New Zealand

Leo Raju and Antony Amalraj Morais (April 22nd 2020). Multi-Agent Systems Based Advanced Energy Management of Smart Micro-grid, Multi Agent Systems - Strategies and Applications, Ricardo López - Ruiz, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.90402.

We propose a formalism to model and reason about multi-agent systems. We allow agents to interact and communicate in different modes so that they can pursue joint tasks; agents may dynamically synchronize, exchange data, adapt their behaviour, and reconfigure their communication interfaces. The formalism defines a local behaviour based on shared variables and a global one based on message passing. We extend LTL to be able to reason explicitly about the intentions of the different agents and their interaction protocols. We also study the complexity of satisfiability and model-checking of this extension.


AAMAS 2020

Reconfigurable Interaction for MAS Modelling

logics for agent reasoning

verification of multi-agent systems

agent theories and models

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). 

technical paper

In this paper we present a novel approach to optimise tactical and strategic decision making in football (soccer). We model the game of football as a multi-stage game which is made up from a Bayesian game to model the pre-match decisions and a stochastic game to model the in-match state transitions and decisions. Using this formulation, we propose a method to predict the probability of game outcomes and the payoffs of team actions. Building upon this, we develop algorithms to optimise team formation and in-game tactics with different objectives. Empirical evaluation of our approach on real-world datasets from 760 matches shows that by using optimised tactics from our Bayesian and stochastic games, we increase a team chances of winning by 16.1% and 3.4% respectively. 


Optimising Game Tactics for Football

We propose a market-inspired bidding scheme for the assignment of paper reviews in large academic conferences. The primary contribution is an analysis of the incentives of reviewers during the bidding phases, when reviewers have private costs and some information about the demand for each paper, and want to obtain the best possible k papers for a predetermined k. We show that by assigning budgets to reviewers and a `price' for every paper that is (roughly) inversely proportional to its demand, the best response of a reviewer is to bid sincerely, i.e., on her most favorite papers, and match the budget even when it is not enforced. Finally, we show via extensive simulations on bidding data from real conferences, that our suggested bidding scheme would substantially improve the assignment, under several common assignment algorithms.

A Market-Inspired Bidding Scheme for Peer Review Paper Assignment

Equitable Allocations of Invisible Chores

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been widely used to solve sequential decision-making problems. However, RL algorithms suffer from poor sample efficiency and require a long time to learn a suitable policy, especially when multiple agents are learning without prior knowledge. This problem can be alleviated through reusing knowledge from other agents during the learning process. One notable approach is advising actions based on a teacher-student relationship, where the decision of a student agent during learning is aided by an experienced teacher agent. A critical assumption in teacher-student paradigm is that the communication may be limited, so that a student may wait for a while and learn by itself before receiving the next advice. More importantly, in some noisy or stochastic environments, the student may not be able to mas- ter the advised actions when they are only performed once. We propose three methods for agents choosing between learning by exploration, asking for advice and reusing previous advice. The results show that our approaches significantly outperform existing advising methods without reusing advice.


Learning by Reusing Previous Advice in Teacher-Student Paradigm

A Deliberate BIAT Logic for Modelling Manipulations

We introduce and analyze new envy-based fairness concepts for agents with weights that quantify their entitlements in the allocation of indivisible items. We propose two variants of weighted envy-freeness up to one item (WEF1): strong, where the envy can be eliminated by removing an item from the envied agent’s bundle, and weak, where the envy can be eliminated either by removing an item as in the strong version or by replicating an item from the envied agent’s bundle in the envying agent’s bundle. We prove that for additive valuations, an allocation that is both Pareto optimal and strongly WEF1 always exists; however, an allocation that maximizes the weighted Nash social welfare may not be strongly WEF1 but always satisfies the weak version of the property. Moreover, we establish that a generalization of the round-robin picking sequence algorithm produces in polynomial time a strongly WEF1 allocation for an arbitrary number of agents; for two agents, we can efficiently achieve both strong WEF1 and Pareto optimality by adapting the adjusted winner procedure. Our work exhibits several aspects in which weighted fair division is richer and more challenging than its unweighted counterpart.


Weighted Envy-Freeness in Indivisible Item Allocation

Mean field theory provides an effective way of scaling multiagent reinforcement learning algorithms to environments with many agents that can be abstracted by a virtual mean agent. In this paper, we extend mean field multiagent algorithms to multiple types. The types enable the relaxation of a core assumption in mean field games, which is that all agents in the environment are playing almost similar strategies and have the same goal. We conduct experiments on three different testbeds for the field of many agent reinforcement learning, based on the standard MAgents framework. We consider two different kinds of mean field games: a) Games where agents belong to predefined types that are known a priori and b) Games where the type of each agent is unknown and therefore must be learned based on observations. We introduce new algorithms for each type of game and demonstrate their superior performance over state of the art algorithms that assume that all agents belong to the same type and other baseline algorithms in the MAgent framework.


Multi Type Mean Field Reinforcement Learning

Multi-agent reinforcement learning has generally been studied under an assumption inherited from classical reinforcement learning: that the reward function is the exclusive property of the environment, and is only altered by external factors. In this work, we break free of this assumption and introduce peer rewarding, in which agents can deliberately influence each others' reward function. We formalize this more general setting and discuss its properties in depth. We also empirically study gifting, a peer rewarding mechanism which allows agents to reward other agents as part of their action space. We demonstrate that this approach can greatly improve learning progression in a resource appropriation setting and provide a preliminary analysis of the complex effects of gifting on the learning dynamics.


Gifting in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms make decisions by building and utilizing a model of the environment. However, none of the existing algorithms attempts to infer the dynamics of any state-action pair from known state-action pairs before meeting it for sufficient times. We propose a new model-based method called Greedy Inference Model (GIM) that infers the unknown dynamics from known dynamics based on the internal spectral properties of the environment. In other words, GIM can "learn by analogy". We further introduce a new exploration strategy which ensures that the agent rapidly and evenly visits unknown state-action pairs. GIM is much more computationally efficient than state-of-the-art model-based algorithms, as the number of dynamic programming operations is independent of the environment size. Lower sample complexity could also be achieved under mild conditions compared against methods without inferring. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of GIM in a variety of real-world tasks.


Can Agents Learn by Analogy? An Inferable Model for PAC Reinforcement Learning

While game-theoretic models and algorithms have been developed to combat illegal activities, such as poaching and over-fishing, in green security domains, none of the existing work considers the crucial aspect of community engagement: community members are recruited by law enforcement agencies as informants and can provide valuable tips, e.g., the location of ongoing illegal activities, to assist patrols. We fill this gap and (i) introduce a novel two-stage security game model for community engagement, with a bipartite graph representing the informant-attacker social network and a level-$\kappa$ response model for attackers inspired by cognitive hierarchy; (ii) provide complexity results and exact, approximate, and heuristic algorithms for selecting informants and allocating patrollers against level-$\kappa$ ($\kappa<\infty$) attackers; (iii) provide a novel algorithm to find the optimal defender strategy against level-$\infty$ attackers, which converts the problem of optimizing a parameterized fixed-point to a bi-level optimization problem, where the inner level is just a linear program, and the outer level has only a linear number of variables and a single linear constraint. We also evaluate the algorithms through extensive experiments.


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Optimising Game Tactics for Football

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Networked Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Emergent Communication

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Next from AAMAS 2020

Optimising Game Tactics for Football

Similar lecture

Networked Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Emergent Communication

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