Agents
Game Theory for Data Science: Eliciting Truthful Information
Faltings, Boi, Radanovic, Goran
Intelligent systems often depend on data provided by information agents, for example, sensor data or crowdsourced human computation. Providing accurate and relevant data requires costly effort that agents may not always be willing to provide. Thus, it becomes important not only to verify the correctness of data, but also to provide incentives so that agents that provide high-quality data are rewarded while those that do not are discouraged by low rewards. We cover different settings and the assumptions they admit, including sensing, human computation, peer grading, reviews, and predictions. We survey different incentive mechanisms, including proper scoring rules, prediction markets and peer prediction, Bayesian Truth Serum, Peer Truth Serum, Correlated Agreement, and the settings where each of them would be suitable.
The 10 Algorithms Machine Learning Engineers Need to Know
Some of the most common examples of machine learning are Netflix's algorithms to make movie suggestions based on movies you have watched in the past or Amazon's algorithms that recommend books based on books you have bought before. The textbook that we used is one of the AI classics: Peter Norvig's Artificial Intelligence -- A Modern Approach, in which we covered major topics including intelligent agents, problem-solving by searching, adversarial search, probability theory, multi-agent systems, social AI, philosophy/ethics/future of AI. Machine learning algorithms can be divided into 3 broad categories -- supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning.Supervised learning is useful in cases where a property (label) is available for a certain dataset (training set), but is missing and needs to be predicted for other instances. You can think of linear regression as the task of fitting a straight line through a set of points.
DAC-h3: A Proactive Robot Cognitive Architecture to Acquire and Express Knowledge About the World and the Self
Moulin-Frier, Clรฉment, Fischer, Tobias, Petit, Maxime, Pointeau, Grรฉgoire, Puigbo, Jordi-Ysard, Pattacini, Ugo, Low, Sock Ching, Camilleri, Daniel, Nguyen, Phuong, Hoffmann, Matej, Chang, Hyung Jin, Zambelli, Martina, Mealier, Anne-Laure, Damianou, Andreas, Metta, Giorgio, Prescott, Tony J., Demiris, Yiannis, Dominey, Peter Ford, Verschure, Paul F. M. J.
This paper introduces a cognitive architecture for a humanoid robot to engage in a proactive, mixed-initiative exploration and manipulation of its environment, where the initiative can originate from both the human and the robot. The framework, based on a biologically-grounded theory of the brain and mind, integrates a reactive interaction engine, a number of state-of-the-art perceptual and motor learning algorithms, as well as planning abilities and an autobiographical memory. The architecture as a whole drives the robot behavior to solve the symbol grounding problem, acquire language capabilities, execute goal-oriented behavior, and express a verbal narrative of its own experience in the world. We validate our approach in human-robot interaction experiments with the iCub humanoid robot, showing that the proposed cognitive architecture can be applied in real time within a realistic scenario and that it can be used with naive users.
Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning for Swarm Systems
Hรผttenrauch, Maximilian, ล oลกiฤ, Adrian, Neumann, Gerhard
In this paper, we investigate how to learn to control a group of cooperative agents with limited sensing capabilities such as robot swarms. The agents have only very basic sensor capabilities, yet in a group they can accomplish sophisticated tasks, such as distributed assembly or search and rescue tasks. Learning a policy for a group of agents is difficult due to distributed partial observability of the state. Here, we follow a guided approach where a critic has central access to the global state during learning, which simplifies the policy evaluation problem from a reinforcement learning point of view. For example, we can get the positions of all robots of the swarm using a camera image of a scene. This camera image is only available to the critic and not to the control policies of the robots. We follow an actor-critic approach, where the actors base their decisions only on locally sensed information. In contrast, the critic is learned based on the true global state. Our algorithm uses deep reinforcement learning to approximate both the Q-function and the policy. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated on two tasks with simple simulated 2D agents: 1) finding and maintaining a certain distance to each others and 2) locating a target.
AI Uses Less Than Two Minutes of Videogame Footage to Recreate Game Engine
Game studios and enthusiasts may soon have a new tool at their disposal to speed up game development and experiment with different styles of play. Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have developed a new approach using an artificial intelligence to learn a complete game engine, the basic software of a game that governs everything from character movement to rendering graphics. Their AI system watches less than two minutes of gameplay video and then builds its own model of how the game operates by studying the frames and making predictions of future events, such as what path a character will choose or how enemies might react. To get their AI agent to create an accurate predictive model that could account for all the physics of a 2D platform-style game, the team trained the AI on a single "speedrunner" video, where a player heads straight for the goal. This made "the training problem for the AI as difficult as possible."
Now available: Watson Virtual Agent Premium Edition for Enterprise clients - Watson
We're pleased to announce that the Premium Edition of Watson Virtual Agent is now available. The Premium Edition has the same capabilities as the Standard Edition, but provides data isolation and features for businesses with higher security expectations. This software as a service (SaaS) offering is designed to meet the reliability needs of the Enterprise market. The Premium Edition of Watson Virtual Agent offers a single tenant isolated model, which includes compute-level isolation at the virtual machine and container levels. It includes data encryption in transit and at rest. Watson Virtual Agent is a digital customer service agent that is designed to simplify and streamline the customer service and support experience by answering common customer questions in English anywhere, anytime.
Learning from lions: inferring the utility of agents from their trajectories
Cobb, Adam D., Markham, Andrew, Roberts, Stephen J.
We build a model using Gaussian processes to infer a spatio-temporal vector field from observed agent trajectories. Significant landmarks or influence points in agent surroundings are jointly derived through vector calculus operations that indicate presence of sources and sinks. We evaluate these influence points by using the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the posterior and prior Laplacian of the inferred spatio-temporal vector field. Through locating significant features that influence trajectories, our model aims to give greater insight into underlying causal utility functions that determine agent decision-making. A key feature of our model is that it infers a joint Gaussian process over the observed trajectories, the time-varying vector field of utility and canonical vector calculus operators. We apply our model to both synthetic data and lion GPS data collected at the Bubye Valley Conservancy in southern Zimbabwe.