United Kingdom

Van Zuylen et al. introduced the notion of a popular ranking in a voting context, where each voter submits a strictly-ordered list of all candidates. A popular ranking pi of the candidates is at least as good as any other ranking sigma in the following sense: if we compare pi to sigma, at least half of all voters will always weakly prefer pi. Whether a voter prefers one ranking to another is calculated based on the Kendall distance.

AAMAS 2021

On Weakly and Strongly Popular Rankings

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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>

**Your Program Chairs,**
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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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To review the proceedings for the conference or review the searchable program, please visit the [website](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/program/).


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.

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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Conversational agents have been widely adopted in dialogue systems for various business purposes. Many existing conversational agents are rule-based and require significant human intervention to adapt the knowledge and conversational flow. In this paper, we propose a graph-based adaptive conversational agent model which is capable of learning knowledge from human beings and adapting the knowledge-base according to human-agent interactions. Studies to evaluate the proposed model are conducted and presented, which compare the responses from the proposed adaptive agent model and a conventional agent.

Graph-based Self-Adaptive Conversational Agent

Automatic gesture generation from speech generally relies on implicit modelling of the nondeterministic speech-gesture relationship and can result in averaged motion lacking defined form. Here, we propose a database-driven approach of selecting gestures based on specific motion characteristics that have been shown to be associated with the speech audio. We extend previous work that identified expressive parameters of gesture motion that can both be predicted from speech and are perceptually important for a good speech-gesture match, such as gesture velocity and finger extension. A perceptual study was performed to evaluate the appropriateness of the gestures selected with our method. We compare our method with two baseline selection methods. The first respects timing, the desired onset and duration of a gesture, but does not match gesture form in other ways. The second baseline additionally disregards the original gesture timing for selecting gestures. The gesture sequences from our method were rated as a significantly better match to the speech than gestures selected by either baseline method.

It's A Match! Gesture Generation Using Expressive Parameter Matching

SARSA-RS is a reward shaping method that updates the shaping through learning. However, the bottleneck of this method is the aggregation of states since designers need to design mappings from all states to abstract states. We propose a dynamic trajectory aggregation that uses subgoal series. The designer's effort becomes minimal because only human input is the subgoal series. This makes application to environments with high-dimensional observations possible. We compared our method by using participants' subgoal series with a baseline reinforcement learning algorithm and other subgoal-based methods in a navigation task. As a result, our reward shaping outperformed all other methods in learning efficiency.

Online Learning of Shaping Reward with Subgoal Knowledge

Relational agents who personalise their message to individual users need to learn about the user first. In the context of an agent who personalises the inclusion of 10 relational cues in its dialogue, we explore training the agent based on first time user’s responses to a single example of each cue prior to the session with the virtual advisor. We designed a between subjects study with three groups: Empathic (all relational cues); Neutral (no relational cues) and Adaptive (only helpful cues included). We found that in the Adaptive group, students received what they found helpful more often than in the other two groups. Analysis of the discrepancy between what user’s found helpful and what they received was least in the Adaptive group and greatest in the Neutral group.

Personalising the Dialogue of Relational Agents for First-Time Users

Large scale multiagent systems must rely on distributed decision making, as centralized coordination is either impractical or impossible. Recent works approach this problem under a game theoretic lens, whereby utility functions are assigned to each of the agents with the hope that their local optimization approximates the centralized optimal solution. Yet, formal guarantees on the resulting performance cannot be obtained for broad classes of problems without compromising on their accuracy. In this work, we address this concern relative to the well-studied problem of resource allocation with nondecreasing concave welfare functions. We show that optimally designed local utilities achieve an approximation ratio (price of anarchy) of 1-c/e, where c is the function's curvature and e is Euler's constant. The upshot of our contributions is the design of approximation algorithms that are distributed and efficient, and whose performance matches that of the best existing polynomial-time (and centralized) schemes.

Tractable Mechanisms for Computing Near-Optimal Utility Functions

We study settings where a set of identical, reusable resources must be allocated in an online fashion to arriving agents. Each arriving agent is patient and willing to wait for some period of time to be matched. When matched, each agent occupies a resource for a certain amount of time, and then releases it, gaining some utility from having done so. The goal of the system designer is to maximize overall utility given some prior knowledge of the distribution of arriving agents. We are particularly interested in settings where demand for the resources far outstrips supply, as is typical in the provision of social services, for example homelessness resources. We formulate this problem as online bipartite matching with reusable resources and patient agents. We develop new, efficient nonmyopic algorithms for this class of problems, and compare their performance with that of greedy algorithms in a variety of simulated settings, as well as in a setting calibrated to real-world data on household demand for homelessness services. We find substantial overall welfare benefits to using our nonmyopic algorithms, particularly in more extreme settings -- those where agents are unwilling or unable to wait for resources, and where the ratio of resource demand to supply is particularly high.

Efficient Nonmyopic Online Allocation of Scarce Reusable Resources

We introduce the idea of a finite sequence of coalition formation games over a set of agents, and we call it Sequential Characteristic-Function Game (SCFG). We define the solution of such a game as a corresponding sequence of coalition structures that must be related by a given feasibility relation, so no coalition structure can be evaluated in isolation. A sequence satisfying this condition is called Feasible Coalition-Structure Sequence (FCSS). Such games can be a useful abstraction for modelling various scenarios, in particular those for real-world disaster management that we consider in this paper. We give an algorithm for computing an FCSS and evaluate it experimentally. Our results show that an SCFG can represent various classical variations of characteristic-function games, and our algorithm solves instances with a reasonable number of agents.

Feasible Coalition Sequences

The problem of finding pure strategy Nash equilibria in multiagent concurrent games with finite-horizon temporal goals has received some recent attention. Earlier work solved this problem through the use of Rabin automata. In this work, we take advantage of the finite-horizon nature of the agents' goals and show that checking for and finding pure strategy Nash equilibria can be done using a combination of safety games and lasso testing in B&#252;chi automata. To separate strategic reasoning from temporal reasoning, we model agents' goals by deterministic finite-word automata (DFAs), since finite-horizon logics such as LTL<sub>f</sub> and LDL<sub>f</sub> are reasoned about through conversion to equivalent DFAs. This allow us characterize the complexity of the problem as PSPACE complete.

Nash Equilibria in Finite-Horizon Multiagent Concurrent Games

In this paper, we propose and study the cascade submodular maximization problem under the adaptive setting. The input of our problem is a set of items, each item is in a particular state (i.e., the marginal contribution of an item) which is drawn from a known probability distribution. However, we can not know its actual state before selecting it. As compared with existing studies on stochastic submodular maximization, one unique setting of our problem is that each item is associated with a continuation probability which represents the probability that one is allowed to continue to select the next item after selecting the current one. Intuitively, this term captures the externality of selecting one item to all its subsequent items in terms of the opportunity of being selected.  Therefore, the actual set of items that can be selected by a policy depends on the specific ordering it adopts to select items, this makes our problem fundamentally different from classical submodular set optimization problems. Our objective is to identify the best sequence of selecting items so as to maximize the expected utility of the selected items. We propose a class of stochastic utility functions, adaptive cascade submodular functions, and show that the objective functions in many practical application domains satisfy adaptive cascade submodularity. Then we develop a $0.12$ approximation algorithm to the adaptive cascade submodular maximization problem.

Adaptive Cascade Submodular Maximization

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) benefit from non-verbal behavior for natural and efficient interaction with users. Gesticulation -- hand and arm movements accompanying speech -- is an essential part of non-verbal behavior. Gesture generation models have been developed for several decades: starting with rule-based and ending with mainly data-driven methods. To date, recent end-to-end gesture generation methods have not been evaluated in a real-time interaction with users. We present a proof-of-concept framework, which is intended to facilitate evaluation of modern gesture generation models in interaction.

On Weakly and Strongly Popular Rankings

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Graph-based Self-Adaptive Conversational Agent

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