Agents
Evaluation Mechanism of Collective Intelligence for Heterogeneous Agents Group
Dai, Anna, Zhao, Zhifeng, Zhang, Honggang, Li, Rongpeng, Zhou, Yugeng
Collective intelligence is manifested when multiple agents coherently work in observation, interaction, decision-making and action. In this paper, we define and quantify the intelligence level of heterogeneous agents group with the improved Anytime Universal Intelligence Test(AUIT), based on an extension of the existing evaluation of homogeneous agents group. The relationship of intelligence level with agents composition, group size, spatial complexity and testing time is analyzed. The intelligence level of heterogeneous agents groups is compared with the homogeneous ones to analyze the effects of heterogeneity on collective intelligence. Our work will help to understand the essence of collective intelligence more deeply and reveal the effect of various key factors on group intelligence level.
Implicitly Coordinated Multi-Agent Path Finding under Destination Uncertainty: Success Guarantees and Computational Complexity
Nebel, Bernhard, Bolander, Thomas, Engesser, Thorsten, Mattmüller, Robert
In multi-agent path finding (MAPF), it is usually assumed that planning is performed centrally and that the destinations of the agents are common knowledge. We will drop both assumptions and analyze under which conditions it can be guaranteed that the agents reach their respective destinations using implicitly coordinated plans without communication. Furthermore, we will analyze what the computational costs associated with such a coordination regime are. As it turns out, guarantees can be given assuming that the agents are of a certain type. However, the implied computational costs are quite severe. In the distributed setting, we either have to solve a sequence of NP-complete problems or have to tolerate exponentially longer executions. In the setting with destination uncertainty, bounded plan existence becomes PSPACE-complete. This clearly demonstrates the value of communicating about plans before execution starts.
Egocentric Bias and Doubt in Cognitive Agents
Sreenivas, Nanda Kishore, Rao, Shrisha
Modeling social interactions based on individual behavior has always been an area of interest, but prior literature generally presumes rational behavior. Thus, such models may miss out on capturing the effects of biases humans are susceptible to. This work presents a method to model egocentric bias, the real-life tendency to emphasize one's own opinion heavily when presented with multiple opinions. We use a symmetric distribution centered at an agent's own opinion, as opposed to the Bounded Confidence (BC) model used in prior work. We consider a game of iterated interactions where an agent cooperates based on its opinion about an opponent. Our model also includes the concept of domain-based self-doubt, which varies as the interaction succeeds or not. An increase in doubt makes an agent reduce its egocentricity in subsequent interactions, thus enabling the agent to learn reactively. The agent system is modeled with factions not having a single leader, to overcome some of the issues associated with leader-follower factions. We find that agents belonging to factions perform better than individual agents. We observe that an intermediate level of egocentricity helps the agent perform at its best, which concurs with conventional wisdom that neither overconfidence nor low self-esteem brings benefits.
Identifying artificial intelligence "blind spots"
A novel model developed by MIT and Microsoft researchers identifies instances in which autonomous systems have "learned" from training examples that don't match what's actually happening in the real world. Engineers could use this model to improve the safety of artificial intelligence systems, such as driverless vehicles and autonomous robots. The AI systems powering driverless cars, for example, are trained extensively in virtual simulations to prepare the vehicle for nearly every event on the road. But sometimes the car makes an unexpected error in the real world because an event occurs that should, but doesn't, alter the car's behavior. Consider a driverless car that wasn't trained, and more importantly doesn't have the sensors necessary, to differentiate between distinctly different scenarios, such as large, white cars and ambulances with red, flashing lights on the road.
To Monitor or to Trust: Observing Robot's Behavior based on a Game-Theoretic Model of Trust
Sengupta, Sailik, Zahedi, Zahra, Kambhampati, Subbarao
In scenarios where a robot generates and executes a plan, there may be instances where this generated plan is less costly for the robot to execute but incomprehensible to the human. When the human acts as a supervisor and is held accountable for the robot's plan, the human may be at a higher risk if the incomprehensible behavior is deemed to be unsafe. In such cases, the robot, who may be unaware of the human's exact expectations, may choose to do (1) the most constrained plan (i.e. one preferred by all possible supervisors) incurring the added cost of executing highly sub-optimal behavior when the human is observing it and (2) deviate to a more optimal plan when the human looks away. These problems amplify in situations where the robot has to fulfill multiple goals and cater to the needs of different human supervisors. In such settings, the robot, being a rational agent, should take any chance it gets to deviate to a lower cost plan. On the other hand, continuous monitoring of the robot's behavior is often difficult for the human because it costs them valuable resources (eg. time, effort, cognitive overload etc.). To optimize the cost for constant monitoring while ensuring the robots follow the {\em safe} behavior, we model this problem in the game-theoretic framework of trust where the human is the agent that trusts the robot. We show that the notion of human's trust, which is well-defined when there is a pure strategy equilibrium, is inversely proportional to the probability it assigns for observing the robot's behavior. We then show that with high probability, our game lacks a pure strategy Nash equilibrium, forcing us to define a notion of trust boundary over mixed strategies of the human in order to guarantee safe behavior by the robot.
Why you shouldn't do a PhD that focuses on a specific AI algorithmic approach?
In recent years, there has been a great deal of coverage about the dearth of PhD qualified AI data-scientists and the level of salaries qualified candidates can gain. One such piece can be found here: NYTimes article. Then you have universities complaining how their PhD qualified AI scientists are being poached by the industry thus demonstrating the demand for PhD qualified AI scientists: Guardian Article. Also, you have many universities opening numerous funded AI PhD positions such as this university: Leeds University Isn't it then obvious, a PhD in AI technology should be on all data scientists to do list. Well, as one who contemplated briefly to do a second PhD (focusing on swarm intelligence and multi-agent system in Healthcare) and who spent some time researching the necessity of completing a PhD to be across AI, I found it detrimental to undertake a PhD focusing on a specific AI algorithmic approach. This article is not meant to signal an obituary for PhD's focusing AI, but a cautionary note for someone contemplating a PhD focusing on a specific AI technique.
Learning Factored Markov Decision Processes with Unawareness
Innes, Craig, Lascarides, Alex
Methods for learning and planning in sequential decision problems often assume the learner is aware of all possible states and actions in advance. This assumption is sometimes untenable. In this paper, we give a method to learn factored markov decision problems from both domain exploration and expert assistance, which guarantees convergence to near-optimal behaviour, even when the agent begins unaware of factors critical to success. Our experiments show our agent learns optimal behaviour on small and large problems, and that conserving information on discovering new possibilities results in faster convergence.
Real-time tree search with pessimistic scenarios
Osogami, Takayuki, Takahashi, Toshihiro
Autonomous agents, such as self-driving cars and drones, need to make decisions in real time, which is particularly important but difficult in critical situations for example to avoid collisions. Such decisions often need to be made in a sequential manner to achieve the eventual goal (e.g., avoiding collisions and recovering to safe conditions), under partially observable environment, and by taking into account how other agents behave. Towards this far-reaching goal of realizing such autonomous agents, we propose practical techniques of sequential decision making in real time and demonstrate their effectiveness in Pommerman, a multi-agent environment that has been used in one of the competitions held at the Thirty-second Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2018) on Dec. 8, 2018 Resnick et al. [2018a]. The techniques that we propose in this paper have been used in the Pommerman agents (HakozakiJunctions and dypm-final) who have won the first and third places in the competition. In Pommerman, a team of two agents competes against another team of two agents on a board of 11 11 grids (see Figure 1 (a) for an initial configuration of the board). Each agent can observe only a limited area of the board, and the agents cannot communicate with each other. The goal of a team is to knock down all of the opponents. Towards this goal, the agents place bombs to destroy wooden walls and collect power-up items that might appear from those wooden walls, while avoiding flames and attacking opponents. See Figure 1 (b) for an example of the board in the middle of the game.
Intelligent Autonomous Things on the Battlefield
Numerous, artificially intelligent, networked things will populate the battlefield of the future, operating in close collaboration with human warfighters, and fighting as teams in highly adversarial environments. This chapter explores the characteristics, capabilities and intelli-gence required of such a network of intelligent things and humans - Internet of Battle Things (IOBT). The IOBT will experience unique challenges that are not yet well addressed by the current generation of AI and machine learning.
Artificial Intelligence in Intelligent Tutoring Robots: A Systematic Review and Design Guidelines
This study provides a systematic review of the recent advances in designing the intelligent tutoring robot (ITR), and summarises the status quo of applying artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. We first analyse the environment of the ITR and propose a relationship model for describing interactions of ITR with the students, the social milieu and the curriculum. Then, we transform the relationship model into the perception-planning-action model for exploring what AI techniques are suitable to be applied in the ITR. This article provides insights on promoting human-robot teaching-learning process and AI-assisted educational techniques, illustrating the design guidelines and future research perspectives in intelligent tutoring robots.