United Kingdom

A self-governed society must have decision rules by which group decisions are made, and these rules are often codified in a written constitution. One of the defining features of a constitution is its degree of entrenchment, or how hard it is to change by amendment. If it is too easy to make amendments, then the constitution can change too frequently, leading to chaos. On the other hand, if it is too hard to make amendments, then this can also be destabilizing, as voters may begin to see the rules as less legitimate, or even seek to overturn the status quo in a revolt. As norms, priorities, and circumstances change over time and over generations a constitution must be able to adapt. Our work considers a stylized model of constitutions that use reality-aware supermajority rules to make decisions. We propose principles for designing amendment procedures for changing decision rules in these constitutions and propose a novel procedure based on these principles.

AAMAS 2021

How to Amend a Constitution? Model, Axioms, and Supermajority Rules

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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poster

Mechanism design has traditionally assumed that the set of participants are fixed and known to the mechanism (the market owner) in advance. However, in practice, the market owner can only directly reach a small number of participants (her neighbours). Hence the owner often needs costly promotions to recruit more participants in order to get desirable outcomes such as social welfare or revenue maximization. In this paper, we propose to incentivize existing participants to invite their neighbours to attract more participants. However, they would not invite each other if they are competitors. We discuss how to utilize the conflict of interest between the participants to incentivize them to invite each other to form larger markets. We will highlight the early solutions and open the floor for discussing the fundamental open questions in the settings of auctions, coalitional games, matching and voting.

Mechanism Design Powered by Social Interactions (Blue Sky Ideas Track)

When trains are finished with their transportation tasks during the day, they are moved to a shunting yard where they are routed, parked, cleaned, subject to regular maintenance checks and repaired during the night. The resulting Train Unit Shunting and Servicing problem motivates advanced research in planning and scheduling in general since it integrates several known individually hard problems while incorporating many real-life details. We developed an event-based simulator called TORS (Dutch acronym for Train Shunting and Servicing Simulator), that provides the user with a state and all feasible actions. After an action is picked, TORS calculates the result and the process repeats.   This simulator facilitates research into a realistic application of multi-agent path finding.

TORS: A Train Unit Shunting and Servicing Simulator

Evolutionary Game Theory is an application of game theory to evolving populations of organisms. Of recent interest are EGT models situated on structured populations or spatial evolutionary games. Due to the complexity added by introducing a population structure, model analysis is usually performed through agent-based Monte-Carlo simulations. However, it can be difficult to obtain desired quantities of interest from these simulations due to stochastic effects. We define a framework for modeling spatial evolutionary games using Dynamic Bayesian Networks that capture the underlying stochastic process. The resulting Dynamic Bayesian Networks can be queried for quantities of interest by performing exact inference on the network. We then propose a method for producing approximations of the spatial evolutionary game through the truncation of the corresponding DBN, taking advantage of the high symmetry of the model. This method generalizes mean-field and pair approximations in the literature for spatial evolutionary games. Furthermore, we show empirical results demonstrating the capability of the method to obtain much better accuracy than pair approximation with respect to stochastic simulations.

Approximating Spatial Evolutionary Games using Bayesian Networks

This paper studies cohorting in public transit systems and its usefulness in mitigating disease transmission. The Mumbai suburban railway system is used as a case study.

Cohorting to Isolate Asymptomatic Spreaders: An Agent-Based Simulation Study on the Mumbai Suburban Railway

Large teams of heterogeneous agents have the potential to solve complex multi-task problems that are intractable for a single agent working independently. However, solving complex multi-task problems requires leveraging the relative strengths of the different kinds of agents in the team. We present Stochastic TRAit-based Task Assignment (STRATA), a unified framework that models large teams of heterogeneous agents and performs effective task assignments. Specifically, given information on which traits (capabilities) are required for various tasks, STRATA computes the assignments of agents to tasks such that the trait requirements are achieved. Inspired by prior work in robot swarms and biodiversity, we categorize agents into different species (groups) based on their traits. We model each trait as a continuous variable and differentiate between traits that can and cannot be aggregated from different agents. STRATA is capable of reasoning about both species-level and agent-level variability in traits. We illustrate the necessity and effectiveness of STRATA using detailed numerical simulations and in a capture-the-flag game environment.

STRATA: Unified Framework for Task Assignments in Large Teams of Heterogeneous Agents (JAAMAS Track)

Many real-world scenarios involve teams of agents that have to coordinate their actions to reach a shared goal. We focus on the setting in which a team of agents faces an opponent in a zero-sum, imperfect-information game. Team members can coordinate their strategies before the beginning of the game, but are unable to communicate during the playing phase of the game. This is the case, for example, in Bridge, collusion in poker, and collusion in bidding.

Multi-Agent Coordination in Adversarial Environments through Signal Mediated Strategies

We address the problem of strategyproof (SP) facility location mechanisms on discrete trees. Our main result is a full characterization of onto and SP mechanisms. In particular, we prove that when a single agent significantly affects the outcome, the trajectory of the facility is almost contained in the trajectory of the agent, and both move in the same direction along the common edges. We show tight relations of our characterization to previous results on discrete lines and on continuous trees. We then derive further implications of the main result for infinite discrete lines.

Strategyproof Facility Location Mechanisms on Discrete Trees

Goal recognition is the problem of determining an agent's intent by observing its actions. In the context of AI research, the problem is tackled for two quite different purposes: to determine an agent's most probable goal or, for human-aware planning including planned  or strategic  deception, to determine an observer's most likely belief about that goal. Making no distinction, contemporary models tend to assume an infallible observer, deceived only while it has limited access to information or if the environment itself is only partially observable. Focusing on the second purpose, we propose an extended framework that incorporates formal definitions of confirmation bias, selective attention and memory decay. In contrast to pre-existing models, our approach combines explicit consideration of prior probabilities with a principled representation of observer confidence and distinguishes between potential observations  i.e., every observable event within the observer's frame of reference  and recalled observations which we model as a function of attention and memory. We show that when these factors are taken into consideration, false beliefs may arise and can be made to persist, even in a fully observable environment  thus providing a perceptual model readily incorporated into the "thinking" of an adversarial agent for the purpose of strategic deception.

Extended Goal Recognition: A Planning-Based Model for Strategic Deception

Recent work on promoting cooperation in multi-agent learning has resulted in many methods which successfully promote cooperation at the cost of becoming more vulnerable to exploitation by malicious actors. We show that this is an unavoidable trade-off and propose an objective which balances these concerns, promoting both safety and long-term cooperation. Moreover, the trade-off between safety and cooperation is not severe, and you can receive exponentially large returns through cooperation from a small amount of risk. We study both an exact solution method and propose a method for training policies that targets this objective, Accumulating Risk Capital Through Investing in Cooperation (ARCTIC), and evaluate them in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma and Stag Hunt.

Accumulating Risk Capital Through Investing in Cooperation

Prediction markets are powerful tools to elicit and aggregate beliefs from strategic agents. However, in current prediction markets, agents may exhaust the social welfare by competing to be the first to update the market. We initiate the study of the trade-off between how quickly information is aggregated by the market, and how much this information costs. We design markets to aggregate timely information from strategic agents to maximize social welfare. To this end, the market must incentivize agents to invest the correct amount of effort to acquire information: quickly enough to be useful, but not faster (and more expensively) than necessary. The market also must ensure that agents report their information truthfully and on time.  We consider two settings: in the first, information is only valuable before a deadline; in the second, the value of information decreases as time passes.  We use both theorems and simulations to demonstrate the mechanisms.

How to Amend a Constitution? Model, Axioms, and Supermajority Rules

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