Empowerment and State-dependent Noise : An Intrinsic Motivation for Avoiding Unpredictable Agents

Empowerment is a recently introduced intrinsic motivation algorithm based on the embodiment of an agent and the dynamics of the world the agent is situated in. Computed as the channel capacity from an agent’s actuators to an agent’s sensors, it offers a quantitative measure of how much an agent is in control of the world it can perceive. In this paper, we expand the approximation of empowerment as a Gaussian linear channel to compute empowerment based on the covariance matrix between actuators and sensors, incorporating state dependent noise. This allows for the first time the study of continuous systems with several agents. We found that if the behaviour of another agent cannot be predicted accurately, then interacting with that agent will decrease the empowerment of the original agent. This leads to behaviour realizing collision avoidance with other agents, purely from maximising an agent’s empowermentFinal Accepted Versio

Information-theoretic measures as a generic approach to human-robot interaction : Application in CORBYS project

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/AuthorThe objective of the CORBYS project is to design and implement a robot control architecture that allows the integration of high-level cognitive control modules, such as a semantically-driven self-awareness module and a cognitive framework for anticipation of, and synergy with, human behaviour based on biologically-inspired information-theoretic principles. CORBYS aims to provide a generic control architecture to benefit a wide range of applications where robots work in synergy with humans, ranging from mobile robots such as robotic followers to gait rehabilitation robots. The behaviour of the two demonstrators, used for validating this architecture, will each be driven by a combination of task specific algorithms and generic cognitive algorithms. In this paper we focus on the generic algorithms based on information theoryFinal Accepted Versio

Changing the Environment Based on Empowerment as Intrinsic Motivation

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 3.0 which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.One aspect of intelligence is the ability to restructure your own environment so that the world you live in becomes more beneficial to you. In this paper we investigate how the information-theoretic measure of agent empowerment can provide a task-independent, intrinsic motivation to restructure the world. We show how changes in embodiment and in the environment change the resulting behaviour of the agent and the artefacts left in the world. For this purpose, we introduce an approximation of the established empowerment formalism based on sparse sampling, which is simpler and significantly faster to compute for deterministic dynamics. Sparse sampling also introduces a degree of randomness into the decision making process, which turns out to beneficial for some cases. We then utilize the measure to generate agent behaviour for different agent embodiments in a Minecraft-inspired three dimensional block world. The paradigmatic results demonstrate that empowerment can be used as a suitable generic intrinsic motivation to not only generate actions in given static environments, as shown in the past, but also to modify existing environmental conditions. In doing so, the emerging strategies to modify an agent’s environment turn out to be meaningful to the specific agent capabilities, i.e., de facto to its embodiment.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Empowerment As Replacement for the Three Laws of Robotics

© 2017 Salge and Polani. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.The greater ubiquity of robots creates a need for generic guidelines for robot behaviour. We focus less on how a robot can technically achieve a predefined goal, and more on what a robot should do in the first place. Particularly, we are interested in the question how a heuristic should look like which motivates the robot's behaviour in interaction with human agents. We make a concrete, operational proposal as to how the information-theoretic concept of empowerment can be used as a generic heuristic to quantify concepts such as self-preservation, protection of the human partner and responding to human actions. While elsewhere we studied involved single-agent scenarios in detail, here we present proof-of-principle scenarios demonstrating how empowerment interpreted in light of these perspectives allows one to specify core concepts with a similar aim as Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics in an operational way. Importantly, this route does not depend on having to establish an explicit verbalized understanding of human language and conventions in the robots. Also, it incorporates the ability to take into account a rich variety of different situations and types of robotic embodiment.Peer reviewe

CORBYS cognitive control architecture for robotic follower

In this paper the novel generic cognitive robot control architecture CORBYS is presented. The objective of the CORBYS architecture is the integration of high-level cognitive modules to support robot functioning in dynamic environments including interacting with humans. This paper presents the preliminary integration of the CORBYS architecture to support a robotic follower. Experimental results on high-level empowerment-based trajectory planning have demonstrated the effectiveness of ROS-based communication between distributed modules developed in a multi-site research environment as typical for distributed collaborative projects such as CORBYS

Bringing Bounded Rationality Back in: a Behavioral Approach to Incentive Systems, Organizational Design, and Social Interactions in Organizations

1Dottorato di Ricerca in Management (XXV ciclo), LUISS Guido Carli, Roma, 2013. Relatori: Prof. Paolo Boccardelli, Prof. Nicolai J. Foss.openThe Principal's Theory of Mind: The Role of Mentalizing for Reward Design and Management in Principal-Agent Relations (with Foss, N.J.). Motivating Knowledge Sharing when Rewards are Ambiguous: the Role of Complementary Motivators (with Foss, N. J., Pedersen, T., and Reinholt, M.). Physical Separation in the Workplace: Separation Cues, Sensemaking, and Behavioral Responses (with Foss, N. J., and Christensen, P. H.). Organizational Design and the Credibility of Delegated Decision Rights (with Foss, K., and Foss, N. J.). Network Size and Prosocial Behavior: Taking Bounded Rationality into Account (with Foss, N. J., and Pedersen, T.). Brokerage and Creativity: A Bounded Rationality Perspective (with Pedersen, T.).openDottorato di Ricerca in ManagementSTEA, DIEGOStea, Dieg