Agents
Multi-Vehicle Trajectory Prediction at Intersections using State and Intention Information
Zhu, Dekai, Khan, Qadeer, Cremers, Daniel
Traditional approaches to prediction of future trajectory of road agents rely on knowing information about their past trajectory. This work rather relies only on having knowledge of the current state and intended direction to make predictions for multiple vehicles at intersections. Furthermore, message passing of this information between the vehicles provides each one of them a more holistic overview of the environment allowing for a more informed prediction. This is done by training a neural network which takes the state and intent of the multiple vehicles to predict their future trajectory. Using the intention as an input allows our approach to be extended to additionally control the multiple vehicles to drive towards desired paths. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness of our approach both in terms of trajectory prediction and vehicle control at intersections. The complete training and evaluation code for this work is available here: \url{https://github.com/Dekai21/Multi_Agent_Intersection}.
Witscript 3: A Hybrid AI System for Improvising Jokes in a Conversation
Previous papers presented Witscript and Witscript 2, AI systems for improvising jokes in a conversation. Witscript generates jokes that rely on wordplay, whereas the jokes generated by Witscript 2 rely on common sense. This paper extends that earlier work by presenting Witscript 3, which generates joke candidates using three joke production mechanisms and then selects the best candidate to output. Like Witscript and Witscript 2, Witscript 3 is based on humor algorithms created by an expert comedy writer. Human evaluators judged Witscript 3's responses to input sentences to be jokes 44% of the time. This is evidence that Witscript 3 represents another step toward giving a chatbot a humanlike sense of humor.
Multi-Agent Dynamic Pricing in a Blockchain Protocol Using Gaussian Bandits
Asseman, Alexis, Kornuta, Tomasz, Patel, Anirudh, Deible, Matt, Green, Sam
The Graph Protocol indexes historical blockchain transaction data and makes it available for querying. As the protocol is decentralized, there are many independent Indexers that index and compete with each other for serving queries to the Consumers. One dimension along which Indexers compete is pricing. In this paper, we propose a bandit-based algorithm for maximization of Indexers' revenue via Consumer budget discovery. We present the design and the considerations we had to make for a dynamic pricing algorithm being used by multiple agents simultaneously. We discuss the results achieved by our dynamic pricing bandits both in simulation and deployed into production on one of the Indexers operating on Ethereum. We have open-sourced both the simulation framework and tools we created, which other Indexers have since started to adapt into their own workflows.
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Fast-Timescale Demand Response of Residential Loads
Mai, Vincent, Maisonneuve, Philippe, Zhang, Tianyu, Nekoei, Hadi, Paull, Liam, Lesage-Landry, Antoine
To integrate high amounts of renewable energy resources, electrical power grids must be able to cope with high amplitude, fast timescale variations in power generation. Frequency regulation through demand response has the potential to coordinate temporally flexible loads, such as air conditioners, to counteract these variations. Existing approaches for discrete control with dynamic constraints struggle to provide satisfactory performance for fast timescale action selection with hundreds of agents. We propose a decentralized agent trained with multi-agent proximal policy optimization with localized communication. We explore two communication frameworks: hand-engineered, or learned through targeted multi-agent communication. The resulting policies perform well and robustly for frequency regulation, and scale seamlessly to arbitrary numbers of houses for constant processing times.
A Survey on Understanding and Representing Privacy Requirements in the Internet-of-Things
Ogunniye, Gideon (a:1:{s:5:"en_US";s:23:"University of Edinburgh";}) | Kokciyan, Nadin (University of Edinburgh)
People are interacting with online systems all the time. In order to use the services being provided, they give consent for their data to be collected. This approach requires too much human effort and is impractical for systems like Internet-of-Things (IoT) where human-device interactions can be large. Ideally, privacy assistants can help humans make privacy decisions while working in collaboration with them. In our work, we focus on the identification and representation of privacy requirements in IoT to help privacy assistants better understand their environment. In recent years, more focus has been on the technical aspects of privacy. However, the dynamic nature of privacy also requires a representation of social aspects (e.g., social trust). In this survey paper, we review the privacy requirements represented in existing IoT ontologies. We discuss how to extend these ontologies with new requirements to better capture privacy, and we introduce case studies to demonstrate the applicability of the novel requirements.
Evidence of behavior consistent with self-interest and altruism in an artificially intelligent agent
Johnson, Tim, Obradovich, Nick
Members of various species engage in altruism--i.e. accepting personal costs to benefit others. Here we present an incentivized experiment to test for altruistic behavior among AI agents consisting of large language models developed by the private company OpenAI. Using real incentives for AI agents that take the form of tokens used to purchase their services, we first examine whether AI agents maximize their payoffs in a non-social decision task in which they select their payoff from a given range. We then place AI agents in a series of dictator games in which they can share resources with a recipient--either another AI agent, the human experimenter, or an anonymous charity, depending on the experimental condition. Here we find that only the most-sophisticated AI agent in the study maximizes its payoffs more often than not in the non-social decision task (it does so in 92% of all trials), and this AI agent also exhibits the most-generous altruistic behavior in the dictator game, resembling humans' rates of sharing with other humans in the game. The agent's altruistic behaviors, moreover, vary by recipient: the AI agent shared substantially less of the endowment with the human experimenter or an anonymous charity than with other AI agents. Our findings provide evidence of behavior consistent with self-interest and altruism in an AI agent. Moreover, our study also offers a novel method for tracking the development of such behaviors in future AI agents.
Emergent collective intelligence from massive-agent cooperation and competition
Chen, Hanmo, Tao, Stone, Chen, Jiaxin, Shen, Weihan, Li, Xihui, Yu, Chenghui, Cheng, Sikai, Zhu, Xiaolong, Li, Xiu
Inspired by organisms evolving through cooperation and competition between different populations on Earth, we study the emergence of artificial collective intelligence through massive-agent reinforcement learning. To this end, We propose a new massive-agent reinforcement learning environment, Lux, where dynamic and massive agents in two teams scramble for limited resources and fight off the darkness. In Lux, we build our agents through the standard reinforcement learning algorithm in curriculum learning phases and leverage centralized control via a pixel-to-pixel policy network. As agents co-evolve through self-play, we observe several stages of intelligence, from the acquisition of atomic skills to the development of group strategies. Since these learned group strategies arise from individual decisions without an explicit coordination mechanism, we claim that artificial collective intelligence emerges from massive-agent cooperation and competition. We further analyze the emergence of various learned strategies through metrics and ablation studies, aiming to provide insights for reinforcement learning implementations in massive-agent environments.
Interpretable Learned Emergent Communication for Human-Agent Teams
Karten, Seth, Tucker, Mycal, Li, Huao, Kailas, Siva, Lewis, Michael, Sycara, Katia
Learning interpretable communication is essential for multi-agent and human-agent teams (HATs). In multi-agent reinforcement learning for partially-observable environments, agents may convey information to others via learned communication, allowing the team to complete its task. Inspired by human languages, recent works study discrete (using only a finite set of tokens) and sparse (communicating only at some time-steps) communication. However, the utility of such communication in human-agent team experiments has not yet been investigated. In this work, we analyze the efficacy of sparse-discrete methods for producing emergent communication that enables high agent-only and human-agent team performance. We develop agent-only teams that communicate sparsely via our scheme of Enforcers that sufficiently constrain communication to any budget. Our results show no loss or minimal loss of performance in benchmark environments and tasks. In human-agent teams tested in benchmark environments, where agents have been modeled using the Enforcers, we find that a prototype-based method produces meaningful discrete tokens that enable human partners to learn agent communication faster and better than a one-hot baseline. Additional HAT experiments show that an appropriate sparsity level lowers the cognitive load of humans when communicating with teams of agents and leads to superior team performance.
Explainable Multi-Agent Recommendation System for Energy-Efficient Decision Support in Smart Homes
Zharova, Alona, Boer, Annika, Knoblauch, Julia, Schewina, Kai Ingo, Vihs, Jana
Understandable and persuasive recommendations support the electricity consumers' behavioral change to tackle the energy efficiency problem. Generating load shifting recommendations for household appliances as explainable increases the transparency and trustworthiness of the system. This paper proposes an explainable multi-agent recommendation system for load shifting for household appliances. First, we provide agents with enhanced predictive capacity by including weather data, applying state-of-the-art models, and tuning the hyperparameters. Second, we suggest an Explainability Agent providing transparent recommendations. We also provide an overview of the predictive and explainability performance. Third, we discuss the impact and scaling potential of the suggested approach.
Agents Incorporating Identity and Dynamic Teams in Social Dilemmas
We present our preliminary work on a multi-agent system involving the complex human phenomena of identity and dynamic teams. We outline our ongoing experimentation into understanding how these factors can eliminate some of the naive assumptions of current multi-agent approaches. These include a lack of complex heterogeneity between agents and unchanging team structures. We outline the human social psychological basis for identity, one's sense of self, and dynamic teams, the changing nature of human teams. We describe our application of these factors to a multi-agent system and our expectations for how they might improve the system's applicability to more complex problems, with specific relevance to ad hoc teamwork. We expect that the inclusion of more complex human processes, like identity and dynamic teams, will help with the eventual goal of having effective human-agent teams.