Yali Du – Towards Cooperative AI Agents with Reinforcement Learning and LLMs

Abstract: From collaborative industrial robots to personal AI assistants, the integration of AI into our daily lives highlights the critical need for effective and reliable coordination among agents, as well as between agents and humans. This challenge centers on creating agents that not only align with user intentions but also possess the flexibility to adapt to evolving circumstances, such as the introduction of novel agents. The pursuit of multi-agent cooperation extends beyond individual interactions to encompass broader societal considerations. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges of cooperative AI, and our contributions on multi-agent cooperation, human-ai coordination and cooperative alignments.

Bio: Dr Yali Du is a Senior Lecturer in AI at King’s College London, and a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. She is the Head of the Distributed AI Group and leads the Cooperative AI Lab. Her research focuses on building cooperative and safe AI agents that can learn, coordinate, and align with humans in intelligent decision-making tasks, spanning multi-agent cooperation, human–AI coordination, and value alignment. She received the AAAI New Faculty Highlights Award in 2023 and was also named a Rising Star in AI in the same year. She has delivered tutorials on cooperative multi-agent learning at ACML 2022 and AAAI 2023. Dr Du serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of AAMAS and IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, and as a Senior Area Chair for AAMAS, as well as an Area Chair for NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, and IJCAI. She has also served on the organising committees of DAI 2025, NeurIPS 2024, and AAMAS 2023.

Seminar will take place in room 909B @ Imperial College’ EEE Department, and live-streamed via Teams.  Please get in touch with the organisers via informed-ai@bristol.ac.uk to express your interest in joining online or in person.  We would be happy to see you there.