United Kingdom

In this work, we define the consensus-prevention problem, which examines the canonical swarm robotic consensus problem from an adversarial point of view: how (if at all) is it possible to lead a swarm into a disagreement, that is, prevent them from reaching an agreement. We focus on consensus-prevention in physically grounded tasks, concentrating on influencing the direction of movement of a flocking swarm and guaranteeing that the swarm will never converge to the same direction by the use of external, predefined agents, referred to as diverting agents.

AAMAS 2021

Spatial Consensus-Prevention in Robotic Swarms

AAMAS is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems, bringing together researchers and practitioners in all areas of agent technology and providing and internationally renowned high-profile forum for publishing and finding out about the latest developments in the field. AAMAS is the flagship conference of the non-profit International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).  

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technical paper

Modeling vessel movement in a maritime environment is an extremely challenging task given the complex nature of vessel behavior. Several existing multiagent maritime decision making frameworks require access to an accurate traffic simulator. We develop a system using electronic navigation charts to generate realistic and high fidelity vessel traffic data using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Our proposed Ship-GAN uses a conditional Wasserstein GAN to model a vessel's behavior. The generator can simulate the travel time of vessels across different maritime zones conditioned on vessels' speeds and traffic intensity. Furthermore, it can be used as an accurate simulator for prior decision making approaches for maritime traffic coordination, which used less accurate model than our approach. Experiments performed on the historical data from heavily trafficked Singapore strait show that our Ship-GAN system generates data whose statistical distribution is close to the real data distribution, and better fit than prior methods.

Ship-GAN: Generative Modeling Based Maritime Traffic Simulator

In recent years, machine learning (ML) models have been successfully applied in a variety of real-world applications. However, they are often complex and incomprehensible to human users. This can decrease trust in their outputs and render their usage in critical settings ethically problematic. As a result, several methods for explaining such ML models have been proposed recently, in particular for black-box models such as deep neural networks (NNs). Nevertheless, these methods predominantly explain model outputs in terms of inputs, disregarding the inner workings of the ML model computing those outputs. We present Argflow, a toolkit enabling the generation of a variety of ‘deep’ argumentative explanations (DAXs) for outputs of NNs on classification tasks.

Argflow: A Toolkit for Deep Argumentative Explanations for Neural Networks

In this paper, we demonstrate a Symbolic Reinforcement Learning (SRL) architecture for safe control in Radio Access Network (RAN) applications. In our automated tool, a user can select a high-level safety specifications expressed in Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) to shield an RL agent running in a given cellular network with aim of optimizing network performance, as measured through certain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). In the proposed architecture, network safety shielding is ensured through model-checking techniques over combined discrete system models (automata) that are abstracted through reinforcement learning. We demonstrate the user interface (UI) helping the user set intent specifications to the architecture and inspect the difference in allowed and blocked actions.

Symbolic Reinforcement Learning for Safe RAN Control

In AI, Multi-Agent Systems are able to model many kind of collective behavior and have therefore a wide range of application. In this paper, we propose a logical framework (Logic of "Inferable") which enable reasoning about whether a group of agents can perform an action, highlighting the concepts of cost of actions and of budget that agents have available to perform actions. The focus is on modeling the group dynamics of cooperative agents.

A Logic of Inferable in Multi-Agent Systems with Budget and Costs

Recently, we have proposed a framework for verification of agents' abilities in asynchronous multi-agent systems, together with an algorithm for automated reduction of models. The semantics was built on the modeling tradition of distributed systems. As we show here, this can sometimes lead to counterintuitive interpretation of formulas when reasoning about the outcome of strategies.

Strategic Abilities of Asynchronous Agents: Semantic Side Effects

Multi-robot task allocation is one of the most fundamental classes of problems in robotics and is crucial for various real-world robotic  applications such as search, rescue and area exploration. We consider the Single-Task robots and Multi-Robot tasks Instantaneous Assignment (ST-MR-IA) setting where each task requires at least a certain number of robots and each robot can work on at most one task and incurs an operational cost for each task. Our aim is  to consider a natural computational problem of allocating robots to complete the maximum number of tasks subject to budget constraints. We consider budget constraints of three different kinds: (1) total budget, (2) task budget, and (3) robot budget. We provide a detailed complexity analysis including results on approximations  as well as polynomial-time algorithms for the general setting and important restricted settings.

Multi-Robot Task Allocation—Complexity and Approximation

The envy-free, Pareto-efficient allocation of indivisible goods leads to computationally hard problems. There is a big variety of modeling issues, such as agent-specific utility functions or (high numbers of) different types of goods. In recent work, Bredereck et al. [ACM EC~2019] addressed this topic by showing (theoretical) fixed-parameter tractability results for "high-multiplicity fair allocation", exploiting parameters such as number of agents or maximum absolute   utility values. To this end, they used a number of tools from (theoretical) integer linear programming. We "engineer" their work towards practical usefulness, thereby being able to solve all real-world instances from the state-of-art online platform "spliddit.org for provably fair solutions". Besides providing the foundations for a fast tool for fair allocations, we also offer a flexible framework with the possibility to relax fairness or efficiency demands so to, e.g., allow tradeoffs between fairness and social welfare. Moreover, our framework provides ways to interpret and explain "solution paths" which makes it possible to perform further explorations in cases when no envy-free and efficient allocations exist.

High-Multiplicity Fair Allocation Made More Practical

The bipolar argumentation framework (BAF) setting is an extension of Dung’s setting for abstract argumentation, that considers an additional relation, called support relation. Several interpretations of such a support relation have been pointed out so far, including deductive, necessity, general and backing supports. These notions of support capture different kinds of interactions between arguments, that do not primarily correspond to attacks. In this paper, we propose a new notion of support, called monotonic support. Our approach is axiomatic: two postulates are introduced for capturing the intuition that underlies this notion of support in formal terms. The first postulate, monotony, prevents the support relation from downgrading the acceptance status of the supported argument. The second postulate, non-triviality, requires the existence of BAFs for which supporting an argument leads to increase its acceptance status. We present a general family of extension-based semantics for BAFs, called support score-based (SSB) semantics, that satisfy the two postulates and are parameterized by some aggregation functions. We prove a characterisation result linking the postulates that a SBB semantics satisfies with the properties of the aggregation functions used to define it. We also show that none of the previously introduced semantics for BAFs satisfies the monotony postulate.

On a Notion of Monotonic Support for Bipolar Argumentation Frameworks

A fair competition, based on the concept of envy-freeness, is a non-eliminating competition where each contestant (team or individual player) may not play against all other contestants, but the total difficulty for each contestant is the same: the sum of the initial rankings of the opponents for each contestant is the same. Similar to other non-eliminating competitions like the Round-robin competition or the Swiss-system competition, the winner of the fair competition is the contestant who wins the most games. The Fair Non-Eliminating Tournament (Fair-NET ) problem can be used to schedule fair competitions whose infrastructure is known. In the Fair-NET problem, we are given an infrastructure of a tournament represented by a graph G and the initial rankings of the contestants represented by a multiset of integers S. The objective is to decide whether G is S-fair, i.e., there exists an assignment of the contestants to the vertices of G such that the sum of the rankings of the neighbors of each contestant in G is the same constant k&#8712; N. We initiate a study of the classical and parameterized complexity of Fair-NET with respect to several central structural parameters motivated by real world scenarios, thereby presenting a comprehensive picture of it.

Multivariate Analysis of Scheduling Fair Competitions

The pursuit of values drives human behavior and promotes cooperation. Existing research is focused on general (e.g., Schwartz) values that transcend contexts. However, context-specific values are necessary to (1) understand human decisions, and (2) engineer intelligent agents that can elicit human values and take value-aligned actions.

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Ship-GAN: Generative Modeling Based Maritime Traffic Simulator

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Next from AAMAS 2021

Ship-GAN: Generative Modeling Based Maritime Traffic Simulator

Similar lecture

HOAD: The Hanabi Open Agent Dataset

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