New Zealand

Eduardo G. Hernández-Martínez and Eduardo Aranda-Bricaire (April 1st 2011). Convergence and Collision Avoidance in Formation Control: A Survey of the Artificial Potential Functions Approach, Multi-Agent Systems - Modeling, Control, Programming, Simulations and Applications, Faisal Alkhateeb, Eslam Al Maghayreh and Iyad Abu Doush, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/14142. 

An important aspect of multi-agent systems concerns the formation of coalitions that are stable or optimal in some well-defined way. The notion of popularity has recently received a lot of attention in this context. A partition is popular if there is no other partition in which more agents are better off than worse off. 
In 2019, a long-standing open problem concerning popularity was solved by proving that computing popular partitions in roommate games is NP-hard, even when preferences are strict. We show that this result breaks down when allowing for randomization: mixed popular partitions can be found efficiently via linear programming and a separation oracle. Mixed popular partitions are particularly attractive because they are guaranteed to exist in any coalition formation game.
Our result implies that one can efficiently verify whether a given partition in a roommate game is popular and that strongly popular partitions can be found in polynomial time (resolving an open problem). By contrast, we prove that both problems become computationally intractable when moving from coalitions of size 2 to coalitions of size 3, even when preferences are strict and globally ranked.


AAMAS 2020

Finding and Recognizing Popular Coalition Structures

coalition formation

social choice theory

popularity

AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems) is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners in all areas of agent technology and to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. AAMAS is the flagship conference of the non-profit International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).

The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 in Bologna, Italy as a joint event comprising the 6th International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA), the 5th International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS), and the 9th International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL).

Subsequent AAMAS conferences have been held in Melbourne, Australia (July 2003), New York City, NY, USA (July 2004), Utrecht, The Netherlands (July 2005), Hakodate, Japan (May 2006), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (May 2007), Estoril, Portugal (May 2008), Budapest, Hungary (May 2009), Toronto, Canada (May 2010), Taipei, Taiwan (May 2011), Valencia, Spain (June 2012), Minnesota, USA (May 2013), Paris, France (May 2014), Istanbul, Turkey (May 2015), Singapore (May 2016), São Paulo (2017) and Stockholm, Sweden (2018), Montreal (May 2019), Auckland (May 2020, Virtual), London (May 2021, Virtual).
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A ticket is required to attend this event, please register using the link below:

https://aamas2022-conference.auckland.ac.nz/attending/registration/

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AAMAS 2022

AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems) is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners in all areas of agent technology and to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. AAMAS is the flagship conference of the non-profit International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).

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). 

Designers of virtual agents have a combinatorically large space of choices for different media that comprise the look and behavior of their characters. We explore the systematic manipulation of animation quality, speech quality, and rendering style, and its impact on the perceptions of virtual agents in terms of naturalness, engagement, trust, credibility, and persuasion within a health counseling domain. The agent’s counseling behavior was based on live video footage of a human counselor. We conducted a between-subjects study that had 12 conditions. Character animation was varied between a static image, procedural animation using a gestuary, and manually rotoscoped animation. Voice quality was varied between recorded audio of the human counselor and synthetic speech. Character rendering style was varied between 3D-shaded realistic and toon-shaded. Prior studies indicate that people prefer and attribute more sociality to other people and agents when modalities are consistent in their level of quality. Thus, we hypothesize that people will be most affected by agents whose animation, voice, and rendering style are consistent, rather than the effects of channel quality being purely additive. Results indicate that natural animations and recorded voice are more appropriate for general acceptance, trust, and credibility of the agent, and how appropriate she seems for the task. However, our results indicate that for a brief health counseling task, animation might actually be distracting from the persuasive message, with the highest levels of persuasion found when the amount of agent animation is minimized.


Navigating the Combinatorics of Virtual Agent Design Space to Maximize Persuasion

We initiate the study of cloning in multiwinner elections, focusing
on single-transferable vote (STV), single-nontransferable vote
(SNTV), bloc, k-Borda, t-approval-CC, and Borda-CC. Transferring
the model of cloning due to Elkind et al. [15] from single-winner to
multiwinner elections, we consider decision problems describing
possible and necessary cloning in the zero-cost, the unit-cost, and
the general-cost model and study their computational complexity.
We show that, depending on the multiwinner voting rule and on
the cost model chosen, some of these cloning problems are in P,
some are NP-hard, and some of the latter (for which, in fact, already
winner determination is NP-hard) are fixed-parameter tractable.

The Complexity of Cloning Candidates in Multiwinner Elections

The hypergraph matching game is a cooperative game defined on a hypergraph such that the vertices are the players, and the characteristic function is the value of a maximum hypergraph matching on a hypergraph induced by a coalition. 
In this talk, we study a computationally tractable condition of the hypergraph matching game, called the convexity.
First, we prove that the problem of checking whether a given hypergraph matching game is convex or not is solvable in polynomial time.
Second, we prove that the Shapley value of a given convex hypergraph matching game is exactly computable in polynomial time.
Finally, we consider the fractional hypergraph matching game and prove that if the fractional hypergraph matching game is convex, then its characteristic function coincides with the characteristic function of the corresponding (integral) hypergraph matching game.

Convexity of Hypergraph Matching Game

We live in a world full of complex social systems. Achieving opti- mal control in a complex social system is challenging due to the difficulty in modeling and optimization. To capture the complex social system dynamics accurately and succinctly, we model the decision-making problem as a partially observable discrete event decision process. To withstand the curse of dimensionality in high- dimensional belief state spaces and to optimize the problem in an amenable searching space, we investigate the connections between the value function of a partially observable decision process and that in the corresponding fully-observable scenario, and reduce the optimal control of a partially observable discrete event decision process to a policy optimization with a specially formed fully ob- servable decision process and a belief state estimation. When tested in real-world transportation scenarios, in comparison with other state-of-the-art approaches, our proposed algorithm leads to the least average time on-road, the largest number of vehicles at work during work hours and the fewest training epochs to converge to the highest total rewards per episode.


Optimal Control in Partially Observable Complex Social Systems

We introduce a model for agent-environment systems where the agents are implemented via feed-forward ReLU neural networks and the environment is non-deterministic. We study the verification problem of such systems against CTL properties. We introduce a bounded fragment of CTL and show its usefulness in identifying shallow bugs in the system. We present a novel parallel algorithm for MILP-based verification of agent-environment systems, present an implementation, and report the experimental results obtained against a variant of the VerticalCAS use-case.


Formal Verification of Neural Agents in Non-deterministic Environments

Coupon has been a major marketing tool that promotes sales for new and repeated buyers and proven effective in numerous realistic scenarios. In this paper, we mainly focus on the problem of designing coupons to maximize the revenue in second-price auction. 

Firstly, we derive the dominant strategies of bidders if they are provided with coupons in second-price auction and prove that the revenue optimization problem with coupons for all the bidders is NP-complete. Secondly, we cast the problem of designing coupons to maximize revenue into a learning framework. With well-designed loss functions, we perform theoretical analysis of its properties and propose corresponding algorithms to solve the problem. Finally, with both synthetic data and industrial data, extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate their effectiveness.


Learning to Design Coupons in Online Advertising Markets

Advertising has become a dominant source of revenue generation on the Internet. Billions of advertisement slots are sold via auctions. And there are many pricing methods ,e.g., CPM (cost-per-mille), CPC (cost-per-click), CPA (cost-per-action), OCPM (optimized cost-per-mille) and so on. In this paper, we study the OCPM method (i.e., advertisers bid for conversions while pay per mille) under VCG auction. However, automatically bid in each view to maximize advertisers' conversions while still meet their target cost-per-conversion in feeds is difficult. To deal with these difficulties, we propose a reinforcement learning framework, i.e., RSDRL (ROI-sensitive distributional reinforcement learning). By making full use of the characteristics of auction rules which are missed by other methods, we design a reward function to surrogate conversion events and a bid generation method based on theoretical results. We also provide some theoretical results to guide hyperparameter tuning. Last, we validate RSDRL on a large industrial dataset with millions of auctions. Plenty of experiments (both online and offline) are used to evaluate the performance of our framework and RSDRL yields substantially better results than compared algorithms.


Optimized Cost per Mille in Feeds Advertising

The plan recognition task is to infer an actor’s plan and goal given observations about its behavior. We submit that in some cases, for plan recognition to be effective and complete, it must appeal to a notion of epistemics to i) recognize epistemic goals, where the actor is trying to achieve some state of knowledge or belief; and ii) model the observer, and its knowledge of the actor, as first class elements of the plan recognition process. To this end, we formalize the notion of Epistemic Plan Recognition, which builds on two growing areas of research: epistemic planning and plan recognition. Our epistemic plan recognition specification appeals to an epistemic logic framework to represent agent beliefs. To realize our specification, we cast the epistemic plan recognition problem as an epistemic planning problem, whose solutions can be generated using existing epistemic planning tools. Finally, we evaluate our approach by utilizing and comparing existing epistemic planners on a diverse set of epistemic plan recognition problems.


Epistemic Plan Recognition

This paper focuses on two-sided matching where one side (a hospital or firm) is matched to the other side (a doctor or worker) so as to maximize a cardinal objective under general feasibility constraints. In a standard model, even though multiple doctors can be matched to a single hospital, a hospital has a responsive preference and a maximum quota. However, in practical applications, a hospital has some complicated cardinal preference and constraints. With such preferences (e.g., submodular) and constraints (e.g., knapsack or matroid intersection), stable matchings may fail to exist. This paper first determines the complexity of checking and computing stable matchings based on preference class and constraint class. Second, we establish a framework to analyze this problem on packing problems, and the framework enables us to access the wealth of online packing algorithms so that we construct approximately stable algorithms as a variant of generalized deferred acceptance algorithm. We further provide some inapproximability results. 


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Navigating the Combinatorics of Virtual Agent Design Space to Maximize Persuasion

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Optimal Matchings with One-Sided Preferences: Fixed and Cost-Based Quotas

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Next from AAMAS 2020

Navigating the Combinatorics of Virtual Agent Design Space to Maximize Persuasion

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Optimal Matchings with One-Sided Preferences: Fixed and Cost-Based Quotas

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