Abstract-- Learning from demonstration (LfD) is useful in settings where hand-coding behaviour or a reward function is impractical. It has succeeded in a wide range of problems but typically relies on artificially generated demonstrations or specially deployed sensors and has not generally been able to leverage the copious demonstrations available in the wild: those that capture behaviour that was occurring anyway using sensors that were already deployed for another purpose, e.g., traffic camera footage capturing demonstrations of natural behaviour of vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians. We propose video to behaviour (ViBe), a new approach to learning models of road user behaviour that requires as input only unlabelled raw video data of a traffic scene collected from a single, monocular, uncalibrated camera with ordinary resolution. Our approach calibrates the camera, detects relevant objects, tracks them through time, and uses the resulting trajectories to perform LfD, yielding models of naturalistic behaviour. We apply ViBe to raw videos of a traffic intersection and show that it can learn purely from videos, without additional expert knowledge. Learning from demonstration (LfD) is a machine learning technique that can learn complex behaviours from a dataset of expert trajectories, called demonstrations. LfD is particularly useful in settings where hand-coding behaviour, or engineering a suitable reward function, is too difficult or labour intensive. While LfD has succeeded in a wide range of problems [1], [2], [3], nearly all methods rely on either artificially generated demonstrations (e.g., from laboratory subjects) or those collected by specially deployed sensors (e.g., MOCAP). These restrictions greatly limit the practical applicability of LfD, which to date has largely not been able to leverage the copious demonstrations available in the wild: those that capture behaviour that was occurring anyway using sensors that were already deployed for other purposes. For example, consider the problem of training autonomous vehicles to navigate in the presence of human road users.

Because combat environments change over time and technology upgrades are widespread for ground vehicles, a large number of vehicles and equipment become quickly obsolete. A possible solution for the U.S. Army is to develop fleets of modular military vehicles, which are built by interchangeable substantial components also known as modules. One of the typical characteristics of module is their ease of assembly and disassembly through simple means such as plug-in/pull-out actions, which allows for real-time fleet reconfiguration to meet dynamic demands. Moreover, military demands are time-varying and highly stochastic because commanders keep reacting to enemy's actions. To capture these characteristics, we formulated an intelligent agent-based model to imitate decision making process during fleet operation, which combines real-time optimization with artificial intelligence. The agents are capable of inferring enemy's future move based on historical data and optimize dispatch/operation decisions accordingly. We implement our model to simulate an attacker-defender game between two adversarial and intelligent players, representing the commanders from modularized fleet and conventional fleet respectively. Given the same level of combat resources and intelligence, we highlight the tactical advantages of fleet modularity in terms of win rate, unpredictability and suffered damage.

Self-organization is a natural phenomenon that emerges in systems with a large number of interacting components. Self-organized systems show robustness, scalability, and flexibility, which are essential properties when handling real-world problems. Swarm intelligence seeks to design nature-inspired algorithms with a high degree of self-organization. Yet, we do not know why swarm-based algorithms work well and neither we can compare the different approaches in the literature. The lack of a common framework capable of characterizing these several swarm-based algorithms, transcending their particularities, has led to a stream of publications inspired by different aspects of nature without much regard as to whether they are similar to already existing approaches. We address this gap by introducing a network-based framework$-$the interaction network$-$to examine computational swarm-based systems via the optics of social dynamics. We discuss the social dimension of several swarm classes and provide a case study of the Particle Swarm Optimization. The interaction network enables a better understanding of the plethora of approaches currently available by looking at them from a general perspective focusing on the structure of the social interactions.

In multi-cycle assignment problems with rotational diversity, a set of tasks has to be repeatedly assigned to a set of agents. Over multiple cycles, the goal is to achieve a high diversity of assignments from tasks to agents. At the same time, the assignments' profit has to be maximized in each cycle. Due to changing availability of tasks and agents, planning ahead is infeasible and each cycle is an independent assignment problem but influenced by previous choices. We approach the multi-cycle assignment problem as a two-part problem: Profit maximization and rotation are combined into one objective value, and then solved as a General Assignment Problem. Rotational diversity is maintained with a single execution of the costly assignment model. Our simple, yet effective method is applicable to different domains and applications. Experiments show the applicability on a multi-cycle variant of the multiple knapsack problem and a real-world case study on the test case selection and assignment problem, an example from the software engineering domain, where test cases have to be distributed over compatible test machines.

The process of play testing a game is subjective, expensive and incomplete. In this paper, we present a play-testing approach that explores the game space with automated agents and collects data to answer questions posed by the designers. Rather than have agents interacting with an actual game client, this approach recreates the bare bone mechanics of the game as a separate system. Our agent is able to play in minutes what would take testers days of organic gameplay. The analysis of thousands of game simulations exposed imbalances in game actions, identified inconsequential rewards and evaluated the effectiveness of optional strategic choices. Our test case game, The Sims Mobile, was recently released and the findings shown here influenced design changes that resulted in improved player experience.

Intelligent interactive narrative systems often use an experience manager to govern the behavior of non-player charactersin a way that guides the story towards its author’s agenda, which may be for entertainment, education, training, or other purposes. For such systems, a central challenge is creating believable virtual characters. The Belief Desire Intention framework is often cited as a goal for researchers in this field; for characters to seem realistic, a human audience should attribute beliefs, desires, and intentions to them. Much of my prior work has focused on belief; my goal for the future is to finish the work on belief, and to implement a new model of desire and intention that explicitly reasons about characters’ commitment to certain plans of action.

Rational agents are becoming prevalent in many domains, from data analysis to entertainment and games. The increased prevalence of agents has evolved new tools and techniques to work with and design new agents. One such technique is system simulation. Systems simulation is a technique an author can use to imitate tasks, processes, or systems, and in particular, agents. Systems simulation has a variety of uses, ranging from simulating ecological systems to entertainment, such as interactive narratives and digital games. However, many system simulators use specialized programming languages and require prior programming experience. This causes a disconnect between individuals with limited programming experience who wish to use the simulation tools, and the software itself. New users may find the specialized languages daunting, and the initial learning process too intense for the anticipated reward. This research strives to bridge the gap between system simulation tools and users with little to no programming experience. Future work includes a corpus of narrative and autonomous agent creation tools designed for users with little to no programming experience.

Many modern creative industrial processes rely on the collaboration between multiple humans, assisted by one or more computational systems, in a complex environment. However, most traditional systems lack the adaptability required to contribute in a flexible, co-creative manner, instead executing a fixed set of tasks in a preset time schedule. We believe games, especially cooperative games offer an ideal platform to conduct research in co-creativity. We present our motivation, preliminary work and future goals to study, build and measure game-inspired co-creative AI systems.

Intelligent autonomous agents that are acting in dynamic environmentsin real-time are often required to follow long-termstrategies while also remaining reactive and being able to actdeliberately. In order to create intelligent behaviors for videogame characters, there are two common approaches – plannersare used for long-term strategical planning, whereas BehaviorTrees allow for reactive acting. Although both methodologieshave their advantages, when used on their own, theyfail to fully achieve both requirements described above. Inthis work, we propose a hybrid approach combining a HierarchicalTask Network planner for high-level planning whiledelegating low-level decision making and acting to BehaviorTrees. Furthermore, we compare this approach with a pureplanner in a multi-agent environment.

Social deduction games present a unique challenge for AI agents, because communication plays a central role in most of them, and deception plays a key role in game play. To be successful in such games, players need to come up with convincing stories, but also discern the truth of statements of other players and adapt to the information learned from them. In this paper we present an approach for virtual agents that have to determine how long to stick to their story in the light of information obtained from other players. We apply this approach to a particular social deduction game, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, and demonstrate the effect of different levels of commitment to an agent's story.