University of Patras
Incompatibilities Between Iterated and Relevance-Sensitive Belief Revision
Aravanis, Theofanis (University of Patras) | Peppas, Pavlos (University of Patras, Greece) | Williams, Mary-Anne (University of Technology Sydney, Australia)
The AGM paradigm for belief change, as originally introduced by Alchourrón, Gärdenfors and Makinson, lacks any guidelines for the process of iterated revision. One of the most influential work addressing this problem is Darwiche and Pearl's approach (DP approach, for short), which, despite its well-documented shortcomings, remains to this date the most dominant. In this article, we make further observations on the DP approach. In particular, we prove that the DP postulates are, in a strong sense, inconsistent with Parikh's relevance-sensitive axiom (P), extending previous initial conflicts. Immediate consequences of this result are that an entire class of intuitive revision operators, which includes Dalal's operator, violates the DP postulates, as well as that the Independence postulate and Spohn's conditionalization are inconsistent with axiom (P). The whole study, essentially, indicates that two fundamental aspects of the revision process, namely, iteration and relevance, are in deep conflict, and opens the discussion for a potential reconciliation towards a comprehensive formal framework for knowledge dynamics.
Knowledge, Fairness, and Social Constraints
Aziz, Haris ( Data61 , CSIRO and UNSW ) | Bouveret, Sylvain ( Univ . Grenoble- Alpes ) | Caragiannis, Ioannis (University of Patras) | Giagkousi, Ira (University of Patras) | Lang, Jérôme ( CNRS , U. Paris- Dauphine , PSL )
In the context of fair allocation of indivisible items, fairness concepts often compare the satisfaction of an agent to the satisfaction she would have from items that are not allocated to her: in particular, envy-freeness requires that no agent prefers the share of someone else to her own share. We argue that these notions could also be defined relative to the knowledge that an agent has on how the items that she does not receive are distributed among other agents. We define a family of epistemic notions of envy-freeness, parameterized by a social graph, where an agent observes the share of her neighbours but not of her non-neighbours. We also define an intermediate notion between envy-freeness and proportionality, also parameterized by a social graph. These weaker notions of envy-freeness are useful when seeking a fair allocation, since envy-freeness is often too strong. We position these notions with respect to known ones, thus revealing new rich hierarchies of fairness concepts. Finally, we present a very general framework that covers all the existing and many new fairness concepts.
Optimizing Positional Scoring Rules for Rank Aggregation
Caragiannis, Ioannis (University of Patras) | Chatzigeorgiou, Xenophon (University of Patras) | Krimpas, George A. (University of Patras) | Voudouris, Alexandros A. (University of Patras)
Nowadays, several crowdsourcing projects exploit social choice methods for computing an aggregate ranking of alternatives given individual rankings provided by workers. Motivated by such systems, we consider a setting where each worker is asked to rank a fixed (small) number of alternatives and, then, a positional scoring rule is used to compute the aggregate ranking. Among the apparently infinite such rules, what is the best one to use? To answer this question, we assume that we have partial access to an underlying true ranking. Then, the important optimization problem to be solved is to compute the positional scoring rule whose outcome, when applied to the profile of individual rankings, is as close as possible to the part of the underlying true ranking we know. We study this fundamental problem from a theoretical point of view and present positive and negative complexity results. Furthermore, we complement our theoretical findings with experiments on real-world and synthetic data.
An Algorithmic Framework for Strategic Fair Division
Brânzei, Simina (University of California Berkeley) | Caragiannis, Ioannis (University of Patras) | Kurokawa, David (Carnegie Mellon University) | Procaccia, Ariel D. (Carnegie Mellon University)
A large body of literature deals with the so-called cake cutting So how would strategic agents behave when faced with problem -- a misleadingly childish metaphor for the the cut and choose protocol? A standard way of answering challenging and important task of fairly dividing a heterogeneous this question employs the notion of Nash equilibrium: each divisible good among multiple agents (see the recent agent would use a strategy that is a best response to the other survey by Procaccia (2013) and the books by Brams agent's strategy. To set up a Nash equilibrium, suppose that and Taylor (1996) and Robertson and Webb (1998)). In particular, the first agent cuts two pieces that the second agent values there is a significant amount of AI work on cake cutting equally; the second agent selects its more preferred piece, (Procaccia 2009; Caragiannis, Lai, and Procaccia 2011; and the one less preferred by the first agent in case of a tie. Brams et al. 2012; Bei et al. 2012; Aumann, Dombb, Clearly, the second agent cannot gain from deviating, as it is and Hassidim 2013; Kurokawa, Lai, and Procaccia 2013; selecting a piece that is at least as preferred as the other. As Brânzei, Procaccia, and Zhang 2013; Brânzei and Miltersen for the first agent, if it makes its preferred piece even bigger, 2013; Chen et al. 2013; Balkanski et al. 2014; Brânzei the second agent would choose that piece, making the and Miltersen 2015; Segal-Halevi, Hassidim, and Aumann first agent worse off. Interestingly enough, in this equilibrium 2015), which is closely intertwined with emerging realworld the tables are turned; now it is the second agent who applications of fair division more broadly (Goldman is getting exactly half of its value for the whole cake, while and Procaccia 2014; Kurokawa, Procaccia, and Shah 2015).
co-rank: An Online Tool for Collectively Deciding Efficient Rankings Among Peers
Caragiannis, Ioannis (University of Patras) | Krimpas, George A. (University of Patras) | Panteli, Marianna (University of Patras) | Voudouris, Alexandros A. (University of Patras)
Ordinal peer grading is much simpler. It requires each student to grade a small number of Our aim with co-rank is to facilitate the grading of exams exam papers submitted by other students and report a ranking or assignments in massive open online courses (MOOCs). Then, an aggregation step will merge all the online platforms that offer, to a huge number of students partial rankings reported into a single one. Since professional graders are costly, inexpensive can do using the tool. The whole process is represented grading is absolutely necessary in order to make graphically in Figure 1. the new educational experience beneficial for the students First, the instructor creates a new exam.
Efficiency and Complexity of Price Competition Among Single-Product Vendors
Caragiannis, Ioannis (University of Patras and CTI Diophantus) | Chatzigeorgiou, Xenophon (University of Patras) | Kanellopoulos, Panagiotis (University of Patras and CTI Diophantus) | Krimpas, George A. (University of Patras) | Protopapas, Nikos (University of Patras) | Voudouris, Alexandros A. (University of Patras)
Motivated by recent progress on pricing in the AI literature, we study marketplaces that contain multiple vendors offering identical or similar products and unit-demand buyers with different valuations on these vendors. The objective of each vendor is to set the price of its product to a fixed value so that its profit is maximized. The profit depends on the vendor's price itself and the total volume of buyers that find the particular price more attractive than the price of the vendor's competitors. We model the behaviour of buyers and vendors as a two-stage full-information game and study a series of questions related to the existence, efficiency (price of anarchy) and computational complexity of equilibria in this game. To overcome situations where equilibria do not exist or exist but are highly inefficient, we consider the scenario where some of the vendors are subsidized in order to keep prices low and buyers highly satisfied.
Modal Ranking: A Uniquely Robust Voting Rule
Caragiannis, Ioannis (University of Patras) | Procaccia, Ariel D. (Carnegie Mellon University) | Shah, Nisarg (Carnegie Mellon University)
Motivated by applications to crowdsourcing, we study voting rules that output a correct ranking of alternatives by quality from a large collection of noisy input rankings. We seek voting rules that are supremely robust to noise, in the sense of being correct in the face of any "reasonable" type of noise. We show that there is such a voting rule, which we call the modal ranking rule. Moreover, we establish that the modal ranking rule is the unique rule with the preceding robustness property within a large family of voting rules, which includes a slew of well-studied rules.
Biased Games
Caragiannis, Ioannis (University of Patras) | Kurokawa, David (Carnegie Mellon University) | Procaccia, Ariel D. (Carnegie Mellon University)
We present a novel extension of normal form games that we call biased games. In these games, a player's utility is influenced by the distance between his mixed strategy and a given base strategy. We argue that biased games capture important aspects of the interaction between software agents. Our main result is that biased games satisfying certain mild conditions always admit an equilibrium. We also tackle the computation of equilibria in biased games.
How Bad Is Selfish Voting?
Branzei, Simina (Aarhus University) | Caragiannis, Ioannis (University of Patras) | Morgenstern, Jamie (Carnegie Mellon University) | Procaccia, Ariel D. (Carnegie Mellon University)
It is well known that strategic behavior in elections is essentially unavoidable; we therefore ask: how bad can the rational outcome be? We answer this question via the notion of the price of anarchy, using the scores of alternatives as a proxy for their quality and bounding the ratio between the score of the optimal alternative and the score of the winning alternative in Nash equilibrium. Specifically, we are interested in Nash equilibria that are obtained via sequences of rational strategic moves. Focusing on three common voting rules — plurality, veto, and Borda — we provide very positive results for plurality and very negative results for Borda, and place veto in the middle of this spectrum.
Teaching Aspects of Constraint Satisafaction Algorithms Via a Game
Hatzilygeroudis, Ioannis (University of Patras, Greece) | Grivokostopoulou, Foteini (University of Patras) | Perikos, Isidoros (University of Patras)
In an Artificial Intelligence course, a basic concept is Constraint Satisfaction (CS), which is acknowledged as a hard domain for teachers to teach and student to understand. In this paper, we present a game-based learning approach to assist students in learning CS algorithms, such as arc consistency and search algorithms, for problem solving in an easy, interactive and motivating way. Preliminary valuation has showed promising results.