In the last few years, deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) has become a highly active area of research. A particularly challenging class of problems in this area is partially observable, cooperative, multi-agent learning, in which teams of agents must learn to coordinate their behaviour while conditioning only on their private observations. This is an attractive research area since such problems are relevant to a large number of real-world systems and are also more amenable to evaluation than general-sum problems. Standardised environments such as the ALE and MuJoCo have allowed single-agent RL to move beyond toy domains, such as grid worlds. However, there is no comparable benchmark for cooperative multi-agent RL. As a result, most papers in this field use one-off toy problems, making it difficult to measure real progress. In this paper, we propose the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) as a benchmark problem to fill this gap. SMAC is based on the popular real-time strategy game StarCraft II and focuses on micromanagement challenges where each unit is controlled by an independent agent that must act based on local observations. We offer a diverse set of challenge maps and recommendations for best practices in benchmarking and evaluations. We also open-source a deep multi-agent RL learning framework including state-of-the-art algorithms. We believe that SMAC can provide a standard benchmark environment for years to come. Videos of our best agents for several SMAC scenarios are available at: https://youtu.be/VZ7zmQ_obZ0.

The Self Organizing Map (SOM) is a competitive, unsupervised learningalgorithm capable of creating a low dimensional and discrete representation of high dimensional data. Sinceits initial conception, SOM has found broad application indata analytics, mainly for data clustering, function approximation, and dimensionality reduction (see [5, 8] for examples of applications). A SOM consists of a population of adaptive, interacting agents dubbed units. Each unit is represented in the sample spaceby vector (called weight) and it influences set of other units (neighbors). For each sample, the unit with the most similar weight is found (called the best matching unit - BMU), and its similarity to the sample is increased by altering itsweight. Subsequently, the neighbors of the BMU are also influenced by increasing their similarity to the sample - albeit to a lesser extend. Given enough data, the units' weight may converge to a low dimensional discrete representation of the data - called a feature map. Additionally, the units' weight will be placed meaningfully: neighboring units should contain similar features, sinceneighborhoods move en masse, a property known as topological preservation. It is possible however for this process to go awry; for example, limiting the influence of a unit over its neighbors may compromise the topological preservation[5, 4].

In this paper, we investigate the use of global information to speed up the learning process and increase the cumulative rewards of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) tasks. Within the actor-critic MARL, we introduce multiple cooperative critics from two levels of the hierarchy and propose a hierarchical critic-based MARL algorithm. In our approach, the agent is allowed to receive information from local and global critics in a competition task. The agent not only receives low-level details but also considers coordination from high levels to obtain global information for increasing operational performance. Here, we define multiple cooperative critics in a top-down hierarchy, called the Hierarchical Critic Assignment (HCA) framework. Our experiment, a two-player tennis competition task performed in the Unity environment, tested the HCA multi-agent framework based on the Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. The results showed that the HCA framework outperforms the non-hierarchical critic baseline method on MARL tasks.

Ad exchanges are widely used in platforms for online display advertising. Autonomous agents operating in these exchanges must learn policies for interacting profitably with a diverse, continually changing, but unknown market. We consider this problem from the perspective of a publisher, strategically interacting with an advertiser through a posted price mechanism. The learning problem for this agent is made difficult by the fact that information is censored, i.e., the publisher knows if an impression is sold but no other quantitative information. We address this problem using the Harsanyi-Bellman Ad Hoc Coordination (HBA) algorithm, which conceptualises this interaction in terms of a Stochastic Bayesian Game and arrives at optimal actions by best responding with respect to probabilistic beliefs maintained over a candidate set of opponent behaviour profiles. We adapt and apply HBA to the censored information setting of ad exchanges. Also, addressing the case of stochastic opponents, we devise a strategy based on a Kaplan-Meier estimator for opponent modelling. We evaluate the proposed method using simulations wherein we show that HBA-KM achieves substantially better competitive ratio and lower variance of return than baselines, including a Q-learning agent and a UCB-based online learning agent, and comparable to the offline optimal algorithm.

We introduce EvalAI, an open source platform for evaluating and comparing machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence algorithms (AI) at scale. EvalAI is built to provide a scalable solution to the research community to fulfill the critical need of evaluating machine learning models and agents acting in an environment against annotations or with a human-in-the-loop. This will help researchers, students, and data scientists to create, collaborate, and participate in AI challenges organized around the globe. By simplifying and standardizing the process of benchmarking these models, EvalAI seeks to lower the barrier to entry for participating in the global scientific effort to push the frontiers of machine learning and artificial intelligence, thereby increasing the rate of measurable progress in this domain. Our code is available here.

Yvonne Hofstetter (* 1966 in Frankfurt am Main) is a German lawyer, essayist and non-fiction author. She attended a convent school of the Congregation of Jesus and studied law. Since 1999, she has been working internationally in software companies specializing in multi-agent systems for the defense and automated commerce industries, working in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Industry 4.0 and Big Data.

Goal recognition is the problem of determining an agent's intent by observing her behaviour. Contemporary solutions for general task-planning relate the probability of a goal to the cost of reaching it. We adapt this approach to goal recognition in the strict context of path-planning. We show (1) that a simpler formula provides an identical result to current state-of-the-art in less than half the time under all but one set of conditions. Further, we prove (2) that the probability distribution based on this technique is independent of an agent's past behaviour and present a revised formula that achieves goal recognition by reference to the agent's starting point and current location only. Building on this, we demonstrate (3) that a Radius of Maximum Probability (i.e., the distance from a goal within which that goal is guaranteed to be the most probable) can be calculated from relative cost-distances between the candidate goals and a start location, without needing to calculate any actual probabilities. In this extended version of earlier work, we generalise our framework to the continuous domain and discuss our results, including the conditions under which our findings can be generalised back to goal recognition in general task-planning.

We investigate the problem of learning description logic ontologies from entailments via queries, using epistemic reasoning. We introduce a new learning model consisting of epistemic membership and example queries and show that polynomial learnability in this model coincides with polynomial learnability in Angluin's exact learning model with membership and equivalence queries. We then instantiate our learning framework to EL and show some complexity results for an epistemic extension of EL where epistemic operators can be applied over the axioms. Finally, we transfer known results for EL ontologies and its fragments to our learning model based on epistemic reasoning.

Although artificial intelligence holds promise for addressing societal challenges, issues of exactly which tasks to automate and the extent to do so remain understudied. We approach the problem of task delegability from a human-centered perspective by developing a framework on human perception of task delegation to artificial intelligence. We consider four high-level factors that can contribute to a delegation decision: motivation, difficulty, risk, and trust. To obtain an empirical understanding of human preferences in different tasks, we build a dataset of 100 tasks from academic papers, popular media portrayal of AI, and everyday life. For each task, we administer a survey to collect judgments of each factor and ask subjects to pick the extent to which they prefer AI involvement. We find little preference for full AI control and a strong preference for machine-in-the-loop designs, in which humans play the leading role. Our framework can effectively predict human preferences in degrees of AI assistance. Among the four factors, trust is the most predictive of human preferences of optimal human-machine delegation. This framework represents a first step towards characterizing human preferences of automation across tasks. We hope this work may encourage and aid in future efforts towards understanding such individual attitudes; our goal is to inform the public and the AI research community rather than dictating any direction in technology development.

Actor-critic algorithms learn an explicit policy (actor), and an accompanying value function (critic). The actor performs actions in the environment, while the critic evaluates the actor's current policy. However, despite their stability and promising convergence properties, current actor-critic algorithms do not outperform critic-only ones in practice. We believe that the fact that the critic learns Q^pi, instead of the optimal Q-function Q*, prevents state-of-the-art robust and sample-efficient off-policy learning algorithms from being used. In this paper, we propose an elegant solution, the Actor-Advisor architecture, in which a Policy Gradient actor learns from unbiased Monte-Carlo returns, while being shaped (or advised) by the Softmax policy arising from an off-policy critic. The critic can be learned independently from the actor, using any state-of-the-art algorithm. Being advised by a high-quality critic, the actor quickly and robustly learns the task, while its use of the Monte-Carlo return helps overcome any bias the critic may have. In addition to a new Actor-Critic formulation, the Actor-Advisor, a method that allows an external advisory policy to shape a Policy Gradient actor, can be applied to many other domains. By varying the source of advice, we demonstrate the wide applicability of the Actor-Advisor to three other important subfields of RL: safe RL with backup policies, efficient leverage of domain knowledge, and transfer learning in RL. Our experimental results demonstrate the benefits of the Actor-Advisor compared to state-of-the-art actor-critic methods, illustrate its applicability to the three other application scenarios listed above, and show that many important challenges of RL can now be solved using a single elegant solution.