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Recently, there is growing attention on applying deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to solve the 3D bin packing problem (3D BPP), given its favorable generalization and independence of ground-truth label. However, due to the relatively less informative yet computationally heavy encoder, and considerably large action space inherent to the 3D BPP, existing methods are only able to handle up to 50 boxes. In this paper, we propose to alleviate this issue via an end-to-end multimodal DRL agent, which sequentially addresses three sub-tasks of sequence, orientation and position, respectively. The resulting architecture enables the agent to solve large-scale instances of 100 boxes or more. Experiments show that the agent could learn highly efficient policies that deliver superior performance against all the baselines on instances of various scales.

AAMAS 2021

Solving 3D Bin Packing Problem via Multimodal Deep Reinforcement Learning

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AAAI 2021

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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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Automated care systems are becoming more tangible than ever: recent breakthroughs in robotics and machine learning can be used to address the need for automated care created by the increasing aging population. However, such systems require overcoming several technological, ethical, and social challenges. One inspirational manifestation of these challenges can be observed in the training of seeing-eye dogs for visually impaired people. A seeing-eye dog is not just trained to obey its owner, but also to "intelligently disobey": if it is given an unsafe command from its handler, it is taught to disobey it or even insist on a different course of action. This paper proposes the challenge of building a seeing-eye robot, as a thought-provoking use-case that helps identify the challenges to be faced when creating behaviors for robot assistants in general. Through this challenge, this paper delineates the prerequisites that an automated care system will need to have in order to perform intelligent disobedience and to serve as a true agent for its handler.

The Seeing-Eye Robot Grand Challenge: Rethinking Automated Care (Blue Sky Ideas Track)

Policy gradient methods have become one of the most popular classes of algorithms for multi-agent reinforcement learning. A key challenge, however, that is not addressed by many of these methods is multi-agent credit assignment: assessing an agent's contribution to the overall performance, which is crucial for learning good policies. We propose a novel algorithm called Dr.Reinforce that explicitly tackles this by combining difference rewards with policy gradients to allow for learning decentralized policies when the reward function is known. By differencing the reward function directly, Dr.Reinforce avoids difficulties associated with learning the 
-function as done by Counterfactual Multiagent Policy Gradients (COMA), a state-of-the-art difference rewards method. For applications where the reward function is unknown, we show the effectiveness of a version of Dr.Reinforce that learns a reward network that is used to estimate the difference rewards.

Difference Rewards Policy Gradients

We propose a generic reward shaping approach for improving the rate of convergence in reinforcement learning (RL), called Self Improvement Based REwards, or SIBRE. The approach is designed for use in conjunction with any existing RL algorithm, and consists of rewarding improvement over the agent's own past performance. We prove that SIBRE converges in expectation under the same conditions as the original RL algorithm. The reshaped rewards help discriminate between policies when the original rewards are weakly discriminated or sparse. Experiments on several well-known benchmark environments with different RL algorithms show that SIBRE converges to the optimal policy faster and more stably. We also perform sensitivity analysis with respect to hyper-parameters, in comparison with baseline RL algorithms.

SIBRE: Self Improvement Based REwards for Adaptive Feedback in Reinforcement Learning

Continual learning aims to provide intelligent agents capable of learning multiple tasks sequentially with neural networks. In most settings of the current approaches, the agent starts from randomly initialized parameters and is optimized to master the current task regardless of the usefulness of the learned representation for future tasks. Moreover, each of the future tasks uses all the previously learned knowledge although parts of this knowledge might not be helpful for its learning. These cause interference among tasks, especially when the data of previous tasks is not accessible. In this paper, we propose a new method, named Self-Attention Meta-Learner (SAM), which learns a prior knowledge for continual learning that permits learning a sequence of tasks, while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. SAM incorporates an attention mechanism that learns to select the particular relevant representation for each future task. We empirically show that we can achieve a better performance than several state-of-the-art methods for continual learning by building on top of the selected representation learned by SAM. We also show the role of the meta-attention mechanism in boosting informative features corresponding to the input task and identifying the correct target in the task agnostic inference. Finally, we demonstrate that popular existing continual learning methods gain a performance boost when they adopt SAM as a starting point.

Self-Attention Meta-Learner for Continual Learning

Distributional reinforcement learning (RL) provides beneficial impacts for the single-agent domain. However, distributional RL methods are not directly compatible with value function factorization methods for multi-agent reinforcement learning. This work provides a distributional perspective on value function factorization, offering a solution for bridging the gap between distributional RL and value function factorization methods.

A Distributional Perspective on Value Function Factorization Methods for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Transportation systems of the future can be best modeled as multi-agent systems. A number of coordination protocols such as autonomous intersection management (AIM), adaptive cooperative traffic light control (TLC), cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC), among others have been developed with the goal of improving the safety and efficiency of such systems. The overall goal in these systems is to provide behavioral guarantees under the assumption that the participating agents work in concert with a centralized (or distributed) coordinator. While there is work on analyzing such systems from a security perspective, we argue that there is limited work on quantifying trustworthiness of individual agents in a multi-agent system. We propose a framework that uses an epistemic logic to quantify trustworthiness of agents, and embed the use of quantitative trustworthiness values into control and coordination policies. Our modified control policies can help the multi-agent system improve its safety in the presence of untrustworthy agents (and under certain assumptions, including malicious agents). We empirically show the effectiveness of our proposed trust framework by embedding it into AIM, TLC, and CACC platooning algorithms. In our experiments, our trust framework accurately detects attackers in CACC platoons; mitigates the effect of untrustworthy agents in AIM; and trust-aware TLC and AIM reduce collisions in all cases compared to the vanilla versions of these algorithms.

A General Trust Framework for Multi-Agent Systems

In this paper we investigate the effect of an underlying social network over agents in a well-known multi-agent resource allocation problem; the housing market. We first show that, when a housing market takes place over a social network with more than two agents and these agents have an option to avoid forwarding information about it to their followers, there does not exist an exchange mechanism that simultaneously satisfies strategy-proofness, Pareto efficiency, and individual rationality. It is also impossible to find a strategy-proof exchange mechanism that always chooses an outcome in a weakened core. These results highlight the difficulty of taking into account the agents' incentive of information diffusion in the resource allocation. To overcome these negative results, we consider two different ways of restricting the problem; limiting the domain of preferences and the structure of social networks.

Mechanism Design for Housing Markets over Social Networks

Several resource allocation problems involve multiple types of resources, with a different agency being responsible for "locally" allocating the resources of each type, while a central planner wishes to provide a guarantee on the properties of the final allocation given agents' preferences. We study the relationship between properties of the local mechanisms, each responsible for assigning all of the resources of a designated type, and the properties of a sequential mechanism which is composed of these local mechanisms, one for each type, applied sequentially, under lexicographic preferences, a well studied model of preferences over multiple types of resources in artificial intelligence and economics. We show that when preferences are O-legal, meaning that agents share a common importance order on the types, sequential mechanisms satisfy the desirable properties of anonymity, neutrality, non-bossiness, or Pareto-optimality if and only if every local mechanism also satisfies the same property, and they are applied sequentially according to the order O. Our main results are that under O-legal lexicographic preferences, every mechanism satisfying strategyproofness and a combination of these properties must be a sequential composition of local mechanisms that are also strategyproof, and satisfy the same combinations of properties.

Sequential Mechanisms for Multi-type Resource Allocation

To help facilitate play and learning, game-based educational activities often feature a computational agent as a co-player. Personalizing this agent's behavior to the student player is an active area of research, and prior work has demonstrated the benefits of personalized educational interaction across a variety of domains. A critical research challenge for personalized educational agents is real-time student modeling. Most student models are designed for and trained on only a single task, which limits the variety, flexibility, and efficiency of student player model learning.    In this paper we present a research project applying transfer learning methods to student player models over different educational tasks, studying the effects of an algorithmic "multi-task personalization" approach on the accuracy and data efficiency of student model learning. We describe a unified robotic game system for studying multi-task personalization over two different educational games, each emphasizing early language and literacy skills such as rhyming and spelling. We present a flexible Gaussian Process-based approach for rapidly learning student models from interactive play in each game, and a method for transferring each game's learned student model to the other via a novel instance-weighting protocol based on task similarity. We present results from a simulation-based investigation of the impact of multi-task personalization, establishing the core viability and benefits of transferrable student models and outlining new questions for future in-person research.

Towards Transferrable Personalized Student Models in Educational Games

People often encounter high-stress situations. Modeling and being able to predict people’s behavior in such situations, how they cope, is a critical research topic. To that end, we propose a computational model of coping that casts Lazarus' theory of coping into a Partial Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) framework. This includes an appraisal process that models the factors that lead to stress by assessing a person's relation to the environment and a coping process that models people’s behavior in the face of such stress. This coping process includes problem-focused coping, whereby people seek to alter the external environment, and emotion-focused coping, whereby people alter their internal beliefs, goals, and intentions in the face of stress. We evaluate the model’s assumptions and predictions in the context of a high-stress situation that is increasingly common, the extreme conditions of a hurricane. We collected human survey data from the last several years of major U.S. hurricanes to evaluate the features in the models used for appraisal calculation. Additionally, we conducted a controlled human-subject experiment simulating a hurricane experience to investigate the prediction of the model on how people change their beliefs and goals to cope with the situation. The results show that, as predicted by the model, the proposed model features are significantly associated with the evacuation decisions and post-decision people also change their beliefs and goals in the directions that align with their prior decisions. Lastly, we conduct a simulation study showing that the proposed model is qualitatively closer to the experiment data than the baseline models that do not incorporate coping effects.

Next from AAMAS 2021

The Seeing-Eye Robot Grand Challenge: Rethinking Automated Care (Blue Sky Ideas Track)

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Online 3D Bin Packing with Constrained Deep Reinforcement Learning

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