As intelligent agents become more autonomous, sophisticated, and prevalent, it becomes increasingly important that humans interact with them effectively. Machine learning is now used regularly to acquire expertise, but common techniques produce opaque content whose behavior is difficult to interpret. Before they will be trusted by humans, autonomous agents must be able to explain their decisions and the reasoning that produced their choices. We will refer to this general ability as explainable agency. This capacity for explaining decisions is not an academic exercise. When a self-driving vehicle takes an unfamiliar turn, its passenger may desire to know its reasons. When a synthetic ally in a computer game blocks a player's path, he may want to understand its purpose. When an autonomous military robot has abandoned a high-priority goal to pursue another one, its commander may request justification. As robots, vehicles, and synthetic characters become more self-reliant, people will require that they explain their behaviors on demand. The more impressive these agents' abilities, the more essential that we be able to understand them.

We consider a set of learning agents in a collaborative peer-to-peer network, where each agent learns a personalized model according to its own learning objective. The question addressed in this paper is: how can agents improve upon their locally trained model by communicating with other agents that have similar objectives? We introduce and analyze two asynchronous gossip algorithms running in a fully decentralized manner. Our first approach, inspired from label propagation, aims to smooth pre-trained local models over the network while accounting for the confidence that each agent has in its initial model. In our second approach, agents jointly learn and propagate their model by making iterative updates based on both their local dataset and the behavior of their neighbors. To optimize this challenging objective, our decentralized algorithm is based on ADMM.

Successful Student has compiled the 25 Best Artificial Intelligence Colleges in the United States. Artificial Intelligence (AI), also known as machine learning, is a discipline within computer science. Artificial Intelligence is usually conceived of as doing more than just computing numbers (such as a calculator), but is more conceptual in nature (such as describing subjective qualities, or giving meanings to different contexts). An example of AI would be speech recognition and communicating, such as Apple's Siri, or Amazon's Alexa. Amazon has announced three new AI tools for anyone wanting to build apps on Amazon Web Services: Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition. According to Amazon "This frees developers to focus on defining and building an entirely new generation of apps that can see, hear, speak, understand, and interact with the world around them." For those interested in developing apps, see our 20 Best App Development Colleges article. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all working on AI. Facebook's FAIR (Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research) program engages with academia to assist in solving long term problems in AI. Facebook is hiring AI experts around the world to assist in their project.

Siemens has been researching neural networks for about 30 years and has made significant progress in applying this technology to artificial intelligence. For example, the company's Software Environment for Neural Networks (SENN) is being continuously refined and adapted to new and evolving applications, including the optimization of gas turbines and wind turbines. "We hold something like 50 patents for learning processes," notes Sterzing. Siemens Power Generation Services and CT have developed a system that continuously optimizes the operation and control of combustion in gas turbines. Based on AI from CT, the system, which is known as a Gas Turbine Autonomous Control Optimizer (GT-ACO), is currently being installed at a top customer in Asia.

Manipulation, bribery, and control are well-studied ways of changing the outcome of an election. Many voting rules are, in the general case, computationally resistant to some of these manipulative actions. However when restricted to single-peaked electorates, these rules suddenly become easy to manipulate. Recently, Faliszewski, Hemaspaandra, and Hemaspaandra studied the computational complexity of strategic behavior in nearly single-peaked electorates. These are electorates that are not single-peaked but close to it according to some distance measure. In this paper we introduce several new distance measures regarding single-peakedness. We prove that determining whether a given profile is nearly single-peaked is NP-complete in many cases. For one case we present a polynomial-time algorithm. In case the single-peaked axis is given, we show that determining the distance is always possible in polynomial time. Furthermore, we explore the relations between the new notions introduced in this paper and existing notions from the literature.

We define a class of parameterised infinite state multi-agent systems (MAS) that is unbounded in both the number of agents composing the system and the domain of the variables encoding the agents. We analyse their verification problem by combining and extending existing techniques in parameterised model checking with predicate abstraction procedures. The resulting methodology addresses both forms of unboundedness and provides a technique for verifying unbounded MAS defined on infinite-state variables. We illustrate the effectiveness of the technique on an infinite-domain variant of an unbounded version of the train-gate-controller.

In this paper we focus on Social Distance Games (SDGs), Coalition formation is a pervasive aspect of social life and an important subclass of HGs introduced in (Brânzei and it has been studied extensively in algorithmic game theory Larson 2011) where agent utilities are based on the concept using the natural model of Hedonic Games (HGs), introduced of social distance (i.e., the number of hops required to reach in (Dreze and Greenberg 1980) and further explored one node from another), which has become famous since in (Aziz, Brandt, and Harrenstein 2011; Aziz, Brandt, and Milgram's study on six degrees of separation. In SDGs the Seedig 2013; Banerjee, Konishi, and Sönmez 2001; Bogomolnaia utility of an agent is given by the average inverse distance and Jackson 2002; Elkind and Wooldridge 2009; from all the other nodes in her coalition, that is by her harmonic Elkind, Fanelli, and Flammini 2016; Gairing and Savani centrality (Boldi and Vigna 2014) divided by the size 2010). A HG consists of a set of selfish agents (humans, of the coalition. The basic idea is that the agents prefer to robots, software agents, etc.) having preferences over coalitions maintain ties with other agents who are close to them. The that might include them, regardless of which other utility formulation is a variant of the closeness centrality and coalitions may or may not be present. The outcome is a partition reflects the principle of homophily, that similarity breeds of the agent set into disjoint coalitions (or clusters), connection and people tend to form communities with similar referred to as a clustering or coalition structure.

Modeling stochastic multiagent behavior such as fish schooling is challenging for fixed-estimate prediction techniques because they fail to reliably reproduce the stochastic aspects of the agents’ behavior. We show how standard fixed-estimate predictors fit within a probabilistic framework, and suggest the reason they work for certain classes of behaviors and not others. We quantify the degree of mismatch and offer alternative sampling-based modeling techniques. We are specifically interested in building executable models (as opposed to statistical or descriptive models) because we want to reproduce and study multiagent behavior in simulation. Such models can be used by biologists, sociologists, and economists to explain and predict individual and group behavior in novel scenarios, and to test hypotheses regarding group behavior. Developing models from observation of real systems is an obvious application of machine learning. Learning directly from data eliminates expensive hand processing and tuning, but introduces unique challenges that violate certain assumptions common in standard machine learning approaches. Our framework suggests a new class of sampling-based methods, which we implement and apply to simulated deterministic and stochastic schooling behaviors, as well as the observed schooling behavior of real fish. Experimental results show that our implementation performs comparably with standard learning techniques for deterministic behaviors, and better on stochastic behaviors.

This article addresses a particular Transfer Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem: when dynamics do not change from one task to another, and only the reward function does. Our method relies on two ideas, the first one is that transition samples obtained from a task can be reused to learn on any other task: an immediate reward estimator is learnt in a supervised fashion and for each sample, the reward entry is changed by its reward estimate. The second idea consists in adopting the optimism in the face of uncertainty principle and to use upper bound reward estimates. Our method is tested on a navigation task, under four Transfer RL experimental settings: with a known reward function, with strong and weak expert knowledge on the reward function, and with a completely unknown reward function. It is also evaluated in a Multi-Task RL experiment and compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms. Results reveal that this method constitutes a major improvement for transfer/multi-task problems that share dynamics.

Being popular in language evolution, cognitive science, and culture dynamics, the Naming Game has been widely used to analyze how agents reach global consensus via communications in multi-agent systems. Most prior work considered networks that are symmetric and homogeneous (e.g., vertex transitive). In this paper we consider asymmetric or heterogeneous settings that complement the current literature: 1) we show that increasing asymmetry in network topology can improve convergence rates. The star graph empirically converges faster than all previously studied graphs; 2) we consider graph topologies that are particularly challenging for naming game such as disjoint cliques or multi-level trees and ask how much extra homogeneity (random edges) is required to allow convergence or fast convergence. We provided theoretical analysis which was confirmed by simulations; 3) we analyze how consensus can be manipulated when stubborn nodes are introduced at different points of the process. Early introduction of stubborn nodes can easily influence the outcome in certain family of networks while late introduction of stubborn nodes has much less power.