Explainable Active Learning for Preference Elicitation

Gaining insights into the preferences of new users and subsequently personalizing recommendations necessitate managing user interactions intelligently, namely, posing pertinent questions to elicit valuable information effectively. In this study, our focus is on a specific scenario of the cold-start problem, where the recommendation system lacks adequate user presence or access to other users' data is restricted, obstructing employing user profiling methods utilizing existing data in the system. We employ Active Learning (AL) to solve the addressed problem with the objective of maximizing information acquisition with minimal user effort. AL operates for selecting informative data from a large unlabeled set to inquire an oracle to label them and eventually updating a machine learning (ML) model. We operate AL in an integrated process of unsupervised, semi-supervised, and supervised ML within an explanatory preference elicitation process. It harvests user feedback (given for the system's explanations on the presented items) over informative samples to update an underlying ML model estimating user preferences. The designed user interaction facilitates personalizing the system by incorporating user feedback into the ML model and also enhances user trust by refining the system's explanations on recommendations. We implement the proposed preference elicitation methodology for food recommendation. We conducted human experiments to assess its efficacy in the short term and also experimented with several AL strategies over synthetic user profiles that we created for two food datasets, aiming for long-term performance analysis. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed preference elicitation with limited user-labeled data while also enhancing user trust through accurate explanations.Comment: Preprin

The challenge of negotiation in the game of Diplomacy

The game of Diplomacy has been used as a test case for complex automated negotiations for a long time, but to date very few successful negotiation algorithms have been implemented for this game. We have therefore decided to include a Diplomacy tournament within the annual Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC). In this paper we present the setup and the results of the ANAC 2017 Diplomacy Competition and the ANAC 2018 Diplomacy Challenge. We observe that none of the negotiation algorithms submitted to these two editions have been able to significantly improve the performance over a non-negotiating baseline agent. We analyze these algorithms and discuss why it is so hard to write successful negotiation algorithms for Diplomacy. Finally, we provide experimental evidence that, despite these results, coalition formation and coordination do form essential elements of the game

The Likeability-Success Tradeoff: Results of the 2nd Annual Human-Agent Automated Negotiating Agents Competition

We present the results of the 2nd Annual Human-Agent League of the Automated Negotiating Agent Competition. Building on the success of the previous year's results, a new challenge was issued that focused exploring the likeability-success tradeoff in negotiations. By examining a series of repeated negotiations, actions may affect the relationship between automated negotiating agents and their human competitors over time. The results presented herein support a more complex view of human-agent negotiation and capture of integrative potential (win-win solutions). We show that, although likeability is generally seen as a tradeoff to winning, agents are able to remain well-liked while winning if integrative potential is not discovered in a given negotiation. The results indicate that the top-performing agent in this competition took advantage of this loophole by engaging in favor exchange across negotiations (cross-game logrolling). These exploratory results provide information about the effects of different submitted 'black-box' agents in human-agent negotiation and provide a state-of-the-art benchmark for human-agent design.</p

Bargaining Chips: Coordinating one-to-many concurrent composite negotiations

This study presents Bargaining Chips: a framework for one-to-many concurrent composite negotiations, where multiple deals can be reached and combined. Our framework is designed to mirror the salient aspects of real-life procurement and trading scenarios, in which a buyer seeks to acquire a number of items from different sellers at the same time. To do so, the buyer needs to successfully perform multiple concurrent bilateral negotiations as well as coordinate the composite outcome resulting from each interdependent negotiation. This paper contributes to the state of the art by: (1) presenting a model and test-bed for addressing such challenges; (2) by proposing a new, asynchronous interaction protocol for coordinating concurrent negotiation threads; and (3) by providing classes of multi-deal coordinators that are able to navigate this new one-to-many multi-deal setting. We show that Bargaining Chips can be used to evaluate general asynchronous negotiation and coordination strategies in a setting that generalizes over a number of existing negotiation approaches

Challenges and Main Results of the Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) 2019

The Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) is a yearly-organized international contest in which participants from all over the world develop intelligent negotiating agents for a variety of negotiation problems. To facilitate the research on agent-based negotiation, the organizers introduce new research challenges every year. ANAC 2019 posed five negotiation challenges: automated negotiation with partial preferences, repeated human-agent negotiation, negotiation in supply-chain management, negotiating in the strategic game of Diplomacy, and in the Werewolf game. This paper introduces the challenges and discusses the main findings and lessons learnt per league

Unanimously acceptable agreements for negotiation teams in unpredictable domains

A negotiation team is a set of agents with common and possibly also conflicting preferences that forms one of the parties of a negotiation. A negotiation team is involved in two decision making processes simultaneously, a negotiation with the opponents, and an intra-team process to decide on the moves to make in the negotiation. This article focuses on negotiation team decision making for circumstances that require unanimity of team decisions. Existing agent-based approaches only guarantee unanimity in teams negotiating in domains exclusively composed of predictable and compatible issues. This article presents a model for negotiation teams that guarantees unanimous team decisions in domains consisting of predictable and compatible, and alsounpredictable issues. Moreover, the article explores the influence of using opponent, and team member models in the proposing strategies that team members use. Experimental results show that the team benefits if team members employ Bayesian learning to model their teammates’ preferences. 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This research is partially supported by TIN2012-36586-C03-01 of the Spanish government and PROMETEOII/2013/019 of Generalitat Valenciana. Other part of this research is supported by the Dutch Technology Foundation STW, applied science division of NWO and the Technology Program of the Ministry of Economic Affairs; the Pocket Negotiator Project with Grant No. VICI-Project 08075.Sánchez Anguix, V.; Aydogan, R.; Julian Inglada, VJ.; Jonker, C. (2014). Unanimously acceptable agreements for negotiation teams in unpredictable domains. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications. 13(4):243-265. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2014.05.002S24326513

Negotiation for incentive driven privacy-preserving information sharing

Due to copyright restrictions, the access to the full text of this article is only available via subscription.This paper describes an agent-based, incentive-driven, and privacy-preserving information sharing framework. Main contribution of the paper is to give the data provider agent an active role in the information sharing process and to change the currently asymmetric position between the provider and the requester of data and information (DI) to the favor of the DI provider. Instead of a binary yes/no answer to the requester’s data request and the incentive offer, the provider may negotiate about excluding from the requested DI bundle certain pieces of DI with high privacy value, and/or ask for a different type of incentive. We show the presented approach on a use case. However, the proposed architecture is domain independent.ITEA M2MGrids Projec

A Survey of Decision Support Mechanisms for Negotiation

This paper introduces a dependency analysis and a categorization of conceptualized and existing economic decision support mechanisms for negotiation. The focus of our survey is on economic decision support mechanisms, although some behavioural support mechanisms were included, to recognize the important work in that area. We categorize support mechanisms from four different aspects: (i) economic versus behavioral decision support, (ii) analytical versus strategical support, (iii) active versus passive support and (iv) implicit versus explicit support. Our survey suggests that active mechanisms would be more effective than passive ones, and that implicit mechanisms can shield the user from mathematical complexities. Furthermore, we provide a list of existing economic support mechanisms.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Interactive Intelligenc

Negotiation for incentive driven privacy-preserving information sharing

Due to copyright restrictions, the access to the full text of this article is only available via subscription.This paper describes an agent-based, incentive-driven, and privacy-preserving information sharing framework. Main contribution of the paper is to give the data provider agent an active role in the information sharing process and to change the currently asymmetric position between the provider and the requester of data and information (DI) to the favor of the DI provider. Instead of a binary yes/no answer to the requester’s data request and the incentive offer, the provider may negotiate about excluding from the requested DI bundle certain pieces of DI with high privacy value, and/or ask for a different type of incentive. We show the presented approach on a use case. However, the proposed architecture is domain independent.ITEA M2MGrids Projec