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Turn-based games on graphs are games where the states are controlled by one and only one player who decides which edge to follow. Each player has a temporal objective that he tries to achieve. One player is the designated &#39;controller&#39;, whose objective captures the desirable outcomes of the whole system. Cooperative rational synthesis is the problem of computing a Nash equilibrium that satisfies the controller&#39;s objective. In this paper, we tackle this problem in the context of a commons, where each action has a cost or a benefit on one shared common pool energy resource. The paper investigates the problem of synthesising the controller in a commons such that there exists an individually rational behaviour of all the agents in the commons that satisfies the controller&#39;s objective and does not deplete the resource. We consider two types of agents: careless and careful. Careless agents only care for their temporal objective, while careful agents also pay attention not to deplete the system&#39;s resource. We solve the problem of cooperative rational synthesis in these games, focusing on parity objectives.

AAMAS 2021

Rational Synthesis in the Commons with Careless and Careful Agents

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally-respected archival forum for scientific research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

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AAMAS 2020

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). 

Turn-based games on graphs are games where the states are controlled by one and only one player who decides which edge to follow. Each player has a temporal objective that he tries to achieve. One player is the designated 'controller', whose objective captures the desirable outcomes of the whole system. Cooperative rational synthesis is the problem of computing a Nash equilibrium that satisfies the controller's objective. In this paper, we tackle this problem in the context of a commons, where each action has a cost or a benefit on one shared common pool energy resource. The paper investigates the problem of synthesising the controller in a commons such that there exists an individually rational behaviour of all the agents in the commons that satisfies the controller's objective and does not deplete the resource. We consider two types of agents: careless and careful. Careless agents only care for their temporal objective, while careful agents also pay attention not to deplete the system's resource. We solve the problem of cooperative rational synthesis in these games, focusing on parity objectives.

technical paper

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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We present a substantially expanded version of our tool STV for strategy synthesis and verification of strategic abilities. The new version adds user-definable models and support for model reduction through partial order reduction and checking for bisimulation.

STV+Reductions: Towards Practical Verification of Strategic Ability Using Model Reductions

We consider the problem of allocating indivisible items to agents where both agents and items are partitioned into disjoint groups. Following previous works on public housing allocation, each item (or house) belongs to a block and each agent is assigned a type. The allocation problem consists in assigning at most one item to each agent in a good way while respecting diversity constraints. Based on Schelling’s seminal work, we introduce a generic individual utility function where the welfare of an agent not only relies on her preferences over the items but also takes into account the fraction of agents of her own type in her own block. In this context, we investigate the issue of stability, and study two existing allocation mechanisms: a sequential mechanism used in Singapore and a distributed procedure based on mutually improving swaps of items.

Sequential and Swap Mechanisms for Public Housing Allocation with Quotas and Neighbourhood-Based Utilities

Participatory Budgeting processes are usually designed to span several years, with referenda for new budget allocations taking place regularly. This paper presents the first formalization of long-term PB. We introduce a theory of fairness for this setting, investigate under which conditions our fairness criteria can be satisfied, and analyze the computational complexity of verifying them.

Fairness in Long-Term Participatory Budgeting

Pay-per-last-$N$-shares'' (PPLNS) is one of the most common payout strategies used by mining pools in Proof-of-Work (PoW) cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.As with any payment scheme, it is imperative to study issues of incentive compatibility of miners within the pool. For PPLNS this question has only been partially answered; we know that reasonably-sized miners within a PPLNS pool prefer following the pool protocol over employing {\em specific} deviations. In this paper, we present a novel modification to PPLNS where we randomise the protocol in a natural way. We call our protocol ''Randomised pay-per-last-$N$-shares'' (RPPLNS), and note that the randomised structure of the protocol greatly simplifies the study of its incentive compatibility. We show that RPPLNS maintains the strengths of PPLNS (i.e., fairness, variance reduction, and resistance to pool hopping), while also being robust against a richer class of strategic mining than what has been shown for PPLNS.

RPPLNS: Pay-per-last-N-shares with a Randomised Twist

Interactive reinforcement learning provides a way for agents to learn to solve tasks from evaluative feedback provided by a human user. Previous research showed that humans give copious feedback early in training but very sparsely thereafter. In this paper, we investigate the potential of agent learning from trainers' facial expressions via interpreting them as evaluative feedback. To do so, we implemented TAMER which is a popular interactive reinforcement learning method in a reinforcement-learning benchmark problem    Infinite Mario, and conducted the first large-scale study of TAMER involving 561 participants. With designed CNN-RNN model, our analysis shows that telling trainers to use facial expressions and competition can improve the accuracies for estimating positive and negative feedback using facial expressions. In addition, our results with a simulation experiment show that learning solely from predicted feedback based on facial expressions is possible and using strong/effective prediction models or a regression method, facial responses would significantly improve the performance of agents. Furthermore, our experiment supports previous studies demonstrating the importance of bi-directional feedback and competitive elements in the training interface.

Facial Feedback for Reinforcement Learning: A Case Study and Offline Analysis Using the TAMER Framework (JAAMAS Track)

One of the key issues for imitation learning lies in making policy learned from limited samples to generalize well in the whole state-action space. This problem is much more severe in high-dimensional state environments, such as game playing with raw pixel inputs. Under this situation, even state-of-the-art adversary-based imitation learning algorithms fail. Through empirical studies, we find that the main cause lies in the failure of training a powerful discriminator to generate meaningful rewards in high-dimensional environments. Although it seems that dimensionality reduction can help, a straightforward application of off-the-shelf methods cannot achieve good performance. In this work, we show in theory that the balance between dimensionality reduction and discriminative training is essential for effective learning. To achieve this target, we propose HashReward, which utilizes the idea of supervised hashing to realize such an ideal balance. Experimental results show that HashReward could outperform state-of-the-art methods for a large gap under the challenging high-dimensional environments.

Imitation Learning from Pixel-Level Demonstrations by HashReward

Action advising is a peer-to-peer knowledge exchange technique built on the teacher-student paradigm to alleviate the sample inefficiency problem in deep reinforcement learning. Recently proposed student-initiated approaches have obtained promising results. However, due to being in the early stages of development, these also have some substantial shortcomings. One of the abilities that are absent in the current methods is further utilising advice by reusing, which is especially crucial in the practical settings considering the budget constraints in peer-to-peer interactions. In this study, we present an approach to enable the student agent to imitate previously acquired advice to reuse them directly in its exploration policy, without any interventions in the learning mechanism itself. In particular, we employ a behavioural cloning module to imitate the teacher policy and use dropout regularisation to have a notion of epistemic uncertainty to keep track of which state-advice pairs are actually collected. As the results of experiments we conducted in three Atari games show, advice reusing via imitation is indeed a feasible option in deep RL and our approach can successfully achieve this while significantly improving the learning performance, even when it is paired with a simple early advising heuristic.

Action Advising with Advice Imitation in Deep Reinforcement Learning

We tackle a common scenario in imitation learning (IL), where agents try to recover the optimal policy from expert demonstrations without further access to the expert or environment reward signals. Except the simple Behavior Cloning (BC) that adopts supervised learning followed by the problem of compounding error, previous solutions like inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) and recent generative adversarial methods involve a bi-level or alternating optimization for updating the reward function and the policy, suffering from high computational cost and training instability. Inspired by recent progress in energy-based model (EBM), in this paper, we propose a simplified IL framework named Energy-Based Imitation Learning (EBIL). Instead of updating the reward and policy iteratively, EBIL breaks out of the traditional IRL paradigm by a simple and flexible two-stage solution: first estimating the expert energy as the surrogate reward function through score matching, then utilizing such a reward for learning the policy by reinforcement learning algorithms. EBIL combines the idea of both EBM and occupancy measure matching, and via theoretic analysis we reveal that EBIL and Max-Entropy IRL (MaxEnt IRL) approaches are two sides of the same coin, and thus EBIL could be an alternative of adversarial IRL methods. Extensive experiments on qualitative and quantitative evaluations indicate that EBIL is able to recover meaningful and interpretative reward signals while achieving effective and comparable performance against existing algorithms on IL benchmarks.

Energy-Based Imitation Learning

Team formation is the problem of deploying the least expensive team of agents while covering a set of skills. Once a team has been formed, some of the agents considered at start may be finally defective and some skills may become uncovered. Two solution concepts have been recently introduced to deal with this issue in a proactive manner: one may form a team which is robust to changes so that after some agent losses, all skills remain covered; or one may opt for a recoverable team, i.e., it can be "repaired" in the worst case by hiring new agents while keeping the overall deployment cost minimal. In this paper, we introduce the problem of partially robust team formation (PR-TF). Partial robustness is a weaker form of robustness which guarantees a certain degree of skill coverage after some agents are lost. We analyze the computational complexity of PR-TF, and provide a complete algorithm for it. The performance of our algorithm is empirically compared with the existing methods for robust and recoverable team formation, on a number of existing benchmarks and some newly introduced ones. Partial robustness is shown to be an interesting trade-off notion between (full) robustness and recoverability in terms of computational efficiency, skill coverage guarantees after agent losses, and repairability.

Partial Robustness in Team Formation: Bridging the Gap between Robustness and Resilience

The goal of this work is to propose a framework for representing and reasoning about the rules governing a combinatorial exchange. Such a framework is at first interest as long as we want to build up digital marketplaces based on auction, a widely used mechanism for automated transactions. Hence the framework should fulfill two requirements: (i) it should enable bidders to express their bids on combinations of goods and (ii) it should allow describing the rules governing some market, namely the legal bids, the allocation and payment rules. To do so, we define a logical language in the spirit of the Game Description Language: the Combinatorial Exchange Description Language is the first language for describing combinatorial exchange in a logical framework. The contribution is two-fold: first, we illustrate the general dimension by representing different kinds of protocols, and second, we show how to reason about auction properties in this machine-processable language.

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STV+Reductions: Towards Practical Verification of Strategic Ability Using Model Reductions

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Next from AAMAS 2021

STV+Reductions: Towards Practical Verification of Strategic Ability Using Model Reductions

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Fair Division of the Commons

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