Decentralization of Multiagent Policies by Learning What to Communicate

Effective communication is required for teams of robots to solve sophisticated collaborative tasks. In practice it is typical for both the encoding and semantics of communication to be manually defined by an expert; this is true regardless of whether the behaviors themselves are bespoke, optimization based, or learned. We present an agent architecture and training methodology using neural networks to learn task-oriented communication semantics based on the example of a communication-unaware expert policy. A perimeter defense game illustrates the system's ability to handle dynamically changing numbers of agents and its graceful degradation in performance as communication constraints are tightened or the expert's observability assumptions are broken.Comment: 7 page

EXPLAINING THE FOOD STAMP CASH-OUT PUZZLE

Empirical studies have shown that food stamp participants spend a higher proportion of their benefit on food than they would with an equivalent amount of cash. Our study demonstrates that this result can be explained by the decision-making behavior of multi-adult households. Multi-adult households spend a higher proportion of their food stamp benefit than they would with an equivalent amount of cash. In contrast, single-adult households show little difference in food spending between food stamps and an equivalent amount of cash. Because over 30 percent of food stamp participants are in multi-adult households, switching from food stamps to cash may reduce food purchases of these needy households. If that is indeed the case, the use of food stamps and other in-kind benefits may be more desirable than other forms of assistance.Food Stamp Program, cash transfers, cash-out puzzle, welfare stigma, Cournot model, intra-household distribution, Engel curves, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty,

Mandate-driven networking eco-system : a paradigm shift in end-to-end communications

The wireless industry is driven by key stakeholders that follow a holistic approach of "one-system-fits-all" that leads to moving network functionality of meeting stringent End-to-End (E2E) communication requirements towards the core and cloud infrastructures. This trend is limiting smaller and new players for bringing in new and novel solutions. For meeting these E2E requirements, tenants and end-users need to be active players for bringing their needs and innovations. Driving E2E communication not only in terms of quality of service (QoS) but also overall carbon footprint and spectrum efficiency from one specific community may lead to undesirable simplifications and a higher level of abstraction of other network segments may lead to sub-optimal operations. Based on this, the paper presents a paradigm shift that will enlarge the role of wireless innovation at academia, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME)'s, industries and start-ups while taking into account decentralized mandate-driven intelligence in E2E communications

Coalition Formation and Combinatorial Auctions; Applications to Self-organization and Self-management in Utility Computing

In this paper we propose a two-stage protocol for resource management in a hierarchically organized cloud. The first stage exploits spatial locality for the formation of coalitions of supply agents; the second stage, a combinatorial auction, is based on a modified proxy-based clock algorithm and has two phases, a clock phase and a proxy phase. The clock phase supports price discovery; in the second phase a proxy conducts multiple rounds of a combinatorial auction for the package of services requested by each client. The protocol strikes a balance between low-cost services for cloud clients and a decent profit for the service providers. We also report the results of an empirical investigation of the combinatorial auction stage of the protocol.Comment: 14 page