Human-Agent Decision-making: Combining Theory and Practice

Extensive work has been conducted both in game theory and logic to model strategic interaction. An important question is whether we can use these theories to design agents for interacting with people? On the one hand, they provide a formal design specification for agent strategies. On the other hand, people do not necessarily adhere to playing in accordance with these strategies, and their behavior is affected by a multitude of social and psychological factors. In this paper we will consider the question of whether strategies implied by theories of strategic behavior can be used by automated agents that interact proficiently with people. We will focus on automated agents that we built that need to interact with people in two negotiation settings: bargaining and deliberation. For bargaining we will study game-theory based equilibrium agents and for argumentation we will discuss logic-based argumentation theory. We will also consider security games and persuasion games and will discuss the benefits of using equilibrium based agents.Comment: In Proceedings TARK 2015, arXiv:1606.0729

Collaborative Plans for Complex Group Action

The original formulation of SharedPlans by B. Grosz and C. Sidner (1990) was developed to provide a model of collaborative planning in which it was not necessary for one agent to have intentions-to toward an act of a different agent. Unlike other contemporaneous approaches (J.R. Searle, 1990), this formulation provided for two agents to coordinate their activities without introducing any notion of irreducible joint intentions. However, it only treated activities that directly decomposed into single-agent actions, did not address the need for agents to commit to their joint activity, and did not adequately deal with agents having only partial knowledge of the way in which to perform an action. This paper provides a revised and expanded version of SharedPlans that addresses these shortcomings. It also reformulates Pollack's (1990) definition of individual plans to handle cases in which a single agent has only partial knowledge; this reformulation meshes with the definition of SharedPlans. The new definitions also allow for contracting out certain actions. The formalization that results has the features required by Bratman's (1992) account of shared cooperative activity and is more general than alternative accounts (H. Levesque et al., 1990; E. Sonenberg et al., 1992).Engineering and Applied Science

Psychologically based Virtual-Suspect for Interrogative Interview Training

In this paper, we present a Virtual-Suspect system which can be used to train inexperienced law enforcement personnel in interrogation strategies. The system supports different scenario configurations based on historical data. The responses presented by the Virtual-Suspect are selected based on the psychological state of the suspect, which can be configured as well. Furthermore, each interrogator's statement affects the Virtual-Suspect's current psychological state, which may lead the interrogation in different directions. In addition, the model takes into account the context in which the statements are made. Experiments with 24 subjects demonstrate that the Virtual-Suspect's behavior is similar to that of a human who plays the role of the suspect

Contracting Tasks in Multi-Agent Environments

Agents may contract some of their tasks to other agent even when they do not share a common goal. An agent may try to contract some of the tasks that it cannot perform by itself, or that may be performed more efficiently by other agents. One self-motivated agent may convince another self-motivated agent to help it with its task, by promises of rewards, even if the agents are not assumed to be benevolent. We propose techniques that provide efficient ways to reach contracting in varied situations: the agents have full information about the environment and each other or subcontracting when the agents do not know the exact state of the world. We consider situations of repeated encounters, cases of asymmetric information, situations where the agents lack information about each other, and cases where an agent subcontracts a task to a group of agents. Situations where there is competition among possible contracted agents or possible contracting agents are also considered. In all situations we would like the contracted agent to carry out the task efficiently without the need of close supervision by the contracting agent. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-94-44

The first automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC 2010)

Motivated by the challenges of bilateral negotiations between people and automated agents we organized the first automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC 2010). The purpose of the competition is to facilitate the research in the area bilateral multi-issue closed negotiation. The competition was based on the Genius environment, which is a General Environment for Negotiation with Intelligent multi-purpose Usage Simulation. The first competition was held in conjunction with the Ninth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-10) and was comprised of seven teams. This paper presents an overview of the competition, as well as general and contrasting approaches towards negotiation strategies that were adopted by the participants of the competition. Based on analysis in post--tournament experiments, the paper also attempts to provide some insights with regard to effective approaches towards the design of negotiation strategies