With the rapid development of robot and other intelligent and autonomous agents, how a human could be influenced by a robot's expressed mood when making decisions becomes a crucial question in human-robot interaction. In this pilot study, we investigate (1) in what way a robot can express a certain mood to influence a human's decision making behavioral model; (2) how and to what extent the human will be influenced in a game theoretic setting. More specifically, we create an NLP model to generate sentences that adhere to a specific affective expression profile. We use these sentences for a humanoid robot as it plays a Stackelberg security game against a human. We investigate the behavioral model of the human player.

With the world moving towards being increasingly dependent on computers and automation, one of the main challenges in the current decade has been to build secure applications, systems and networks. Alongside these challenges, the number of threats is rising exponentially due to the attack surface increasing through numerous interfaces offered for each service. To alleviate the impact of these threats, researchers have proposed numerous solutions; however, current tools often fail to adapt to ever-changing architectures, associated threats and 0-days. This manuscript aims to provide researchers with a taxonomy and survey of current dataset composition and current Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) capabilities and assets. These taxonomies and surveys aim to improve both the efficiency of IDS and the creation of datasets to build the next generation IDS as well as to reflect networks threats more accurately in future datasets. To this end, this manuscript also provides a taxonomy and survey or network threats and associated tools. The manuscript highlights that current IDS only cover 25% of our threat taxonomy, while current datasets demonstrate clear lack of real-network threats and attack representation, but rather include a large number of deprecated threats, hence limiting the accuracy of current machine learning IDS. Moreover, the taxonomies are open-sourced to allow public contributions through a Github repository.

In line with the sensorimotor contingency theory, we investigate the problem of the perception of space from a fundamental sensorimotor perspective. Despite its pervasive nature in our perception of the world, the origin of the concept of space remains largely mysterious. For example in the context of artificial perception, this issue is usually circumvented by having engineers pre-define the spatial structure of the problem the agent has to face. We here show that the structure of space can be autonomously discovered by a naive agent in the form of sensorimotor regularities, that correspond to so called compensable sensory experiences: these are experiences that can be generated either by the agent or its environment. By detecting such compensable experiences the agent can infer the topological and metric structure of the external space in which its body is moving. We propose a theoretical description of the nature of these regularities and illustrate the approach on a simulated robotic arm equipped with an eye-like sensor, and which interacts with an object. Finally we show how these regularities can be used to build an internal representation of the sensor's external spatial configuration.

We investigate the problem of truth discovery based on opinions from multiple agents who may be unreliable or biased. We consider the case where agents' reliabilities or biases are correlated if they belong to the same community, which defines a group of agents with similar opinions regarding a particular event. An agent can belong to different communities for different events, and these communities are unknown \emph{a priori}. We incorporate knowledge of the agents' social network in our truth discovery framework and develop Laplace variational inference methods to estimate agents' reliabilities, communities, and the event states. We also develop a stochastic variational inference method to scale our model to large social networks. Simulations and experiments on real data suggest that when observations are sparse, our proposed methods perform better than several other inference methods, including majority voting, the popular Bayesian Classifier Combination (BCC) method, and the Community BCC method.

Progress in machine learning is measured by careful evaluation on problems of outstanding common interest. However, the proliferation of benchmark suites and environments, adversarial attacks, and other complications has diluted the basic evaluation model by overwhelming researchers with choices. Deliberate or accidental cherry picking is increasingly likely, and designing well-balanced evaluation suites requires increasing effort. In this paper we take a step back and propose Nash averaging. The approach builds on a detailed analysis of the algebraic structure of evaluation in two basic scenarios: agent-vs-agent and agent-vs-task. The key strength of Nash averaging is that it automatically adapts to redundancies in evaluation data, so that results are not biased by the incorporation of easy tasks or weak agents. Nash averaging thus encourages maximally inclusive evaluation -- since there is no harm (computational cost aside) from including all available tasks and agents.

We introduce Mix & Match (M&M) - a training framework designed to facilitate rapid and effective learning in RL agents, especially those that would be too slow or too challenging to train otherwise. The key innovation is a procedure that allows us to automatically form a curriculum over agents. Through such a curriculum we can progressively train more complex agents by, effectively, bootstrapping from solutions found by simpler agents. In contradistinction to typical curriculum learning approaches, we do not gradually modify the tasks or environments presented, but instead use a process to gradually alter how the policy is represented internally. We show the broad applicability of our method by demonstrating significant performance gains in three different experimental setups: (1) We train an agent able to control more than 700 actions in a challenging 3D first-person task; using our method to progress through an action-space curriculum we achieve both faster training and better final performance than one obtains using traditional methods.

Proportional representation (PR) is often discussed in voting settings as a major desideratum. For the past century or so, it is common both in practice and in the academic literature to jump to single transferable vote (STV) as the solution for achieving PR. Some of the most prominent electoral reform movements around the globe are pushing for the adoption of STV. It has been termed a major open problem to design a voting rule that satisfies the same PR properties as STV and better monotonicity properties. In this paper, we first present a taxonomy of proportional representation axioms for general weak order preferences, some of which generalise and strengthen previously introduced concepts. We then present a rule called Expanding Approvals Rule (EAR) that satisfies properties stronger than the central PR axiom satisfied by STV, can handle indifferences in a convenient and computationally efficient manner, and also satisfies better candidate monotonicity properties. In view of this, our proposed rule seems to be a compelling solution for achieving proportional representation in voting settings.

Machine learning (ML) has become a core component of many real-world applications and training data is a key factor that drives current progress. This huge success has led Internet companies to deploy machine learning as a service (MLaaS). Recently, the first membership inference attack has shown that extraction of information on the training set is possible in such MLaaS settings, which has severe security and privacy implications. However, the early demonstrations of the feasibility of such attacks have many assumptions on the adversary such as using multiple so-called shadow models, knowledge of the target model structure and having a dataset from the same distribution as the target model's training data. We relax all 3 key assumptions, thereby showing that such attacks are very broadly applicable at low cost and thereby pose a more severe risk than previously thought. We present the most comprehensive study so far on this emerging and developing threat using eight diverse datasets which show the viability of the proposed attacks across domains. In addition, we propose the first effective defense mechanisms against such broader class of membership inference attacks that maintain a high level of utility of the ML model.

The General Video Game AI competitions have been the testing ground for several techniques for game playing, such as evolutionary computation techniques, tree search algorithms, hyper heuristic based or knowledge based algorithms. So far the metrics used to evaluate the performance of agents have been win ratio, game score and length of games. In this paper we provide a wider set of metrics and a comparison method for evaluating and comparing agents. The metrics and the comparison method give shallow introspection into the agent's decision making process and they can be applied to any agent regardless of its algorithmic nature. In this work, the metrics and the comparison method are used to measure the impact of the terms that compose a tree policy of an MCTS based agent, comparing with several baseline agents. The results clearly show how promising such general approach is and how it can be useful to understand the behaviour of an AI agent, in particular, how the comparison with baseline agents can help understanding the shape of the agent decision landscape. The presented metrics and comparison method represent a step toward to more descriptive ways of logging and analysing agent's behaviours.

We initiate the study of mechanism design without money for common goods. Our model captures a variation of the well-known one-dimensional facility location problem if the facility is assumed to have a capacity constraint $k