Agents
Preface
Felner, Ariel (Ben Gurion Univserity of the Negev)
Recently, there has been a growing interest in multiagent path planning (MAPF). Applications include vehicle fleet coordination, computer games, robotics, and various military scenarios. Some researchers have worked at a theoretical level, while others implemented solvers to specific applications. Consequently, similar concepts were developed in different subcommunities, using varying terminology.
TurkServer: Enabling Synchronous and Longitudinal Online Experiments
Mao, Andrew (Harvard University) | Chen, Yiling (Harvard University) | Gajos, Krzysztof Z. (Harvard University) | Parkes, David C. (Harvard University) | Procaccia, Ariel D (Carnegie Mellon University) | Zhang, Haoqi (Harvard University)
With the proliferation of online labor markets and other social computing platforms, online experiments have become a low-cost and scalable way to empirically test hypotheses and mechanisms in both human computation and social science. Yet, despite the potential in designing more powerful and expressive online experiments using multiple subjects, researchers still face many technical and logistical difficulties. We see synchronous and longitudinal experiments involving real-time interaction between participants as a dual-use paradigm for both human computation and social science, and present TurkServer, a platform that facilitates these types of experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our work has the potential to make more fruitful online experiments accessible to researchers in many different fields.
Social State Recognition and Knowledge-Level Planning for Human-Robot Interaction in a Bartender Domain
Petrick, Ronald P. A. (University of Edinburgh) | Foster, Mary Ellen (Heriot-Watt University) | Isard, Amy (University of Edinburgh)
We discuss preliminary work focusing on the problem of combining social interaction with task-based action in a dynamic, multiagent bartending domain, using an embodied robot. We show how the users' spoken input is interpreted, discuss how social states are inferred from the parsed speech together with low-level information from the vision system, and present a planning approach that models task, dialogue, and social actions in a simple bartending scenario. This approach allows us to build interesting plans, which have been evaluated in a real-world study, using a general purpose, off-the-shelf planner, as an alternative to more mainstream methods of interaction management.
Situated Comprehension of Imperative Sentences in Embodied, Cognitive Agents
Mohan, Shiwali (University of Michigan) | Laird, John E. (University of Michigan)
Linguistic communication relies on non-linguistic context toconvey meaning. That context might include, for instance, recent orlong-term experience, semantic knowledge of the world, or objects and events in the immediate environment. In this paper, we describe embodied agents instantiated in Soar cognitive architecture that use context derived from their linguistic, perceptual, procedural and semantic knowledge for comprehending imperative sentences.
A Robust Planning Framework for Cognitive Robots
Karapinar, Sertac (Istanbul Technical University) | Altan, Dogan (Istanbul Technical University) | Sariel-Talay, Sanem (Istanbul Technical University)
A cognitive robot should construct a plan to attain its goals. While it executes the actions in its plan, it may face several failures due to both internal and external issues. We present a taxonomy to classify these failures that may be encountered during the execution of cognitive tasks. The taxonomy presents a wide range of failure types. To recover from most of these failures presented in this taxonomy, we propose a Robust Planning Framework for cognitive robots. Our framework combines planning, reasoning and learning procedures into each other for robust execution of cognitive tasks. Failures can be detected and handled by reasoning and replanning, respectively. The framework also facilitates learning new hypotheses incrementally based on experience. It can successfully detect and recover from temporary failures on a selected set of actions executed by a Pioneer3DX robot. It has been shown that our preliminary results for hypothesis learning in failure scenarios are promising.
Identifying Collaborators Activities from Web-Mediated Dialogs: The Activity States Framework Approach
Abdullah, Nik Nailah Binti (Mimos Berhad) | Mendes, Samuel (Laboratoire dโInformatique, de Robotique et de Microelectronique de Montpellier) | Cerri, Stefano A (Laboratoire dโInformatique, de Robotique et de Microelectronique de Montpellier) | Honiden, Shinichi (National Institute of Informatics)
We have explored with three notions: conceptualization, and contextualization from situated cognition, and psychic reflection from activity theory for identifying activities into a method called the activity states framework (ASF). The purpose of our work is to build an AI system based on ASF for the identification of collaborators activities during situated context, e.g., collaborators are engaged in a tutorial activity. In this paper, we will introduce and propose how Web-mediated collaborative activities can be identified from collaborators communication exchanges by applying the ASF.
Large-Scale Mapping and Navigation in VirtualWorlds: Thesis Summary
Samperi, Katrina (The University of Birmingham)
Virtual worlds present a challenge for intelligent mobile agents. They are required to generate maps of very large scale, dynamic and unstructured environments in a short amount of time. We investigate how to represent maps of ever growing virtual environments, how the agent can build, update and use these maps to navigate between points in the environment. We look at trails, the movement of other people and agents in the environment as a new information source. We can use trails to improve the generation of probabilistic roadmaps in these environments and enable the agent to segment space intelligently. Our future plans are to extend this to look at dynamic environments, where the agent will have to recognise change and update the map and how this will affect the map representation.
A Multi-Agent Control Architecture for a Rescue Robot
Haber, Adam (University of New South Wales)
Despite many years of research and progress in the field tecture, the testing environment in which the implementation of artificial intelligence, there is still no universally accepted will be embedded, and then describes the work completed so definition of the word intelligence. Finally we will address the body of work still to be completed identified a multitude of tasks, skills, and behaviours that and plans for future research. Much A.I research is focused Although the initial thrust multiplicity, heterogeneity, and adaptability. of A.I in the 1950s was towards this kind of integrated system, Multiplicity. One of the few points of consensus within in recent times the problem of integration has become cognitive architecture research is that architectures must be conspicuous by its absence in the field, but is essential to improve composed of modular, independent components. This is a our design of complete intelligent systems, and consequently consequence of the multifaceted nature of information processing, our understanding of our own brains.
Strategic Advice Provision in Repeated Human-Agent Interactions
Azaria, Amos (Bar Ilan University) | Rabinovich, Zinovi (Bar Ilan University) | Kraus, Sarit (Bar Ilan University) | Goldman, Claudia V. (General Motors) | Gal, Ya' (Ben Gurion University) | akov
This paper addresses the problem of automated advice provision in settings that involve repeated interactions between people and computer agents. This problem arises in many real world applications such as route selection systems and office assistants. To succeed in such settings agents must reason about how their actions in the present influence people's future actions. This work models such settings as a family of repeated bilateral games of incomplete information called ``choice selection processes'', in which players may share certain goals, but are essentially self-interested. The paper describes several possible models of human behavior that were inspired by behavioral economic theories of people's play in repeated interactions. These models were incorporated into several agent designs to repeatedly generate offers to people playing the game. These agents were evaluated in extensive empirical investigations including hundreds of subjects that interacted with computers in different choice selections processes. The results revealed that an agent that combined a hyperbolic discounting model of human behavior with a social utility function was able to outperform alternative agent designs, including an agent that approximated the optimal strategy using continuous MDPs and an agent using epsilon-greedy strategies to describe people's behavior. We show that this approach was able to generalize to new people as well as choice selection processes that were not used for training. Our results demonstrate that combining computational approaches with behavioral economics models of people in repeated interactions facilitates the design of advice provision strategies for a large class of real-world settings.
Influence-Based Abstraction for Multiagent Systems
Oliehoek, Frans Adriaan (Maastricht University) | Witwicki, Stefan J. (INESC-ID) | Kaelbling, Leslie Pack (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
This paper presents a theoretical advance by which factored POSGs can be decomposed into local models. We formalize the interface between such local models as the influence agents can exert on one another; and we prove that this interface is sufficient for decoupling them. The resulting influence-based abstraction substantially generalizes previous work on exploiting weakly-coupled agent interaction structures. Therein lie several important contributions. First, our general formulation sheds new light on the theoretical relationships among previous approaches, and promotes future empirical comparisons that could come by extending them beyond the more specific problem contexts for which they were developed. More importantly, the influence-based approaches that we generalize have shown promising improvements in the scalability of planning for more restrictive models. Thus, our theoretical result here serves as the foundation for practical algorithms that we anticipate will bring similar improvements to more general planning contexts, and also into other domains such as approximate planning, decision-making in adversarial domains, and online learning.