United Kingdom

Human-agent interactions present people guide an object or agent to act as human intentions. This demonstration work develops an online human-agent interaction system, particularly targeting the brain-computer interface (BCI), which uses real-time brain cortex signals: electroencephalogram (EEG) to control the agent in Unity3D game platform. The developed system also provides the online visualisation of EEG signals, including pre-processed temporal data and power spectral in three frequency bands (theta, alpha, and beta). To build this systematic work, we firstly collect wireless EEG signals via the Bluetooth transmission from a commercially available 14-channel brainware headset (Emotiv). EEG signals are then pre-processed and fed into a trained deep learning model to predict the human intentions, which will be sent to Unity3D platform to control an agent’s movements in game playing, such as a karting game scenario. The online testing results show the feasibility of our systematic work that will benefit for human-agent interaction community. The demonstration video can be viewed at the following link: https://youtu.be/9AWKHeatc6I

AAMAS 2021

An Online Human-Agent Interaction System: A Brain-controlled Agent Playing Games in Unity

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**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year!<br><br>

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**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

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CogSci 2021

The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education. The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.

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AAMAS is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems, bringing together researchers and practitioners in all areas of agent technology and providing and internationally renowned high-profile forum for publishing and finding out about the latest developments in the field. AAMAS is the flagship conference of the non-profit International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).  

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Designing autonomous agents that act collaboratively to achieve a common set of goals has been a major goal for Artificial Intelligence research for many years. Collaborative Privacy-Preserving Planning (cppp) is a multi-agent planning task in which agents need to achieve a common set of goals without revealing certain private information [2]. In particular, in cppp an individual agent may have a set of private facts and actions that it does not share with the other agents. cppp has important motivating examples, such as planning for organizations that outsource some of their tasks, and has recently received considerable attention from the academic community.

Partial Disclosure of Private Dependencies in Privacy Preserving Planning

Pool block withholding attack, which reduces the effective mining power in the system and leads to potential systemic instability in the blockchain, can be modeled as a non-cooperative game called "the miner's dilemma". However, existing literature on the game-theoretic properties of this attack only gives a preliminary analysis. In this paper, we establish the existence and uniqueness of pure Nash equilibrium for the two-player miner's dilemma. Then we give a tight upper bound 2 for PPoA, which measures how much mining power is wasted in the game. Moreover, we show the uniqueness and the tight bound holds in a more general setting with betrayal assumption. Inspired by the experiments on the games among three mining pools, we conjecture that similar results should hold for the N-player miner's dilemma game (N ≥ 2).

The Tight Bound for Pure Price of Anarchy in an Extended Miner's Dilemma Game

We design a prediction market to recover a complete and fully general probability distribution over a random variable. Traders buy and sell interval securities that pay $1 if the outcome falls into an interval and $0 otherwise. Our market takes the form of a central automated market maker  and allows traders to express interval endpoints of arbitrary precision. We present two designs in both of which market operations take time logarithmic in the number of intervals (that traders distinguish), providing the first computationally efficient market for a continuous variable. Our first design replicates the popular logarithmic market scoring rule  (LMSR), but operates exponentially faster than a standard LMSR by exploiting its modularity properties to construct a balanced binary tree and decompose computations along the tree nodes. The second design consists of two or more parallel LMSR market makers that mediate submarkets of increasingly fine-grained outcome partitions.  This design remains computationally efficient for all operations, including arbitrage removal across submarkets. It adds two additional benefits for the market designer: (1)~the ability to express utility for information at various resolutions by assigning different liquidity values, and  (2)~the ability to guarantee a true constant bounded loss by appropriately decreasing the liquidity in each submarket.

Log-time Prediction Markets for Interval Securities

In modular reinforcement learning (MRL), a complex decision making problem is decomposed into multiple simpler subproblems each solved by a separate module. Often, these subproblems have conflicting goals, and incomparable reward scales. A composable decision making architecture requires that even the modules authored separately with possibly misaligned reward scales can be combined coherently. An arbitrator should consider different module's action preferences to learn effective global action selection. We present a novel framework called GRACIAS that assigns fine-grained importance to the different modules based on their relevance in a given state, and enables composable decision making based on modern deep RL methods such as deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) and deep Q-learning. We provide insights into the convergence properties of GRACIAS and also show that previous MRL algorithms reduce to special cases of our framework. We experimentally demonstrate on several standard MRL domains that our approach works significantly better than the previous MRL methods, and is highly robust to incomparable reward scales. Our framework extends MRL to complex Atari games such as Qbert, and has a better learning curve than the conventional RL algorithms.

Action Selection for Composable Modular Deep Reinforcement Learning

Equilibrium computation in markets usually considers settings where player valuation functions are known. We consider the setting where player valuations are unknown; using a PAC learning-theoretic framework, we analyze some classes of common valuation functions, and provide algorithms which output direct PAC equilibrium allocations, not estimates based on attempting to learn valuation functions. Since there exist trivial PAC market outcomes with an unbounded worst-case efficiency loss, we lower-bound the efficiency of our algorithms. While the efficiency loss under general distributions is rather high, we show that in some cases (e.g., unit-demand valuations), it is possible to find a PAC market equilibrium with significantly better utility.

The Price is (Probably) Right: Learning Market Equilibria from Samples

We introduce a new numerical framework to learn optimal bidding strategies in repeated auctions when the seller uses past bids to optimize her mechanism. Crucially, we do not assume that the bidders know which optimization mechanism is used by the seller. We recover essentially all state-of-the-art analytical results for the single-item framework derived previously in the setup where the bidder knows the optimization mechanism used by the seller and extend our approach to multi-item settings, in which no optimal shading strategies were previously known. Our approach yields substantial increases in bidder utility in all settings and has a strong potential for practical usage since it provides a simple way to optimize bidding strategies on modern marketplaces where buyers face unknown data-driven mechanisms.

Adversarial Learning in Revenue-Maximizing Auctions

Ensemble learning is a very prevalent method employed in machine learning. The relative success of ensemble methods is attributed to their ability to tackle a wide range of instances and complex problems that require different low-level approaches. However, ensemble methods are relatively less popular in reinforcement learning owing to the high sample complexity and computational expense involved in obtaining a diverse ensemble. We present a novel training and model selection framework for model-free reinforcement algorithms that use ensembles of policies obtained from a single training run. These policies are diverse in nature and are learned through directed perturbation of the model parameters at regular intervals. We show that learning and selecting an adequately diverse set of policies is required for a good ensemble while extreme diversity can prove detrimental to overall performance. Selection of an adequately diverse set of policies is done through our novel policy selection framework. We evaluate our approach on challenging discrete and continuous control tasks and also discuss various ensembling strategies. Our framework is substantially sample efficient, computationally inexpensive and is seen to outperform state-of-the-art (SOTA) scores in Atari 2600 and Mujoco.

SEERL: Sample Efficient Ensemble Reinforcement Learning

Symbolic planning models allow decision-making agents to sequence actions in arbitrary ways to achieve a variety of goals in dynamic domains. However, they are typically handcrafted and tend to require precise formulations that are not robust to human error. Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches do not require such models, and instead learn domain dynamics by exploring the environment and collecting rewards. However, RL approaches tend to require millions of episodes of experience and often learn policies that are not easily transferable to other tasks. In this paper, we address one aspect of the open problem of integrating these approaches: how can decision-making agents resolve discrepancies in their symbolic planning models while attempting to accomplish goals? We propose an integrated framework named SPOTTER that uses RL to augment and support ("spot") a planning agent by discovering new operators needed by the agent to accomplish goals that are initially unreachable for the agent. SPOTTER outperforms pure-RL approaches while also discovering transferable symbolic knowledge and does not require supervision, successful plan traces or any a priori  knowledge about the missing planning operator.

SPOTTER: Extending Symbolic Planning Operators through Targeted Reinforcement Learning

Blockchain-based Distributed Ledgers (DLs) promise to transform the existing financial system by making it truly democratic. In the past decade, blockchain technology has seen many novel applications ranging from the banking industry to real estate. However, in order to be adopted universally, blockchain systems must be scalable to support a high volume of transactions. As we increase the throughput of the DL system, the underlying peer-to-peer network might face multiple levels of challenges to keep up with the requirements. Due to varying network capacities, the slower nodes would be at a relative disadvantage compared to the faster ones, which could negatively impact their revenue. In order to quantify their relative advantage or disadvantage, we introduce two measures of network fairness, $p_f$, the probability of frontrunning and α_f$, the publishing fairness. We show that as we scale the blockchain, both these measures deteriorate, implying that the slower nodes face a disadvantage at higher throughputs. It results in the faster nodes getting more than their fair share of the reward while the slower nodes (slow in terms of network quality) get less. Thus, fairness and scalability in blockchain systems do not go hand in hand.

We might walk together, but I run faster: Network Fairness and Scalability in Blockchains

Complex networks and reputation systems are fundamental mechanisms to sustain cooperation in populations of self-regarding agents. These mechanisms are typically studied in isolation. In online social platforms, however, behavioral dynamics are likely to result from their combination. Here we investigate the relationship between social networks and reputation-based cooperation (in a Prisoner’s Dilemma setting) in large populations. We develop a new evolutionary game-theoretical model and study dynamics in networks with varying degrees of community structure. We show that networks exhibiting modular structures hamper global cooperation: reputation-based group identities emerge in different communities and strategies that uniquely cooperate with in-group members fixate, sustaining polarization and group bias. Global cooperation is recovered provided that inter-community edges are added.

An Online Human-Agent Interaction System: A Brain-controlled Agent Playing Games in Unity

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Partial Disclosure of Private Dependencies in Privacy Preserving Planning

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