For Internet applications like sponsored search, cautions need to be taken when using machine learning to optimize their mechanisms (e.g., auction) since self-interested agents in these applications may change their behaviors (and thus the data distribution) in response to the mechanisms. To tackle this problem, a framework called game-theoretic machine learning (GTML) was recently proposed, which first learns a Markov behavior model to characterize agents' behaviors, and then learns the optimal mechanism by simulating agents' behavior changes in response to the mechanism. While GTML has demonstrated practical success, its generalization analysis is challenging because the behavior data are non-i.i.d. and dependent on the mechanism. To address this challenge, first, we decompose the generalization error for GTML into the behavior learning error and the mechanism learning error; second, for the behavior learning error, we obtain novel non-asymptotic error bounds for both parametric and non-parametric behavior learning methods; third, for the mechanism learning error, we derive a uniform convergence bound based on a new concept called \emph{nested covering number} of the mechanism space and the generalization analysis techniques developed for mixing sequences.

Laughter is an important social signal which may have various communicative functions (Chapman 1983). Humans laugh at humorous stimuli or to mark their pleasure when receiving praised statements (Provine 2001); they also laugh to mask embarrassment (Huber and Ruch 2007) or to be cynical. Laughter can also act as social indicator of ingroup belonging (Adelswärd 1989); it can work as speech regulator during conversation (Provine 2001); it can also be used to elicit laughter in interlocutors as it is very contagious (Provine 2001). Endowing machines with laughter capabilities is a crucial challenge to develop virtual agents and robots able to act as companions, coaches, or supporters in a more natural manner. However, so far, few attempts have been made to model and implement laughter for virtual Figure 1: the architecture of our laughing agent.

In many real-world situations a decision maker may make decisions across many separate reinforcement learning tasks in parallel, yet there has been very little work on concurrent RL. Building on the efficient exploration RL literature, we introduce two new concurrent RL algorithms and bound their sample complexity. We show that under some mild conditions, both when the agent is known to be acting in many copies of the same MDP, and when they are not the same but are taken from a finite set, we can gain linear improvements in the sample complexity over not sharing information. This is quite exciting as a linear speedup is the most one might hope to gain. Our preliminary experiments confirm this result and show empirical benefits.

We show that without using any domain knowledge, we can predict the final performance of a team of voting agents, at any step towards solving a complex problem.

We address the problem of planning collision-free paths for multiple agents using optimization methods known as proximal algorithms. Recently this approach was explored in Bento et al. (2013), which demonstrated its ease of parallelization and decentralization, the speed with which the algorithms generate good quality solutions, and its ability to incorporate different proximal operators, each ensuring that paths satisfy a desired property. Unfortunately, the operators derived only apply to paths in 2D and require that any intermediate waypoints we might want agents to follow be preassigned to specific agents, limiting their range of applicability. In this paper we resolve these limitations. We introduce new operators to deal with agents moving in arbitrary dimensions that are faster to compute than their 2D predecessors and we introduce landmarks, space-time positions that are automatically assigned to the set of agents under different optimality criteria. Finally, we report the performance of the new operators in several numerical experiments.

Effectively incorporating external advice is an important problem in reinforcement learning, especially as it moves into the real world. Potential-based reward shaping is a way to provide the agent with a specific form of additional reward, with the guarantee of policy invariance. In this work we give a novel way to incorporate an arbitrary reward function with the same guarantee, by implicitly translating it into the specific form of dynamic advice potentials, which are maintained as an auxiliary value function learnt at the same time. We show that advice provided in this way captures the input reward function in expectation, and demonstrate its efficacy empirically.

Much of the focus on finding good representations in reinforcement learning has been on learning complex non-linear predictors of value. Policy gradient algorithms, which directly represent the policy, often need fewer parameters to learn good policies. However, they typically employ a fixed parametric representation that may not be sufficient for complex domains. This paper introduces the Policy Tree algorithm, which can learn an adaptive representation of policy in the form of a decision tree over different instantiations of a base policy. Policy gradient is used both to optimize the parameters and to grow the tree by choosing splits that enable the maximum local increase in the expected return of the policy. Experiments show that this algorithm can choose genuinely helpful splits and significantly improve upon the commonly used linear Gibbs softmax policy, which we choose as our base policy.

In this paper we propose a wrapper based PSO method for gene selection in microarray datasets, where we gradually refine the feature (gene) space from a very coarse level to a fine grained one, by reducing the gene set at each step of the algorithm. We use the linear support vector machine weight vector to serve as the initial gene pool selection. In addition, we also examine integration of other filter based ranking methods with our proposed approach. Experiments on publicly available datasets, Colon, Leukemia and T2D show that our approach selects only a very small subset of genes while yielding substantial improvements in accuracy over state-of-the-art evolutionary methods.

The NO paradigm can model many operations. Examples When agents dwell inside an organization, they form patterns are systems of river dam control, factory cells, electrical of interactions that we call paradigms. There are many power grids, and traffic control on land, sea, and space. As existing paradigms to describe organizations, which affect a paradigm, it does not functionally alter the operations to its performance features. These paradigms include hierarchies, which it is applied. The paradigm can be understood in terms holarchies, coalitions, teams, congregations, societies, of the ways it permits command and control regimes. Invariably, federations, markets and matrix organizations (Horling and NO relies on a network on which it dwells.

Following Fleming (1952), Harsanyi (1955) showed that if the collective preference satisfies von Neumann and Morgenstern's Prade's axioms (1995), and particularly risk aversion, The present paper raises the question of collective resorts on (i) the identification of a theory of decision decision making under possibilistic uncertainty. The making under uncertainty (DMU) that captures the decision next Section recalls the basic notions on which our work relies makers' behaviour with respect to uncertainty and (ii) the (decision under possibilistic uncertainty, collective utility specification of a collective utility function (CUF) as it may functions, etc.).