In the coming years, diverse ecologies of AI systems are envisioned to rapidly and complexly interact with each other and with humans. Collaborative industrial robots will work on factory floors alongside labourers, care robots will assist human health workers, and personal AI assistants will help with scheduling, albeit in an elementary way. Therefore, it is essential to develop AI systems that can effectively and reliably collaborate with humans in various contexts. This gives rise to the agent alignment problem: how do we create agents that behave in accordance with the user's intentions and possess the ability to adapt to changing circumstances? In this talk, I will provide an overview of the problem and discuss our attempts in human-centred coordination and alignment, as well as collaboration in social context.

Dr Yali Du is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Informatics at King’s College London. She leads the Cooperative AI Lab. Her research aims to enable machines to exhibit cooperative and responsible behaviour in intelligent decision making tasks. Her work focuses on reinforcement learning and multi-agent cooperation, with topics such as generalisation, zero-shot coordination, evaluation of human and AI players, and social agency (e.g., human-involved learning, safety, and ethics). She was chosen for the AAAI New Faculty Highlights award (2023), Rising Star in AI 2023. She has given tutorials on cooperative multi-agent learning at ACML 2022 and AAAI 2023. She serves as the editors for Journal of AAMAS and IEEE Transactions on AI, and organising committee for AAMAS 2023. Her research is also supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UKRI-EPSRC).