Artificial Leviathan: Exploring Social Evolution of LLM Agents Through the Lens of Hobbesian Social Contract Theory

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer an opportunity for computational social science research at scale. Building upon prior explorations of LLM agent design, our work introduces a simulated agent society where complex social relationships dynamically form and evolve over time. Agents are imbued with psychological drives and placed in a sandbox survival environment. We conduct an evaluation of the agent society through the lens of Thomas Hobbes's seminal Social Contract Theory (SCT). We analyze whether, as the theory postulates, agents seek to escape a brutish "state of nature" by surrendering rights to an absolute sovereign in exchange for order and security. Our experiments unveil an alignment: Initially, agents engage in unrestrained conflict, mirroring Hobbes's depiction of the state of nature. However, as the simulation progresses, social contracts emerge, leading to the authorization of an absolute sovereign and the establishment of a peaceful commonwealth founded on mutual cooperation. This congruence between our LLM agent society's evolutionary trajectory and Hobbes's theoretical account indicates LLMs' capability to model intricate social dynamics and potentially replicate forces that shape human societies. By enabling such insights into group behavior and emergent societal phenomena, LLM-driven multi-agent simulations, while unable to simulate all the nuances of human behavior, may hold potential for advancing our understanding of social structures, group dynamics, and complex human systems.

RiEMann: Near Real-Time SE-Equivariant Robot Manipulation without Point Cloud Segmentation

We present RiEMann, an end-to-end near Real-time SE(3)-Equivariant Robot Manipulation imitation learning framework from scene point cloud input. Compared to previous methods that rely on descriptor field matching, RiEMann directly predicts the target poses of objects for manipulation without any object segmentation. RiEMann learns a manipulation task from scratch with 5 to 10 demonstrations, generalizes to unseen SE(3) transformations and instances of target objects, resists visual interference of distracting objects, and follows the near real-time pose change of the target object. The scalable action space of RiEMann facilitates the addition of custom equivariant actions such as the direction of turning the faucet, which makes articulated object manipulation possible for RiEMann. In simulation and real-world 6-DOF robot manipulation experiments, we test RiEMann on 5 categories of manipulation tasks with a total of 25 variants and show that RiEMann outperforms baselines in both task success rates and SE(3) geodesic distance errors on predicted poses (reduced by 68.6%), and achieves a 5.4 frames per second (FPS) network inference speed. Code and video results are available at https://riemann-web.github.io/.

LongDanceDiff: Long-term Dance Generation with Conditional Diffusion Model

Dancing with music is always an essential human art form to express emotion. Due to the high temporal-spacial complexity, long-term 3D realist dance generation synchronized with music is challenging. Existing methods suffer from the freezing problem when generating long-term dances due to error accumulation and training-inference discrepancy. To address this, we design a conditional diffusion model, LongDanceDiff, for this sequence-to-sequence long-term dance generation, addressing the challenges of temporal coherency and spatial constraint. LongDanceDiff contains a transformer-based diffusion model, where the input is a concatenation of music, past motions, and noised future motions. This partial noising strategy leverages the full-attention mechanism and learns the dependencies among music and past motions. To enhance the diversity of generated dance motions and mitigate the freezing problem, we introduce a mutual information minimization objective that regularizes the dependency between past and future motions. We also address common visual quality issues in dance generation, such as foot sliding and unsmooth motion, by incorporating spatial constraints through a Global-Trajectory Modulation (GTM) layer and motion perceptual losses, thereby improving the smoothness and naturalness of motion generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate a significant improvement in our approach over the existing state-of-the-art methods. We plan to release our codes and models soon.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection using Forward-Backward Cyclic Adaptation

We present a novel approach to perform the unsupervised domain adaptation for object detection through forward-backward cyclic (FBC) training. Recent adversarial training based domain adaptation methods have shown their effectiveness on minimizing domain discrepancy via marginal feature distributions alignment. However, aligning the marginal feature distributions does not guarantee the alignment of class conditional distributions. This limitation is more evident when adapting object detectors as the domain discrepancy is larger compared to the image classification task, e.g. various number of objects exist in one image and the majority of content in an image is the background. This motivates us to learn domain invariance for category level semantics via gradient alignment. Intuitively, if the gradients of two domains point in similar directions, then the learning of one domain can improve that of another domain. To achieve gradient alignment, we propose Forward-Backward Cyclic Adaptation, which iteratively computes adaptation from source to target via backward hopping and from target to source via forward passing. In addition, we align low-level features for adapting holistic color/texture via adversarial training. However, the detector performs well on both domains is not ideal for target domain. As such, in each cycle, domain diversity is enforced by maximum entropy regularization on the source domain to penalize confident source-specific learning and minimum entropy regularization on target domain to intrigue target-specific learning. Theoretical analysis of the training process is provided, and extensive experiments on challenging cross-domain object detection datasets have shown the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art.

Using LIP to Gloss Over Faces in Single-Stage Face Detection Networks

This work shows that it is possible to fool/attack recent state-of-the-art face detectors which are based on the single-stage networks. Successfully attacking face detectors could be a serious malware vulnerability when deploying a smart surveillance system utilizing face detectors. We show that existing adversarial perturbation methods are not effective to perform such an attack, especially when there are multiple faces in the input image. This is because the adversarial perturbation specifically generated for one face may disrupt the adversarial perturbation for another face. In this paper, we call this problem the Instance Perturbation Interference (IPI) problem. This IPI problem is addressed by studying the relationship between the deep neural network receptive field and the adversarial perturbation. As such, we propose the Localized Instance Perturbation (LIP) that uses adversarial perturbation constrained to the Effective Receptive Field (ERF) of a target to perform the attack. Experiment results show the LIP method massively outperforms existing adversarial perturbation generation methods -- often by a factor of 2 to 10.

TV-GAN: Generative Adversarial Network Based Thermal to Visible Face Recognition

This work tackles the face recognition task on images captured using thermal camera sensors which can operate in the non-light environment. While it can greatly increase the scope and benefits of the current security surveillance systems, performing such a task using thermal images is a challenging problem compared to face recognition task in the Visible Light Domain (VLD). This is partly due to the much smaller amount number of thermal imagery data collected compared to the VLD data. Unfortunately, direct application of the existing very strong face recognition models trained using VLD data into the thermal imagery data will not produce a satisfactory performance. This is due to the existence of the domain gap between the thermal and VLD images. To this end, we propose a Thermal-to-Visible Generative Adversarial Network (TV-GAN) that is able to transform thermal face images into their corresponding VLD images whilst maintaining identity information which is sufficient enough for the existing VLD face recognition models to perform recognition. Some examples are presented in Figure 1. Unlike the previous methods, our proposed TV-GAN uses an explicit closed-set face recognition loss to regularize the discriminator network training. This information will then be conveyed into the generator network in the forms of gradient loss. In the experiment, we show that by using this additional explicit regularization for the discriminator network, the TV-GAN is able to preserve more identity information when translating a thermal image of a person which is not seen before by the TV-GAN.