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Negotiation is one of the crucial processes for resolving conflicts between parties. In automated negotiation, agent designers mostly take opponent&#39;s offers and the remaining time into account while designing their strategies. While designing a negotiating agent interacting with a human directly, other information such as opponent&#39;s emotional changes during the negotiation can establish a better interaction and reach an admissible settlement for joint interests. Accordingly, this paper proposes a bidding strategy for humanoid robots, which incorporates their opponents&#39; emotional states and awareness of the agent&#39;s changing behavior.

AAMAS 2021

Solver Agent: Towards Emotional and Opponent-Aware Agent for Human-Robot Negotiation

**About**
 The PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) conference is a highly interdisciplinary conference that focuses on computational and engineering approaches to improve the quality of life and enhance human performance in a wide range of settings, in the workplace, at home, in public spaces, urban environments, and other. Outcomes of this conference have a broad impact in application areas that include, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy systems, security and safety, robotics, biomedicine, environment and conservation, and many others. PETRA brings together very different types of technologies to also address important social and healthcare issues for sensitive populations, such as the elderly, persons suffering from chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Cerebral Palsy, and other disabilities or traumas.

 PETRA (which means “stone” in Greek) addresses important human living needs. From a technological perspective, PETRA motivates and inspires new scientific thrusts, innovations and discoveries to improve living environments, a particularly important issue, in an increasingly crowded and complex world where the need for inclusiveness and connectivity with the rest of the world is key. For the elderly in particular, PETRA addresses the fact that, as people grow older; they will increasingly rely on technology to be able to prolong staying in their homes and enjoy an independent life.

 The PETRA 2021 proceedings will be published in the ACM Digital Library as part of the ACM ICPS program. The ISBN number assigned to PETRA '21 is 978-1-4503-8792-7

PETRA 2021

The PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) conference is a highly interdisciplinary conference that focuses on computational and engineering approaches to improve the quality of life and enhance human performance in a wide range of settings, in the workplace, at home, in public spaces, urban environments, and other. Outcomes of this conference have a broad impact in application areas that include, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy systems, security and safety, robotics, biomedicine, environment and conservation, and many others. PETRA brings together very different types of technologies to also address important social and healthcare issues for sensitive populations, such as the elderly, persons suffering from chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Cerebral Palsy, and other disabilities or traumas.

Negotiation is one of the crucial processes for resolving conflicts between parties. In automated negotiation, agent designers mostly take opponent's offers and the remaining time into account while designing their strategies. While designing a negotiating agent interacting with a human directly, other information such as opponent's emotional changes during the negotiation can establish a better interaction and reach an admissible settlement for joint interests. Accordingly, this paper proposes a bidding strategy for humanoid robots, which incorporates their opponents' emotional states and awareness of the agent's changing behavior.

poster

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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This paper describes a demonstration setup that integrates cognitive agents with the latest W3C standardization efforts for the Web of Things (WoT). The conceptual foundations of the implemented system are the integration of cognitive agent abstractions with W3C Web Things, which are generic abstractions of devices and virtual services that provide agents with various interaction affordances (e.g., actions, events). Together with the W3C WoT Scripting API, which is an ECMAScript-compatible API for W3C WoT environments, these standards allow JavaScript-based agents to be deployed and to operate in heterogeneous WoT environments. The agents can then be effectively distributed across the physical-virtual space in a write once, run anywhere manner: we deploy agents across a heterogeneous information system landscape that includes Web servers, browser-based front-ends, and constrained devices (microcontrollers). The deployment only requires minor platform-specific adjustments to consider resource and performance limitations on constrained devices. As a running example, we demonstrate a semi-autonomous assembly scenario with human-in-the-loop support.

Autonomous Agents on the Edge of Things

We study perception in the scenario of an embodied agent equipped with first-person sensors and a continuous motor space with multiple degrees of freedom. We consider the commutative properties of action sequences with respect to sensory information perceived by such an embodied agent. We introduce the Sensory Commutativity Probability (SCP) criterion which measures how much an agent's degree of freedom affects the environment in embodied scenarios. We show how to compute this criterion in different environments, including realistic robotic setups and discuss how SCP and the commutative properties of action sequences can be used to learn about objects in the environment and improve sample-efficiency in Reinforcement Learning.

On the Sensory Commutativity of Action Sequences for Embodied Agents

The task in judgment aggregation is to find a collective judgment set based on the views of individual judges about a given set of propositional formulas. One way of guaranteeing consistent outcomes is the use of sequential rules. In each round, the decision on a single formula is made either because the outcome is entailed by the already obtained judgment set, or, if this is not the case, by some underlying rule, e.g. the majority rule. Such rules are especially useful for cases, where the agenda is not fixed in advance, and formulas are added one by one. This paper investigates the computational complexity of winner determination under a family of sequential rules, and the manipulative influence of the processing order on the final outcome.

Complexity of Sequential Rules in Judgment Aggregation

We investigate a problem that lies at the intersection of three research areas, namely Automated Negotiation, Vehicle Routing, and Multi-Objective Optimization. Specifically, we investigate the scenario that multiple competing logistics companies aim to cooperate by delivering truck loads for one another, in order to improve efficiency and reduce the distance they drive. In order to do so, these companies need to find ways to exchange their truck loads such that each of them individually benefits. We present a new heuristic algorithm that, given one set of orders to deliver for each company, tries to find the set of all order-exchanges that are Pareto-optimal and individually rational. Furthermore, we present experiments based on real-world test data from two major logistics companies, which show that our algorithm is able to find hundreds of solutions in a matter of minutes.

A Heuristic Algorithm for Multi-Agent Vehicle Routing with Automated Negotiation

We study the knapsack problem with group fairness constraints. The input of the problem consists of a knapsack of bounded capacity and a set of items. Each item belongs to a particular category and has an associated weight and value. The goal of this problem is to select a subset of items such that all categories are fairly represented, the total weight of the selected items does not exceed the capacity of the knapsack, and the total value is maximized. We study the fairness parameters such as the bounds on the total value of items from each category, the total weight of items from each category, and the total number of items from each category. We give approximation algorithms for these problems. We also give experimental validation for the efficiency of our algorithms. These fairness notions could also be extended to the min-knapsack problem.  The fair knapsack problems encompass various important problems, such as participatory budgeting, fair budget allocation, and advertising.

Group Fairness for Knapsack Problems

Solving the Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem optimally is known to be NP-Hard for both make-span and total arrival time minimization. While many algorithms have been developed to solve MAPF problems, there is no dominating optimal MAPF algorithm that works well in all types of problems and no standard guidelines for when to use which algorithm. In this work, we develop the deep convolutional network MAPFAST (Multi-Agent Path Finding Algorithm SelecTor), which takes a MAPF problem instance and attempts to select the fastest algorithm to use from a portfolio of algorithms. We improve the performance of our model by including single-agent shortest paths in the instance embedding given to our model and by utilizing supplemental loss functions in addition to a classification loss. We evaluate our model on a large and diverse dataset of MAPF instances, showing that it outperforms all individual algorithms in its portfolio as well as the state-of-the-art optimal MAPF algorithm selector. We also provide an analysis of algorithm behavior in our dataset to gain a deeper understanding of optimal MAPF algorithms' strengths and weaknesses to help other researchers leverage different heuristics in algorithm designs.

MAPFAST: A Deep Algorithm Selector for Multi Agent Path Finding using Shortest Path Embeddings

Despite abundant negotiation strategies in literature, the complexity of automated negotiation forbids a single strategy from being dominant against all others in different negotiation scenarios. To overcome this, one approach is to use mixture of experts, but at the same time, one problem of this method is the selection of experts, as this approach is limited by the competency of the experts selected. Another problem with most negotiation strategies is their incapability of adapting to dynamic variation of the opponent's behaviour within a single negotiation session resulting in poor performance. This work focuses on both, solving the problem of expert selection and adapting to the opponent's behaviour with our Autonomous Negotiating Agent Framework. This framework allows real-time classification of opponent's behaviour and provides a mechanism to select, switch or combine strategies within a single negotiation session. Additionally, our framework has a reviewer component which enables self-enhancement capability by deciding to include new strategies or replace old ones with better strategies periodically. We demonstrate an instance of our framework by implementing maximum entropy reinforcement learning based strategies with a deep learning based opponent classifier. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our agent against state-of-the-art negotiators under varied negotiation scenarios.

An Autonomous Negotiating Agent Framework with Reinforcement Learning based Strategies and Adaptive Strategy Switching Mechanism

The classical 'buy or rent' ski-rental problem was recently considered in the setting where multiple experts (such as Machine learning algorithms) advice on the length of the ski season. Here, robust algorithms were developed with improved theoretical performance over adversarial scenarios where such expert predictions were unavailable. We consider a variant of this problem which we call the 'sequential ski-rental' problem. Here, a sequence of ski-rental problems has to be solved in an online fashion where both the buy cost and the length of ski season are unknown to the learner. The learner has access to two sets of experts, one set who advise on the true cost of buying the ski and another set who advise on the length of the ski season. Under certain stochastic assumptions on the experts who predict the buy costs, we develop online algorithms and prove regret bounds for the same. Our experimental evaluations confirm our theoretical results.

Sequential Ski Rental Problem

Value alignment is a crucial aspect of ethical multiagent systems. An important step toward value alignment is identifying values specific to an application context. However, identifying context-specific values is complex and cognitively demanding. To support this process, we develop a methodology and a collaborative web platform that employs AI techniques. We describe this platform, highlighting its intuitive design and implementation.

A Collaborative Platform for Identifying Context-Specific Values

Artificial agents trained by deep reinforcement learning will likely encounter novel situations after deployment that were never seen during training. Our agent must be 
 to handle such situations well. However, if we cannot rely on the average training or validation reward as a metric, then how can we effectively evaluate robustness? We take inspiration from the practice of 
 in software engineering. Specifically, we suggest that when designing AI agents that collaborate with humans, designers should search for potential edge cases in 
 and 
 and write tests which check that the behavior of the agent in these edge cases is reasonable. We apply this methodology to build a suite of unit tests for the Overcooked-AI environment, and use this test suite to evaluate three proposals for improving robustness. We find that the test suite provides significant insight into the effects of these proposals that were generally not revealed by looking solely at the average validation reward. For our full paper, see https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.05507 arxiv.org/abs/2101.05507

Solver Agent: Towards Emotional and Opponent-Aware Agent for Human-Robot Negotiation

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