We propose a method that allows to develop shared understanding between two agents for the purpose of performing a task that requires cooperation. Our method focuses on efficiently establishing successful task-oriented communication in an open multi-agent system, where the agents do not know anything about each other and can only communicate via grounded interaction. The method aims to assist researchers that work on human-machine interaction or scenarios that require a human-in-the-loop, by defining interaction restrictions and efficiency metrics. To that end, we point out the challenges and limitations of such a (diverse) setup, while also restrictions and requirements which aim to ensure that high task performance truthfully reflects the extent to which the agents correctly understand each other. Furthermore, we demonstrate a use-case where our method can be applied for the task of cooperative query answering. We design the experiments by modifying an established ontology alignment benchmark. In this example, the agents want to query each other, while representing different databases, defined in their own ontologies that contain different and incomplete knowledge. Grounded interaction here has the form of examples that consists of common instances, for which the agents are expected to have similar knowledge. Our experiments demonstrate successful communication establishment under the required restrictions, and compare different agent policies that aim to solve the task in an efficient manner.
{"title":"Establishing Shared Query Understanding in an Open Multi-Agent System","authors":"Nikolaos Kondylidis, Ilaria Tiddi, A. T. Teije","doi":"10.5555/3545946.3598649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5555/3545946.3598649","url":null,"abstract":"We propose a method that allows to develop shared understanding between two agents for the purpose of performing a task that requires cooperation. Our method focuses on efficiently establishing successful task-oriented communication in an open multi-agent system, where the agents do not know anything about each other and can only communicate via grounded interaction. The method aims to assist researchers that work on human-machine interaction or scenarios that require a human-in-the-loop, by defining interaction restrictions and efficiency metrics. To that end, we point out the challenges and limitations of such a (diverse) setup, while also restrictions and requirements which aim to ensure that high task performance truthfully reflects the extent to which the agents correctly understand each other. Furthermore, we demonstrate a use-case where our method can be applied for the task of cooperative query answering. We design the experiments by modifying an established ontology alignment benchmark. In this example, the agents want to query each other, while representing different databases, defined in their own ontologies that contain different and incomplete knowledge. Grounded interaction here has the form of examples that consists of common instances, for which the agents are expected to have similar knowledge. Our experiments demonstrate successful communication establishment under the required restrictions, and compare different agent policies that aim to solve the task in an efficient manner.","PeriodicalId":326727,"journal":{"name":"Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130139943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Many recent works have turned to multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for adaptive traffic signal control to optimize the travel time of vehicles over large urban networks. However, achieving effective and scalable cooperation among junctions (agents) remains an open challenge, as existing methods often rely on extensive, non-generalizable reward shaping or on non-scalable centralized learning. To address these problems, we propose a new MARL method for traffic signal control, SocialLight, which learns cooperative traffic control policies by distributedly estimating the individual marginal contribution of agents on their local neighborhood. SocialLight relies on the Asynchronous Actor Critic (A3C) framework, and makes learning scalable by learning a locally-centralized critic conditioned over the states and actions of neighboring agents, used by agents to estimate individual contributions by counterfactual reasoning. We further introduce important modifications to the advantage calculation that help stabilize policy updates. These modifications decouple the impact of the neighbors' actions on the computed advantages, thereby reducing the variance in the gradient updates. We benchmark our trained network against state-of-the-art traffic signal control methods on standard benchmarks in two traffic simulators, SUMO and CityFlow. Our results show that SocialLight exhibits improved scalability to larger road networks and better performance across usual traffic metrics.
{"title":"SocialLight: Distributed Cooperation Learning towards Network-Wide Traffic Signal Control","authors":"Harsh Goel, Yifeng Zhang, Mehul Damani, Guillaume Sartoretti","doi":"10.5555/3545946.3598809","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5555/3545946.3598809","url":null,"abstract":"Many recent works have turned to multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for adaptive traffic signal control to optimize the travel time of vehicles over large urban networks. However, achieving effective and scalable cooperation among junctions (agents) remains an open challenge, as existing methods often rely on extensive, non-generalizable reward shaping or on non-scalable centralized learning. To address these problems, we propose a new MARL method for traffic signal control, SocialLight, which learns cooperative traffic control policies by distributedly estimating the individual marginal contribution of agents on their local neighborhood. SocialLight relies on the Asynchronous Actor Critic (A3C) framework, and makes learning scalable by learning a locally-centralized critic conditioned over the states and actions of neighboring agents, used by agents to estimate individual contributions by counterfactual reasoning. We further introduce important modifications to the advantage calculation that help stabilize policy updates. These modifications decouple the impact of the neighbors' actions on the computed advantages, thereby reducing the variance in the gradient updates. We benchmark our trained network against state-of-the-art traffic signal control methods on standard benchmarks in two traffic simulators, SUMO and CityFlow. Our results show that SocialLight exhibits improved scalability to larger road networks and better performance across usual traffic metrics.","PeriodicalId":326727,"journal":{"name":"Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133645109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Niclas Boehmer, Markus Brill, Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin
Given a set of agents with approval preferences over each other, we study the task of finding k matchings fairly representing everyone’s preferences. To formalize fairness, we apply the concept of proportional representation as studied in approval-based multiwinner elections. To this end, we model the problem as a multiwinner election where the set of candidates consists of matchings of the agents, and agents’ preferences over each other are lifted to preferences over matchings. Due to the exponential number of candidates in such elections, standard algorithms for classical sequential voting rules (such as those proposed by Thiele and Phragmén) are rendered inefficient. We show that the computational tractability of these rules can be regained by exploiting the structure of the approval preferences. Moreover, we establish algorithmic results and axiomatic guarantees that go beyond those obtainable in the classical approval-based multiwinner setting: Assuming that approvals are symmetric, we show that Proportional Approval Voting (PAV), a well-established but computationally intractable voting rule, becomes polynomial-time computable, and that its sequential variant, which does not provide any proportionality guarantees in general, fulfills a rather strong guarantee known as extended justified representation. Some of our algorithmic results extend to other types of compactly representable elections with an exponential candidate space.
{"title":"Proportional Representation in Matching Markets: Selecting Multiple Matchings under Dichotomous Preferences","authors":"Niclas Boehmer, Markus Brill, Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin","doi":"10.5555/3535850.3535867","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5555/3535850.3535867","url":null,"abstract":"Given a set of agents with approval preferences over each other, we study the task of finding k matchings fairly representing everyone’s preferences. To formalize fairness, we apply the concept of proportional representation as studied in approval-based multiwinner elections. To this end, we model the problem as a multiwinner election where the set of candidates consists of matchings of the agents, and agents’ preferences over each other are lifted to preferences over matchings. Due to the exponential number of candidates in such elections, standard algorithms for classical sequential voting rules (such as those proposed by Thiele and Phragmén) are rendered inefficient. We show that the computational tractability of these rules can be regained by exploiting the structure of the approval preferences. Moreover, we establish algorithmic results and axiomatic guarantees that go beyond those obtainable in the classical approval-based multiwinner setting: Assuming that approvals are symmetric, we show that Proportional Approval Voting (PAV), a well-established but computationally intractable voting rule, becomes polynomial-time computable, and that its sequential variant, which does not provide any proportionality guarantees in general, fulfills a rather strong guarantee known as extended justified representation. Some of our algorithmic results extend to other types of compactly representable elections with an exponential candidate space.","PeriodicalId":326727,"journal":{"name":"Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123402642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-24DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2303.14227
Rafael Pina, V. D. Silva, Corentin Artaud
When learning a task as a team, some agents in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) may fail to understand their true impact in the performance of the team. Such agents end up learning sub-optimal policies, demonstrating undesired lazy behaviours. To investigate this problem, we start by formalising the use of temporal causality applied to MARL problems. We then show how causality can be used to penalise such lazy agents and improve their behaviours. By understanding how their local observations are causally related to the team reward, each agent in the team can adjust their individual credit based on whether they helped to cause the reward or not. We show empirically that using causality estimations in MARL improves not only the holistic performance of the team, but also the individual capabilities of each agent. We observe that the improvements are consistent in a set of different environments.
{"title":"Causality Detection for Efficient Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning","authors":"Rafael Pina, V. D. Silva, Corentin Artaud","doi":"10.48550/arXiv.2303.14227","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.14227","url":null,"abstract":"When learning a task as a team, some agents in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) may fail to understand their true impact in the performance of the team. Such agents end up learning sub-optimal policies, demonstrating undesired lazy behaviours. To investigate this problem, we start by formalising the use of temporal causality applied to MARL problems. We then show how causality can be used to penalise such lazy agents and improve their behaviours. By understanding how their local observations are causally related to the team reward, each agent in the team can adjust their individual credit based on whether they helped to cause the reward or not. We show empirically that using causality estimations in MARL improves not only the holistic performance of the team, but also the individual capabilities of each agent. We observe that the improvements are consistent in a set of different environments.","PeriodicalId":326727,"journal":{"name":"Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129845928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-23DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2303.13660
D. Radke, Alexi Orchard
This paper draws correlations between several challenges and opportunities within the area of team sports analytics and key research areas within multiagent systems (MAS). We specifically consider invasion games, defined as sports where players invade the opposing team's territory and can interact anywhere on a playing surface such as ice hockey, soccer, and basketball. We argue that MAS is well-equipped to study invasion games and will benefit both MAS and sports analytics fields. Our discussion highlights areas for MAS implementation and further development along two axes: short-term in-game strategy (coaching) and long-term team planning (management).
{"title":"Presenting Multiagent Challenges in Team Sports Analytics","authors":"D. Radke, Alexi Orchard","doi":"10.48550/arXiv.2303.13660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.13660","url":null,"abstract":"This paper draws correlations between several challenges and opportunities within the area of team sports analytics and key research areas within multiagent systems (MAS). We specifically consider invasion games, defined as sports where players invade the opposing team's territory and can interact anywhere on a playing surface such as ice hockey, soccer, and basketball. We argue that MAS is well-equipped to study invasion games and will benefit both MAS and sports analytics fields. Our discussion highlights areas for MAS implementation and further development along two axes: short-term in-game strategy (coaching) and long-term team planning (management).","PeriodicalId":326727,"journal":{"name":"Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems","volume":"25 12","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133170189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-23DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2303.13494
Gaia Belardinelli, Thomas Bolander
Attention is the crucial cognitive ability that limits and selects what information we observe. Previous work by Bolander et al. (2016) proposes a model of attention based on dynamic epistemic logic (DEL) where agents are either fully attentive or not attentive at all. While introducing the realistic feature that inattentive agents believe nothing happens, the model does not represent the most essential aspect of attention: its selectivity. Here, we propose a generalization that allows for paying attention to subsets of atomic formulas. We introduce the corresponding logic for propositional attention, and show its axiomatization to be sound and complete. We then extend the framework to account for inattentive agents that, instead of assuming nothing happens, may default to a specific truth-value of what they failed to attend to (a sort of prior concerning the unattended atoms). This feature allows for a more cognitively plausible representation of the inattentional blindness phenomenon, where agents end up with false beliefs due to their failure to attend to conspicuous but unexpected events. Both versions of the model define attention-based learning through appropriate DEL event models based on a few and clear edge principles. While the size of such event models grow exponentially both with the number of agents and the number of atoms, we introduce a new logical language for describing event models syntactically and show that using this language our event models can be represented linearly in the number of agents and atoms. Furthermore, representing our event models using this language is achieved by a straightforward formalisation of the aforementioned edge principles.
{"title":"Attention! Dynamic Epistemic Logic Models of (In)attentive Agents","authors":"Gaia Belardinelli, Thomas Bolander","doi":"10.48550/arXiv.2303.13494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.13494","url":null,"abstract":"Attention is the crucial cognitive ability that limits and selects what information we observe. Previous work by Bolander et al. (2016) proposes a model of attention based on dynamic epistemic logic (DEL) where agents are either fully attentive or not attentive at all. While introducing the realistic feature that inattentive agents believe nothing happens, the model does not represent the most essential aspect of attention: its selectivity. Here, we propose a generalization that allows for paying attention to subsets of atomic formulas. We introduce the corresponding logic for propositional attention, and show its axiomatization to be sound and complete. We then extend the framework to account for inattentive agents that, instead of assuming nothing happens, may default to a specific truth-value of what they failed to attend to (a sort of prior concerning the unattended atoms). This feature allows for a more cognitively plausible representation of the inattentional blindness phenomenon, where agents end up with false beliefs due to their failure to attend to conspicuous but unexpected events. Both versions of the model define attention-based learning through appropriate DEL event models based on a few and clear edge principles. While the size of such event models grow exponentially both with the number of agents and the number of atoms, we introduce a new logical language for describing event models syntactically and show that using this language our event models can be represented linearly in the number of agents and atoms. Furthermore, representing our event models using this language is achieved by a straightforward formalisation of the aforementioned edge principles.","PeriodicalId":326727,"journal":{"name":"Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133707780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-22DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2303.12390
William Hunt, Jack Ryan, A. Abioye, S. Ramchurn, Mohammad Divband Soorati
Autonomous swarms of robots can bring robustness, scalability and adaptability to safety-critical tasks such as search and rescue but their application is still very limited. Using semi-autonomous swarms with human control can bring robot swarms to real-world applications. Human operators can define goals for the swarm, monitor their performance and interfere with, or overrule, the decisions and behaviour. We present the ``Human And Robot Interactive Swarm'' simulator (HARIS) that allows multi-user interaction with a robot swarm and facilitates qualitative and quantitative user studies through simulation of robot swarms completing tasks, from package delivery to search and rescue, with varying levels of human control. In this demonstration, we showcase the simulator by using it to study the performance gain offered by maintaining a ``human-in-the-loop'' over a fully autonomous system as an example. This is illustrated in the context of search and rescue, with an autonomous allocation of resources to those in need.
{"title":"Demonstrating Performance Benefits of Human-Swarm Teaming","authors":"William Hunt, Jack Ryan, A. Abioye, S. Ramchurn, Mohammad Divband Soorati","doi":"10.48550/arXiv.2303.12390","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.12390","url":null,"abstract":"Autonomous swarms of robots can bring robustness, scalability and adaptability to safety-critical tasks such as search and rescue but their application is still very limited. Using semi-autonomous swarms with human control can bring robot swarms to real-world applications. Human operators can define goals for the swarm, monitor their performance and interfere with, or overrule, the decisions and behaviour. We present the ``Human And Robot Interactive Swarm'' simulator (HARIS) that allows multi-user interaction with a robot swarm and facilitates qualitative and quantitative user studies through simulation of robot swarms completing tasks, from package delivery to search and rescue, with varying levels of human control. In this demonstration, we showcase the simulator by using it to study the performance gain offered by maintaining a ``human-in-the-loop'' over a fully autonomous system as an example. This is illustrated in the context of search and rescue, with an autonomous allocation of resources to those in need.","PeriodicalId":326727,"journal":{"name":"Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114270450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-13DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2303.07435
Atrisha Sarkar, K. Larson, K. Czarnecki
A central design problem in game theoretic analysis is the estimation of the players' utilities. In many real-world interactive situations of human decision making, including human driving, the utilities are multi-objective in nature; therefore, estimating the parameters of aggregation, i.e., mapping of multi-objective utilities to a scalar value, becomes an essential part of game construction. However, estimating this parameter from observational data introduces several challenges due to a host of unobservable factors, including the underlying modality of aggregation and the possibly boundedly rational behaviour model that generated the observation. Based on the concept of rationalisability, we develop algorithms for estimating multi-objective aggregation parameters for two common aggregation methods, weighted and satisficing aggregation, and for both strategic and non-strategic reasoning models. Based on three different datasets, we provide insights into how human drivers aggregate the utilities of safety and progress, as well as the situational dependence of the aggregation process. Additionally, we show that irrespective of the specific solution concept used for solving the games, a data-driven estimation of utility aggregation significantly improves the predictive accuracy of behaviour models with respect to observed human behaviour.
{"title":"Revealed Multi-Objective Utility Aggregation in Human Driving","authors":"Atrisha Sarkar, K. Larson, K. Czarnecki","doi":"10.48550/arXiv.2303.07435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.07435","url":null,"abstract":"A central design problem in game theoretic analysis is the estimation of the players' utilities. In many real-world interactive situations of human decision making, including human driving, the utilities are multi-objective in nature; therefore, estimating the parameters of aggregation, i.e., mapping of multi-objective utilities to a scalar value, becomes an essential part of game construction. However, estimating this parameter from observational data introduces several challenges due to a host of unobservable factors, including the underlying modality of aggregation and the possibly boundedly rational behaviour model that generated the observation. Based on the concept of rationalisability, we develop algorithms for estimating multi-objective aggregation parameters for two common aggregation methods, weighted and satisficing aggregation, and for both strategic and non-strategic reasoning models. Based on three different datasets, we provide insights into how human drivers aggregate the utilities of safety and progress, as well as the situational dependence of the aggregation process. Additionally, we show that irrespective of the specific solution concept used for solving the games, a data-driven estimation of utility aggregation significantly improves the predictive accuracy of behaviour models with respect to observed human behaviour.","PeriodicalId":326727,"journal":{"name":"Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130869504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In large-scale multi-agent systems like taxi fleets, individual agents (taxi drivers) are self-interested (maximizing their own profits) and this can introduce inefficiencies in the system. One such inefficiency is with regard to the"required"availability of taxis at different time periods during the day. Since a taxi driver can work for a limited number of hours in a day (e.g., 8-10 hours in a city like Singapore), there is a need to optimize the specific hours, so as to maximize individual as well as social welfare. Technically, this corresponds to solving a large-scale multi-stage selfish routing game with transition uncertainty. Existing work in addressing this problem is either unable to handle ``driver"constraints (e.g., breaks during work hours) or not scalable. To that end, we provide a novel mechanism that builds on replicator dynamics through ideas from behavior cloning. We demonstrate that our methods provide significantly better policies than the existing approach in terms of improving individual agent revenue and overall agent availability.
{"title":"Strategic Planning for Flexible Agent Availability in Large Taxi Fleets","authors":"Rajiv Ranjan Kumar, Pradeep Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng","doi":"10.48550/arXiv.2303.04337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.04337","url":null,"abstract":"In large-scale multi-agent systems like taxi fleets, individual agents (taxi drivers) are self-interested (maximizing their own profits) and this can introduce inefficiencies in the system. One such inefficiency is with regard to the\"required\"availability of taxis at different time periods during the day. Since a taxi driver can work for a limited number of hours in a day (e.g., 8-10 hours in a city like Singapore), there is a need to optimize the specific hours, so as to maximize individual as well as social welfare. Technically, this corresponds to solving a large-scale multi-stage selfish routing game with transition uncertainty. Existing work in addressing this problem is either unable to handle ``driver\"constraints (e.g., breaks during work hours) or not scalable. To that end, we provide a novel mechanism that builds on replicator dynamics through ideas from behavior cloning. We demonstrate that our methods provide significantly better policies than the existing approach in terms of improving individual agent revenue and overall agent availability.","PeriodicalId":326727,"journal":{"name":"Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121955503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-06DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2303.03075
Sizhe Gu, Yao Zhang, Yi-Zhou Zhao, Dengji Zhao
Redistribution mechanism design aims to redistribute the revenue collected by a truthful auction back to its participants without affecting the truthfulness. We study redistribution mechanisms for diffusion auctions, which is a new trend in mechanism design [19]. The key property of a diffusion auction is that the existing participants are incentivized to invite new participants to join the auctions. Hence, when we design redistributions, we also need to maintain this incentive. Existing redistribution mechanisms in the traditional setting are targeted at modifying the payment design of a truthful mechanism, such as the Vickrey auction. In this paper, we do not focus on one specific mechanism. Instead, we propose a general framework to redistribute the revenue back for all truthful diffusion auctions for selling a single item. The framework treats the original truthful diffusion auction as a black box, and it does not affect its truthfulness. The framework can also distribute back almost all the revenue.
{"title":"A Redistribution Framework for Diffusion Auctions","authors":"Sizhe Gu, Yao Zhang, Yi-Zhou Zhao, Dengji Zhao","doi":"10.48550/arXiv.2303.03075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.03075","url":null,"abstract":"Redistribution mechanism design aims to redistribute the revenue collected by a truthful auction back to its participants without affecting the truthfulness. We study redistribution mechanisms for diffusion auctions, which is a new trend in mechanism design [19]. The key property of a diffusion auction is that the existing participants are incentivized to invite new participants to join the auctions. Hence, when we design redistributions, we also need to maintain this incentive. Existing redistribution mechanisms in the traditional setting are targeted at modifying the payment design of a truthful mechanism, such as the Vickrey auction. In this paper, we do not focus on one specific mechanism. Instead, we propose a general framework to redistribute the revenue back for all truthful diffusion auctions for selling a single item. The framework treats the original truthful diffusion auction as a black box, and it does not affect its truthfulness. The framework can also distribute back almost all the revenue.","PeriodicalId":326727,"journal":{"name":"Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126795697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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