Agents
Energy Flexibility Potential in the Brewery Sector: A Multi-agent Based Simulation of 239 Danish Breweries
Howard, Daniel Anthony, Ma, Zheng Grace, Engvang, Jacob Alstrup, Hagenau, Morten, Jorgensen, Kathrine Lau, Olesen, Jonas Fausing, Jørgensen, Bo Nørregaard
The beverage industry is a typical food processing industry and accounts for significant energy consumption, e.g., 1 % of The grid stability and security of supply are challenged Danish energy consumption [10]. The beverage industry can due to the increasing penetration of renewable energy sources be further divided based on the beverage type, with beer in the electricity grid [1]. Furthermore, conventional balancing production being the category with the highest energy of the electricity grid through supply-side management is consumption accounting for 40 % of the beverages industry's becoming costly, and the capacity required to ensure the combined energy consumption [10]. For instance, Denmark security of supply would be inefficient [2]. Demand-side has the highest number of breweries per capita [11] among the management has seen increasing potential to mitigate the European nations. As of April 2022, there were 275 breweries impact of fluctuations in the electricity grid and aid in in Denmark. A survey based on the Danish Brewery stabilization by adjusting consumer demand subject to Associations members shows that approximately 50 % of electricity market conditions [3]. Danish beverage facilities might be permanently close or go Demand side management can be divided based on the bankrupt due to COVID-19 and the increasing energy prices load-shape objective, e.g., peak clipping, valley filling, and [12].
Keeping the Harmony Between Neighbors: Local Fairness in Graph Fair Division
Hummel, Halvard, Igarashi, Ayumi
We study the problem of allocating indivisible resources under the connectivity constraints of a graph $G$. This model, initially introduced by Bouveret et al. (published in IJCAI, 2017), effectively encompasses a diverse array of scenarios characterized by spatial or temporal limitations, including the division of land plots and the allocation of time plots. In this paper, we introduce a novel fairness concept that integrates local comparisons within the social network formed by a connected allocation of the item graph. Our particular focus is to achieve pairwise-maximin fair share (PMMS) among the "neighbors" within this network. For any underlying graph structure, we show that a connected allocation that maximizes Nash welfare guarantees a $(1/2)$-PMMS fairness. Moreover, for two agents, we establish that a $(3/4)$-PMMS allocation can be efficiently computed. Additionally, we demonstrate that for three agents and the items aligned on a path, a PMMS allocation is always attainable and can be computed in polynomial time. Lastly, when agents have identical additive utilities, we present a pseudo-polynomial-time algorithm for a $(3/4)$-PMMS allocation, irrespective of the underlying graph $G$. Furthermore, we provide a polynomial-time algorithm for obtaining a PMMS allocation when $G$ is a tree.
On the Limitations of Markovian Rewards to Express Multi-Objective, Risk-Sensitive, and Modal Tasks
Skalse, Joar, Abate, Alessandro
In this paper, we study the expressivity of scalar, Markovian reward functions in Reinforcement Learning (RL), and identify several limitations to what they can express. Specifically, we look at three classes of RL tasks; multi-objective RL, risk-sensitive RL, and modal RL. For each class, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions that describe when a problem in this class can be expressed using a scalar, Markovian reward. Moreover, we find that scalar, Markovian rewards are unable to express most of the instances in each of these three classes. We thereby contribute to a more complete understanding of what standard reward functions can and cannot express. In addition to this, we also call attention to modal problems as a new class of problems, since they have so far not been given any systematic treatment in the RL literature. We also briefly outline some approaches for solving some of the problems we discuss, by means of bespoke RL algorithms.
Efficiently Quantifying Individual Agent Importance in Cooperative MARL
Mahjoub, Omayma, de Kock, Ruan, Singh, Siddarth, Khlifi, Wiem, Vall, Abidine, Tessera, Kale-ab, Pretorius, Arnu
Measuring the contribution of individual agents is challenging in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). In cooperative MARL, team performance is typically inferred from a single shared global reward. Arguably, among the best current approaches to effectively measure individual agent contributions is to use Shapley values. However, calculating these values is expensive as the computational complexity grows exponentially with respect to the number of agents. In this paper, we adapt difference rewards into an efficient method for quantifying the contribution of individual agents, referred to as Agent Importance, offering a linear computational complexity relative to the number of agents. We show empirically that the computed values are strongly correlated with the true Shapley values, as well as the true underlying individual agent rewards, used as the ground truth in environments where these are available. We demonstrate how Agent Importance can be used to help study MARL systems by diagnosing algorithmic failures discovered in prior MARL benchmarking work. Our analysis illustrates Agent Importance as a valuable explainability component for future MARL benchmarks.
General Automatic Solution Generation of Social Problems
Niu, Tong, Huang, Haoyu, Du, Yu, Zhang, Weihao, Shi, Luping, Zhao, Rong
Given the escalating intricacy and multifaceted nature of contemporary social systems, manually generating solutions to address pertinent social issues has become a formidable task. In response to this challenge, the rapid development of artificial intelligence has spurred the exploration of computational methodologies aimed at automatically generating solutions. However, current methods for auto-generation of solutions mainly concentrate on local social regulations that pertain to specific scenarios. Here, we report an automatic social operating system (ASOS) designed for general social solution generation, which is built upon agent-based models, enabling both global and local analyses and regulations of social problems across spatial and temporal dimensions. ASOS adopts a hypergraph with extensible social semantics for a comprehensive and structured representation of social dynamics. It also incorporates a generalized protocol for standardized hypergraph operations and a symbolic hybrid framework that delivers interpretable solutions, yielding a balance between regulatory efficacy and function viability. To demonstrate the effectiveness of ASOS, we apply it to the domain of averting extreme events within international oil futures markets. By generating a new trading role supplemented by new mechanisms, ASOS can adeptly discern precarious market conditions and make front-running interventions for non-profit purposes. This study demonstrates that ASOS provides an efficient and systematic approach for generating solutions for enhancing our society.
Decentralized Federated Learning: A Survey on Security and Privacy
Hallaji, Ehsan, Razavi-Far, Roozbeh, Saif, Mehrdad, Wang, Boyu, Yang, Qiang
Federated learning has been rapidly evolving and gaining popularity in recent years due to its privacy-preserving features, among other advantages. Nevertheless, the exchange of model updates and gradients in this architecture provides new attack surfaces for malicious users of the network which may jeopardize the model performance and user and data privacy. For this reason, one of the main motivations for decentralized federated learning is to eliminate server-related threats by removing the server from the network and compensating for it through technologies such as blockchain. However, this advantage comes at the cost of challenging the system with new privacy threats. Thus, performing a thorough security analysis in this new paradigm is necessary. This survey studies possible variations of threats and adversaries in decentralized federated learning and overviews the potential defense mechanisms. Trustability and verifiability of decentralized federated learning are also considered in this study.
Towards Collective Superintelligence: Amplifying Group IQ using Conversational Swarms
Rosenberg, Louis, Willcox, Gregg, Schumann, Hans, Mani, Ganesh
Swarm Intelligence (SI) is a natural phenomenon that enables biological groups to amplify their combined intellect by forming real-time systems. Artificial Swarm Intelligence (or Swarm AI) is a technology that enables networked human groups to amplify their combined intelligence by forming similar systems. In the past, swarm-based methods were constrained to narrowly defined tasks like probabilistic forecasting and multiple-choice decision making. A new technology called Conversational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) was developed in 2023 that amplifies the decision-making accuracy of networked human groups through natural conversational deliberations. The current study evaluated the ability of real-time groups using a CSI platform to take a common IQ test known as Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM). First, a baseline group of participants took the Raven's IQ test by traditional survey. This group averaged 45.6% correct. Then, groups of approximately 35 individuals answered IQ test questions together using a CSI platform called Thinkscape. These groups averaged 80.5% correct. This places the CSI groups in the 97th percentile of IQ test-takers and corresponds to an effective IQ increase of 28 points (p<0.001). This is an encouraging result and suggests that CSI is a powerful method for enabling conversational collective intelligence in large, networked groups. In addition, because CSI is scalable across groups of potentially any size, this technology may provide a viable pathway to building a Collective Superintelligence.
Decision Theoretic Foundations for Experiments Evaluating Human Decisions
Hullman, Jessica, Kale, Alex, Hartline, Jason
Decision-making with information displays is a key focus of research in areas like explainable AI, human-AI teaming, and data visualization. However, what constitutes a decision problem, and what is required for an experiment to be capable of concluding that human decisions are flawed in some way, remain open to speculation. We present a widely applicable definition of a decision problem synthesized from statistical decision theory and information economics. We argue that to attribute loss in human performance to forms of bias, an experiment must provide participants with the information that a rational agent would need to identify the normative decision. We evaluate the extent to which recent evaluations of decision-making from the literature on AI-assisted decisions achieve this criteria. We find that only 6 (17\%) of 35 studies that claim to identify biased behavior present participants with sufficient information to characterize their behavior as deviating from good decision-making. We motivate the value of studying well-defined decision problems by describing a characterization of performance losses they allow us to conceive. In contrast, the ambiguities of a poorly communicated decision problem preclude normative interpretation. We conclude with recommendations for practice.
Efficient Constraint Generation for Stochastic Shortest Path Problems
Schmalz, Johannes, Trevizan, Felipe
Current methods for solving Stochastic Shortest Path Problems (SSPs) find states' costs-to-go by applying Bellman backups, where state-of-the-art methods employ heuristics to select states to back up and prune. A fundamental limitation of these algorithms is their need to compute the cost-to-go for every applicable action during each state backup, leading to unnecessary computation for actions identified as sub-optimal. We present new connections between planning and operations research and, using this framework, we address this issue of unnecessary computation by introducing an efficient version of constraint generation for SSPs. This technique allows algorithms to ignore sub-optimal actions and avoid computing their costs-to-go. We also apply our novel technique to iLAO* resulting in a new algorithm, CG-iLAO*. Our experiments show that CG-iLAO* ignores up to 57% of iLAO*'s actions and it solves problems up to 8x and 3x faster than LRTDP and iLAO*.
Enhancing Diagnostic Accuracy through Multi-Agent Conversations: Using Large Language Models to Mitigate Cognitive Bias
Ke, Yu He, Yang, Rui, Lie, Sui An, Lim, Taylor Xin Yi, Abdullah, Hairil Rizal, Ting, Daniel Shu Wei, Liu, Nan
Background: Cognitive biases in clinical decision-making significantly contribute to errors in diagnosis and suboptimal patient outcomes. Addressing these biases presents a formidable challenge in the medical field. This study explores the role of large language models (LLMs) in mitigating these biases through the utilization of a multi-agent framework. We simulate the clinical decision-making processes through multi-agent conversation and evaluate its efficacy in improving diagnostic accuracy. Methods: A total of 16 published and unpublished case reports where cognitive biases have resulted in misdiagnoses were identified from the literature. In the multi-agent system, we leveraged GPT-4 Turbo to facilitate interactions among four simulated agents to replicate clinical team dynamics. Each agent has a distinct role: 1) To make the initial and final diagnosis after considering the discussions, 2) The devil's advocate and correct confirmation and anchoring bias, 3) The tutor and facilitator of the discussion to reduce premature closure bias, and 4) To record and summarize the findings. A total of 80 simulations were evaluated for the accuracy of initial diagnosis, top differential diagnosis and final two differential diagnoses. Findings: In a total of 80 responses evaluating both initial and final diagnoses, the initial diagnosis had an accuracy of 0% (0/80), but following multi-agent discussions, the accuracy for the top differential diagnosis increased to 71.3% (57/80), and for the final two differential diagnoses, to 80.0% (64/80). The system demonstrated an ability to reevaluate and correct misconceptions, even in scenarios with misleading initial investigations. Interpretation: The LLM-driven multi-agent conversation system shows promise in enhancing diagnostic accuracy in diagnostically challenging medical scenarios.