resource in related source domains, to avoid the exhausted effort on resource annotation devoted to the target domain. Specifically, at the first stage, to enhance the domain transferability, representations on the crowdsourced comments have been aligned up between the source and target domain, by minimizing the domain distribution discrepancy in the kernel space. At the second stage, Zero-shot comment integration mechanism has been adopted to deal with the dilemma that none of the gold integration reference may be available in target domain. In other words, taking the sample-level semantic prototype as input, the enhanced neural text generation model in TTGCIF is trained to learn data semantic association among different domains via semantic prototype transduction, so that the “ unlabeled ” crowdsourced comments in target domain can be associated with existing integration references in related source domains. At the third stage, based on the parameters trained at the second stage, fast domain adaptation mechanism in a Few-shot manner has also been adopted by seeking most potential parameters along the gradient direction constrained by instances across multiple source domains. In this way, parameters in TTGCIF can be sensitive to any alteration on training data, ensuring that even if only few annotated resource in target domain are available for “Fine-tune,” TTGCIF can still react promptly to achieve effective target domain adaptation. According to the experimental results, TTGCIF can achieve the best transferable product comment integration performance in target domain, with fast and stable domain adaption effect depending on no more than 10% annotated resource in target domain. More importantly, even if TTGCIF has not been fine-tuned on the target domain, yet by referring to the available integration resource in related source domains, the integrated comments generated by TTGCIF on the target domain are still superior to those generated by models already fine-tuned on the target domain.

Nowadays, crowdsourced documents like Wikipedia pages and comments on products are all over the Internet. However, documents generated by crowdsourcing participants may contain inconsistent facts, implicit semantics and fabricated contents, thus threatening the trustworthiness of information content security available in Internet. To address this problem, we propose FuFaction, enabled by an enhanced observation mechanism based on the notion of hybrid-mask consisting of a hard-mask and a soft-mask, to eliminate factual inconsistencies on crowdsourced documents at the hidden-state level (or in a fuzzy way), according to the given evidence retrieved from an external open domain. Specifically, instead of focusing on a specific category of factual inconsistency, FuFaction captures anomalous hidden-states between a crowdsourced document and evidence obtained via a reverse-attention mechanism, where a hard-mask controls the attending direction as bidirectional and unidirectional for better understanding on semantics. Then, a soft-mask is generated with the help of the hard-masked reverse-attention to revise or mask anomalous hidden-states on the crowdsourced document. Afterwards, the masked hidden-states are further refined by a cross reverse-attention and factual consistency reinforcement strategy, based on which a new crowdsourced document with higher factual consistency is generated via neural text generation. According to our experimental results, FuFaction can effectively deal with the fuzzy factual inconsistencies on crowdsourced documents, achieving the overall best performance in terms of factual consistency metrics with a little higher (yet still competitive) editing cost on literal vocabulary, so as to reflect factually consistent semantics supported by the given evidence.

Crowdsourcing is a sourcing model where individuals or organizations obtain goods and services from a large, relatively open and often rapidly evolving group of internet users. The most common way that crowdsourcing can facilitate machine learning is to annotate instances with labels [1] . However, the same instance may have inconsistent class labels, in the eyes of various annotators. Therefore, current efforts in crowdsourcing mainly focus on the truth inference or label integration, to remove inconsistent labels or to alleviate biased labeling. In turn, instances with the integrated labels could facilitate the training on machine learning models. The future direction of crowdsourcing is to apply more fine-grained truth inference methods to different application domains [2] . Consequently, we evolve toward another challenging problem of comment integration. That is, how can we integrate or summarize the core opinions of multiple product comments obtained from users, rather than the discrete labels.

Source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (SFUDA) aims to accomplish the task of adaptation to the target domain by utilizing pre-trained source domain model and unlabeled target domain samples, without directly accessing any source domain data. Although many SFUDA works use the pseudo-labeling strategy to improve the accuracy of pseudo-labels in the target domain, these strategies ignore the influence of domain shift on calculating the reference distribution of pseudo-labels. In this article, we propose a novel kind of SFUDA with trusted pseudo samples (SFUDA-TPS), which uses reliable feature reference distribution to solve the SFUDA problem. In SFUDA-TPS, we design a target feature correcting classifier to alleviate the problem of feature reference distribution deviating from target domain samples distribution. On this basis, the more reliable feature reference distribution is calculated by selecting the target domain samples with a high amount of information, i.e., low entropy in the fixed source domain classifier and target feature correcting classifier. The implicit alignment between the source domain and target domain is realized by learning the source domain distributions hidden in the fixed source domain classifier. Experimental evaluations illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in solving SFUDA tasks.

Crowdsourcing is a hotspot research field which can facilitate machine learning by collecting labels to train models. Consequently, the state-of-the-art research efforts in crowdsourcing focus on truth inference or label integration, to remove inconsistent labels or to alleviate biased labeling. In turn, the integrated labels will be used to fine-tune machine learning models. Particularly, in this paper, we change the target of truth inference in crowdsourcing from discrete labels to multiple comments given by online participants, that is, the integration of the crowdsourced comments. For such a goal, we propose aSelf-play andSentiment-EmphasizedCommentIntegrationFramework (SSECIF), based on deepQ-learning, with three unique features. First, our framework SSECIF can generate the comment integration in a totally self-play way, without relying on the ground truth generated by human effort. Second, the integrated comment generated by SSECIF can include salient content with low redundancy. Third, the proposed framework SSECIF has emphasized, with a higher intensity, the sentiment in the integrated comment, in order to reflect the attitude or opinion more obviously. Extensive evaluation on real-world datasets demonstrates that SSECIF has achieved the best overall performance in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency, compared with the state-of-the-art methods.