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Decentralized Multi-agent Plan Repair in Dynamic Environments

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Achieving joint objectives by teams of cooperative planning agents requires significant coordination and communication efforts. For a singleagent system facing a plan failure in a dynamic environment, arguably, attempts to repair the failed plan in general do not straightforwardly bring any benefit in terms of time complexity. However, in multi-agent settings the communication complexity might be of a much higher importance, possibly a high communication overhead might be even prohibitive in certain domains. We hypothesize that in decentralized systems, where coordination is enforced to achieve joint objectives, attempts to repair failed multi-agent plans should lead to lower communication overhead than replanning from scratch. The contribution of the presented paper is threefold. Firstly, we formally introduce the multi-agent plan repair problem and formally present the core hypothesis underlying our work. Secondly, we propose three algorithms for multi-agent plan repair reducing the problem to specialized instances of the multi-agent planning problem. Classical planning and multi-agent planning based on classical planning are approaches to constructing autonomous agents and teams of agents, which attempt to achieve their objectives in an environment. The result of the planning process is traditionally a plan, a sequence of actions the agent should perform in order to achieve a given goal. This is the full version of an extended abstract published in Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2012), Conitzer, Winikoff, Padgham, and van der Hoek (eds.),


A framework: Cluster detection and multidimensional visualization of automated data mining using intelligent agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Data Mining techniques plays a vital role like extraction of required knowledge, finding unsuspected information to make strategic decision in a novel way which in term understandable by domain experts. A generalized frame work is proposed by considering non - domain experts during mining process for better understanding, making better decision and better finding new patters in case of selecting suitable data mining techniques based on the user profile by means of intelligent agents.


Temporal Composite Actions with Constraints

AAAI Conferences

Complex mission or task specification languages play a fundamentally important role in human/robotic interaction. In realistic scenarios such as emergency response, specifying temporal, resource and other constraints on a mission is an essential component due to the dynamic and contingent nature of the operational environments. It is also desirable that in addition to having a formal semantics, the language should be sufficiently expressive, pragmatic and abstract. The main goal of this paper is to propose a mission specification language that meets these requirements. It is based on extending both the syntax and semantics of a well-established formalism for reasoning about action and change, Temporal Action Logic (TAL), in order to represent temporal composite actions with constraints. Fixpoints are required to specify loops and recursion in the extended language. The results include a sound and complete proof theory for this extension. To ensure that the composite language constructs are adequately grounded in the pragmatic operation of robotic systems, Task Specification Trees (TSTs) and their mapping to these constructs are proposed. The expressive and pragmatic adequacy of this approach is demonstrated using an emergency response scenario.


Synthesizing Agent Protocols From LTL Specifications Against Multiple Partially-Observable Environments

AAAI Conferences

We consider the problem of synthesizing an agent pro- tocol satisfying LTL specifications for multiple, partially- observable environments. We present a sound and complete procedure for solving the synthesis problem in this setting and show it is computationally optimal from a theoretical com- plexity standpoint. While this produces perfect-recall, hence unbounded, strategies we show how to transform these into agent protocols with bounded number of states.


Ambiguous Language and Differences in Beliefs

AAAI Conferences

Standard models of multi-agent modal logic do not capture the fact that information is often ambiguous, and may be interpreted in different ways by different agents. We propose a framework that can model this, and consider different semantics that capture different assumptions about the agents' beliefs regarding whether or not there is ambiguity. We consider the impact of ambiguity on a seminal result in economics: Aumann's result saying that agents with a common prior cannot agree to disagree. This result is known not to hold if agents do not have acommon prior; we show that it also does not hold in the presence of ambiguity. We then consider the tradeoff between assuming a common interpretation (i.e., no ambiguity) and a common prior (i.e., shared initial beliefs).


An Abstraction Technique for the Verification of Artifact-Centric Systems

AAAI Conferences

We explore the paradigm of artifact-centric systems from a knowledge-based perspective. We provide a semantics based on interpreted-systems to interpret a first-order temporal- epistemic language with identity in a multi-agent setting. We consider the model checking problem for this language and provide abstraction results. We isolate a natural subclass of artifact-systems for which the model checking problem is decidable. We give an upper bound on the complexity of the model checking problem.


Modification of the Elite Ant System in Order to Avoid Local Optimum Points in the Traveling Salesman Problem

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This article presents a new algorithm which is a modified version of the elite ant system (EAS) algorithm. The new version utilizes an effective criterion for escaping from the local optimum points. In contrast to the classical EAC algorithms, the proposed algorithm uses only a global updating, which will increase pheromone on the edges of the best (i.e. the shortest) route and will at the same time decrease the amount of pheromone on the edges of the worst (i.e. the longest) route. In order to assess the efficiency of the new algorithm, some standard traveling salesman problems (TSPs) were studied and their results were compared with classical EAC and other well-known meta-heuristic algorithms. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm has been able to improve the efficiency of the algorithms in all instances and it is competitive with other algorithms.


On the influence of intelligence in (social) intelligence testing environments

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper analyses the influence of including agents of different degrees of intelligence in a multiagent system. The goal is to better understand how we can develop intelligence tests that can evaluate social intelligence. We analyse several reinforcement algorithms in several contexts of cooperation and competition. Our experimental setting is inspired by the recently developed Darwin-Wallace distribution.


Location-Based Reasoning about Complex Multi-Agent Behavior

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

Recent research has shown that surprisingly rich models of human activity can be learned from GPS (positional) data. However, most effort to date has concentrated on modeling single individuals or statistical properties of groups of people. Moreover, prior work focused solely on modeling actual successful executions (and not failed or attempted executions) of the activities of interest. We, in contrast, take on the task of understanding human interactions, attempted interactions, and intentions from noisy sensor data in a fully relational multi-agent setting. We use a real-world game of capture the flag to illustrate our approach in a well-defined domain that involves many distinct cooperative and competitive joint activities. We model the domain using Markov logic, a statistical-relational language, and learn a theory that jointly denoises the data and infers occurrences of high-level activities, such as a player capturing an enemy. Our unified model combines constraints imposed by the geometry of the game area, the motion model of the players, and by the rules and dynamics of the game in a probabilistically and logically sound fashion. We show that while it may be impossible to directly detect a multi-agent activity due to sensor noise or malfunction, the occurrence of the activity can still be inferred by considering both its impact on the future behaviors of the people involved as well as the events that could have preceded it. Further, we show that given a model of successfully performed multi-agent activities, along with a set of examples of failed attempts at the same activities, our system automatically learns an augmented model that is capable of recognizing success and failure, as well as goals of people's actions with high accuracy. We compare our approach with other alternatives and show that our unified model, which takes into account not only relationships among individual players, but also relationships among activities over the entire length of a game, although more computationally costly, is significantly more accurate. Finally, we demonstrate that explicitly modeling unsuccessful attempts boosts performance on other important recognition tasks.


Empowerment for Continuous Agent-Environment Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper develops generalizations of empowerment to continuous states. Empowerment is a recently introduced information-theoretic quantity motivated by hypotheses about the efficiency of the sensorimotor loop in biological organisms, but also from considerations stemming from curiosity-driven learning. Empowemerment measures, for agent-environment systems with stochastic transitions, how much influence an agent has on its environment, but only that influence that can be sensed by the agent sensors. It is an information-theoretic generalization of joint controllability (influence on environment) and observability (measurement by sensors) of the environment by the agent, both controllability and observability being usually defined in control theory as the dimensionality of the control/observation spaces. Earlier work has shown that empowerment has various interesting and relevant properties, e.g., it allows us to identify salient states using only the dynamics, and it can act as intrinsic reward without requiring an external reward. However, in this previous work empowerment was limited to the case of small-scale and discrete domains and furthermore state transition probabilities were assumed to be known. The goal of this paper is to extend empowerment to the significantly more important and relevant case of continuous vector-valued state spaces and initially unknown state transition probabilities. The continuous state space is addressed by Monte-Carlo approximation; the unknown transitions are addressed by model learning and prediction for which we apply Gaussian processes regression with iterated forecasting. In a number of well-known continuous control tasks we examine the dynamics induced by empowerment and include an application to exploration and online model learning.