United Kingdom

In this paper we introduce a generic approach to solving Sequential Security Games (SGs) based on Evolutionary Algorithms. The method (named EASG) is general and largely game-independent, which allows for its application to a wide range of SGs with only slight adjustments. The efficacy of EASG is verified on 3 types of games from different domains: patrolling, surveillance, and cybersecurity. Comprehensive experiments performed on more than $300$ test games demonstrate robustness and stability of EASG, manifested by repetitively achieving optimal or near-optimal solutions. The main advantage of EASG compared to alternative approaches to solving SGs is its time efficiency. EASG finds high-quality solutions with approximately linear time scalability and can therefore be applied to solving SG instances which are beyond capabilities of the state-of-the-art exact methods. Due to anytime characteristics, EASG is particularly well suited for time-critical applications.

AAMAS 2021

Evolution of Strategies in Sequential Security Games

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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technical paper

We present an ascending-price mechanism for a multi-sided market with a variety of participants, such as manufacturers, logistics agents, insurance providers, and assemblers. Each deal in the market may consist of a combination of agents from separate categories, and different such combinations are simultaneously allowed. This flexibility lets multiple intersecting markets be resolved as a single global market. Our mechanism is obviously-truthful, strongly budget-balanced, individually rational, and attains almost the optimal gain-from-trade when the market is sufficiently large.

A Global Multi-Sided Market with Ascending-Price Mechanism

Blockchain-based Distributed Ledgers (DLs) promise to transform the existing financial system by making it truly democratic. In the past decade, blockchain technology has seen many novel applications ranging from the banking industry to real estate. However, in order to be adopted universally, blockchain systems must be scalable to support a high volume of transactions. As we increase the throughput of the DL system, the underlying peer-to-peer network might face multiple levels of challenges to keep up with the requirements. Due to varying network capacities, the slower nodes would be at a relative disadvantage compared to the faster ones, which could negatively impact their revenue. In order to quantify their relative advantage or disadvantage, we introduce two measures of network fairness, $p_f$, the probability of frontrunning and α_f$, the publishing fairness. We show that as we scale the blockchain, both these measures deteriorate, implying that the slower nodes face a disadvantage at higher throughputs. It results in the faster nodes getting more than their fair share of the reward while the slower nodes (slow in terms of network quality) get less. Thus, fairness and scalability in blockchain systems do not go hand in hand.

We might walk together, but I run faster: Network Fairness and Scalability in Blockchains

Learning in tightly coupled multiagent settings with sparse rewards is challenging because multiple agents must reach the goal state simultaneously for the team to receive a reward. This is even more challenging under temporal coupling constraints - where agents need to sequentially complete different components of a task in a particular order. Here, a single local reward is inadequate for learning an effective policy. We introduce MADyS, Multiagent Learning via Dynamic Skill Selection, a bi-level optimization framework that learns to dynamically switch between multiple local skills to optimize sparse team objectives. MADyS adopts fast policy gradients to learn local skills using local rewards and an evolutionary algorithm to optimize the sparse team objective by recruiting the most optimal skill at any given time. This eliminates the need to generate a single dense reward via reward shaping or other mixing functions. In environments with both spatial and temporal coupling requirements, we outperform prior methods and provides intuitive visualizations of its skill switching strategy.

Dynamic Skill Selection for Learning Joint Actions

We present a novel model-based algorithm, Cooperative Prioritized Sweeping, for sample-efficient learning in large multi-agent Markov decision processes. Our approach leverages domain knowledge about the structure of the problem in the form of a dynamic decision network. Using this information, our method learns a model of the environment to determine which state-action pairs are the most likely in need to be updated, significantly increasing learning speed. Batch updates can then be performed which efficiently back-propagate knowledge throughout the value function. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art sparse cooperative Q-learning and QMIX  algorithms, both on the well-known SysAdmin benchmark, randomized environments and a fully-observable variation of the well-known firefighter benchmark from Dec-POMDP literature.

Cooperative Prioritized Sweeping

Investors try to predict returns of financial assets to make successful investment. Many quantitative analysts have used machine learning-based methods to find unknown profitable market rules from large amounts of market data. However, there are several challenges in financial markets hindering practical applications of machine learning-based models. First, in financial markets, there is no single model that can consistently make accurate prediction because traders in markets quickly adapt to newly available information. Instead, there are a number of ephemeral and partially correct models called "alpha factors". Second, since financial markets are highly uncertain, ensuring interpretability of prediction models is quite important to make reliable trading strategies. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Trader-Company method, a novel evolutionary model that mimics the roles of a financial institute and traders belonging to it. Our method predicts future stock returns by aggregating suggestions from multiple weak learners called Traders. A Trader holds a collection of simple mathematical formulae, each of which represents a candidate of an alpha factor and would be interpretable for real-world investors. The aggregation algorithm, called a Company, maintains multiple Traders. By randomly generating new Traders and retraining them, Companies can efficiently find financially meaningful formulae whilst avoiding overfitting to a transient state of the market. We show the effectiveness of our method by conducting experiments on real market data.

Trader-Company Method: A Metaheuristics for Interpretable Stock Price Prediction

Recently, Jain et al. [IJCAI, 2019] studied the effect of project interactions in participatory budgeting (PB) by assuming an existing partition of the projects to interaction structures, namely a grouping of the projects into substitution and complementarity groups. Motivated by their study, here we take voter preferences to find such interaction structures. In our model, voters submit interaction structures, and the goal is to find an aggregated structure. Formally, given a set P of m projects, and n partitions of P, the task is to aggregate these n partitions into one aggregated partition.  We consider this partition aggregation task both for substitution structures and for complementarity structures, studying several aggregation methods for each, including utility-based methods and Condorcet-based methods; we evaluate these methods by analyzing their computational complexity and their behavior with respect to certain relevant axiomatic properties.

Partition Aggregation for Participatory Budgeting

This paper addresses the problem of collaborative multi-agent autonomous driving of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) in lane-free highway scenarios.  We eliminate the lane-changing task, i.e., CAVs may be located in any arbitrary lateral position within the road boundaries, hence allowing for better utilization of the available road capacity. As a consequence, vehicles operate in a much more complex environment, and the need for the individual CAVs to select actions that are efficient for the group as a whole is highly desired. We formulate this environment as a multiagent collaboration problem represented via a coordination graph, thus decomposing the problem with local utility functions, based on the interactions between vehicles. We produce a tractable and scalable solution by estimating the joint action of all vehicles via the anytime max-plus algorithm, with local utility functions provided by potential fields, designed to promote collision avoidance. Specifically, the fields have an ellipsoid form that is most suitable for lane-free highway environments. This novel use of max-plus with potential fields gives rise to a coordinated control policy that exploits only local information specific to each CAV. Our experimental evaluation confirms the effectiveness of our approach: lane-free movement allows for increased traffic flow rates, and vehicles are able to achieve speeds that are both high and close to their desired ones, even in demanding environments with high traffic flow.

Collaborative Multiagent Decision Making for Lane-Free Autonomous Driving

Studying adversarial attacks on Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents has become a key aspect of developing robust, RL-based solutions. Test-time attacks, which target the post-learning performance of an RL agent's policy, have been well studied in both white- and black-box settings. More recently, however, state-of-the-art works have shifted to investigate training-time attacks on RL agents, i.e., forcing the learning process towards a target policy designed by the attacker. Alas, these SOTA works continue to rely on white-box settings and/or use a reward-poisoning approach. In contrast, this paper studies environment-dynamics poisoning attacks at training time. Furthermore, while environment-dynamics poisoning presumes a transfer-learning capable agent, it also allows us to expand our approach to black-box attacks. Our overall framework, inspired by hierarchical RL, seeks the minimal environment-dynamics manipulation that will prompt the momentary policy of the agent to change in a desired manner. We show the attack efficiency by comparing it with the reward-poisoning approach, and empirically demonstrate the transferability of the environment-poisoning attack strategy. Finally, we seek to exploit the transferability of the attack strategy to handle black-box settings.

Transferable Environment Poisoning: Training-time Attack on Reinforcement Learning

In this work we present the Hanabi Open Agent Dataset (HOAD)— meant to address the current lack of Hanabi datasets, HOAD is an easily extensible, open-sourced, and comprehensive collection of existing Hanabi playing agents, all ported to the Hanabi Learning Environment (HLE). We give a description and analysis of each agent’s strategy, and we also show cross-play performance between all the agents, demonstrating both their high quality and diversity of strategy. These properties make HOAD especially well suited to studies involving meta-learning and transfer learning. Finally, we describe in detail an easy way to add new agents to HOAD regardless of the origin codebase of the agent and make our code and dataset publicly available at https://github.com/aronsar/hoad.

HOAD: The Hanabi Open Agent Dataset

The ability of agents to learn to communicate through interaction has been studied through emergent communication tasks. Previous works in this domain have studied the linguistic properties of the emergent languages like compositionality, generalization, and as well as the environmental pressures that shape them. However, most of these experiments require a considerable amount of shared training time between agents to communicate successfully. Our work highlights the problem of sample inefficiency of agents in population-based referential games and proposes an Action Advising framework to counter it.

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