New Zealand

S. H. Kho, S. P. Govilkar, A. S. Myint and M. J. Hershman (October 10th 2011). Rectal Carcinoma: Multi-Modality Approach in Curative Local Treatment of Early Rectal Carcinoma, Rectal Cancer - A Multidisciplinary Approach to Management, Giulio Aniello Santoro, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/25724. 

Alexander Kindler, Natasa Golo and Sorin Solomon (December 14th 2016). Stochastic Agent-Based Simulation of the Role of Labor in the Economy, Complex Systems, Sustainability and Innovation, Ciza Thomas, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/64698.

Neural networks that output the parameters of a diagonal Gaussian distribution are widely used in reinforcement learning tasks with continuous action spaces. They have had considerable success in single-agent domains and even in some multi-agent tasks. However, general multi-agent tasks often require mixed strategies whose distributions cannot be well approximated by Gaussians or their mixtures. This paper proposes an alternative for policy representation based on normalizing flows. This approach allows for greater flexibility in action distribution representation beyond mixture models. We demonstrate their advantage over standard methods on a set of imitation learning tasks modeling human driving behaviors in the presence of other drivers.


AAMAS 2020

Normalizing Flow Model for Policy Representation in Continuous Action Multi-agent Systems

density modeling

stochastic policies

continuous actions

multi-modality

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

AAAI 2025

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.



technical paper

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally-respected archival forum for scientific research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

Browse keynotes, discussions, panels and over 300 presentations.


AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). 

Multi-agent coordination is prevalent in many real-world applications. However, such coordination is challenging due to its combinatorial nature. An important observation in this regard is that agents in the real world often only directly affect a limited set of neighbouring agents. Leveraging such loose couplings among agents is key to making coordination in multi-agent systems feasible.
In this work, we focus on learning to coordinate.
Specifically, we consider the multi-agent multi-armed bandit framework, in which fully cooperative loosely-coupled agents must learn to coordinate their decisions to optimize a common objective. 
We propose multi-agent Thompson sampling (MATS), a new Bayesian exploration-exploitation algorithm that leverages loose couplings. We empirically show that MATS outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm, MAUCE, on two synthetic benchmarks with Bernoulli-distributed rewards. Our results show that MATS improves significantly upon state-of-the-art coordination methods in terms of performance, demonstrating the value of using MATS in applications with sparse neighbourhood structures.


Thompson Sampling for Factored Multi-Agent Bandits

Despite the success of deep reinforcement learning in a variety type of games such as Board games, RTS, FPS, and MOBA games, sports games (SPG) like basketball have been seldom studied. Basketball is one of the most popular and challenging sports games due to its long-time horizon, sparse rewards, complex game rules, and multiple roles with different capabilities. Although these problems could be partially alleviated by common methods like hierarchical reinforcement learning through a decomposition of the whole game into several subtasks based on game rules (such as attack, defense), these methods tend to ignore the strong correlations between these subtasks and could have difficulty in generating reasonable poli- cies across the whole basketball match. Besides, the existence of multiple agents adds extra challenges to such game. In this work, we propose an integrated curriculum training approach (ICTA) which is composed of two parts. The first part is for handling the correlated subtasks from the perspective of a single player, which contains several weighted cascading curriculum learners that can smoothly unify the base curriculum training of corresponding sub- tasks together using a Q-value backup mechanism with a weight factor. The second part is for enhancing the cooperation ability of the basketball team, which is a curriculum switcher that focuses on learning the switch of the cooperative curriculum within one team by taking over collaborative actions such as passing from single- player’s action spaces. Our method is then applied to a commercial online basketball game named Fever Basketball (FB). Results show that ICTA significantly outperforms the built-in AI and reaches up to around 70% win-rate than online human players during a 300-day evaluation period.


Mastering Basketball with Deep Reinforcement Learning: An Integrated Curriculum Training Approach

We consider Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approaches to devise mapless navigation strategies for mobile platforms. We propose a Genetic Deep Reinforcement Learning (GDRL) method that combines Genetic Algorithms (GA) with discrete and continuous action space DRL approaches. The goal of GDRL is to reduce the sensitivity of DRL approaches to their hyper-parameter tuning and to provide robust exploration strategies. We evaluate GDRL in combination with Rainbow and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in two navigation scenarios: i) a wheeled robot avoiding obstacles in an indoor environment and ii) a water drone that must reach a predefined location in presence of waves. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that GDRL outperforms state-of-the-art DRL and GA methods as well as a previous hybrid approach.


Genetic Deep Reinforcement Learning for Mapless Navigation

Multi-agent path finding (MAPF), naturally exists in applications like picking-up and dropping-off parcels by automated guided vehicles (AGVs) in the warehouse. Existing algorithms, like conflict-based search (CBS), windowed hierarchical cooperative A* (WHCA), and other A* variants, are widely used to find the shortest paths in different manners. However, in real-world environments, MAPF cases are dynamically generated and need to be solved in real time. In this work, a decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework with multi-step ahead tree search (MATS) strategy is proposed to make efficient decisions. Through performing experiments on a 30*30 grid world and a real-world warehouse case, our proposed MARL policy is proved to be capable of: 1) scaling to a large number of agents in real-world environment with online response time within acceptable levels; 2) outperforming existing algorithms with shorter path length and solution time, as the number of agents increases.


Learning to Cooperate: Application of Deep Reinforcement Learning for Online AGV Path Finding

In this talk, we study a variant of hedonic games, called Seat Arrangement. 
The model is defined by a bijection from agents with preferences to vertices in a graph.
The utility of an agent depends on the neighbors in the graph. 
In this talk, we study the price of stability and fairness in Seat Arrangement, and the computational complexity and the parameterized complexity of finding certain desirable seat arrangements, say Maximum Welfare Arrangement, Maximin Utility Arrangement, Stable Arrangement, and Envy-free Arrangement.


Hedonic Seat Arrangement Problems

In order to be useful in the real world, an AI agent needs to plan and act in the presence of other agents, who may be helpful or disruptive. In this paper, we consider the problem where an autonomous agent needs to act in a manner that clarifies its objectives to cooperative agents while simultaneously preventing adversarial agents from inferring those objectives. We call it Mixed-Observer Controlled Observability Planning Problem (MO-COPP). We develop two new solution approaches: one provides an optimal solution to the problem given a fixed time horizon by using an integer programming solver, the other provides a satisficing solution using heuristic-guided forward search to achieve prespecified amount of obfuscation and legibility for adversarial and cooperative agents respectively. 


Signaling Friends and Head-Faking Enemies Simultaneously: Balancing Goal Obfuscation and Goal Legibility

In many multi-agent interactions in the real world, agents receive payoffs over multiple distinct criteria; i.e. the payoffs are multi-objective in nature. However, the same multi-objective payoff vector may lead to different utilities for each participant. Therefore, it is essential for an agent to learn about the behaviour of other agents in the system. We investigate here the effects of opponent modelling on multi-objective multi-agent interactions with non-linear utilities. Specifically, we consider multi-objective normal form games (MONFGs) with non-linear utility functions under the scalarised expected returns optimisation criterion. We contribute a novel actor-critic formulation to allow reinforcement learning of mixed strategies in this setting, along with an extension that incorporates opponent policy reconstruction using conditional action frequencies. Our empirical results demonstrate that opponent modelling can drastically alter the learning dynamics in this setting.


Opponent Modelling for Reinforcement Learning in Multi-Objective Normal Form Games

Too many coocks: Coordinating multi-agent collaboration through inverse planning

Reinforcement learning and planning have been revolutionized in recent years, due in part to the mass adoption of deep convolutional neural networks and the resurgence of powerful methods to refine decision-making policies. However, the problem of sparse reward signals remains pervasive in many domains. While various reward-shaping mechanisms and imitation learning approaches have been proposed to mitigate this problem, a mathematically rigorous structure of the underlying objective is rarely exploited. In this paper, we resolve this by defining objectives using linear temporal logic over finite traces (LTL_f) and utilize the automaton representation of said objectives in order to define novel reward shaping functions that mitigate the sparse rewards problem within modern Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) methods. We further demonstrate that such verification-guided reward shaping can be utilized to facilitate transfer learning between different environments when the objective is the same.


Verification-Guided Tree Search

This presentation describes the use of CArtAgO artifacts to represent virtual resources exposed by an agent in a hypermedia context as an extension of the Multi-Agent MicroServices architecture.

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Thompson Sampling for Factored Multi-Agent Bandits

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Thompson Sampling for Factored Multi-Agent Bandits

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