New Zealand

Syeda Huma Jabeen, Nadeem Ahmed, Muhammad Ejaz Sandhu, Nauman Riaz Chaudhry and Reeha Raza (May 16th 2019). Neural Signaling and Communication, New Frontiers in Brain - Computer Interfaces, Nawaz Mohamudally, Manish Putteeraj and Seyyed Abed Hosseini, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.86318. 

Ümit Ulusoy, Mehmet Serdar Güzel and Erkan Bostanci (April 22nd 2020). A Q-Learning-Based Approach for Simple and Multi-Agent Systems, Multi Agent Systems - Strategies and Applications, Ricardo López - Ruiz, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.88484.

Mengchun Xie (March 18th 2019). Improvement of Cooperative Action for Multi-Agent System by Rewards Distribution, Assistive and Rehabilitation Engineering, Yves Rybarczyk, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.85109. 

Several recent works have found the emergence of grounded compositional language in the communication protocols developed by mostly cooperative multi-agent systems when learned end-to-end to maximize performance on a downstream task. However, human populations learn to solve complex tasks involving communicative behaviors not only in fully cooperative settings but also in scenarios where competition acts as an additional external pressure for improvement. In this work, we investigate whether competition for performance from an external, similar agent team could act as a social influence that encourages multi-agent populations to develop better communication protocols for improved performance, compositionality, and convergence speed. We start from Task &amp; Talk, a previously proposed referential game between two cooperative agents as our testbed and extend it into Task, Talk &amp; Compete, a game involving two competitive teams each consisting of two aforementioned cooperative agents. Using this new setting, we provide an empirical study demonstrating the impact of competitive influence on multi-agent teams. Our results show that an external competitive influence leads to improved accuracy and generalization, as well as faster emergence of communicative languages that are more informative and compositional.

AAMAS 2020

On Emergent Communication in Competitive Multi-Agent Teams

emergent communication; learning agent-to-agent interactions; multi-agent learning

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/

Registration Is Required

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).

Several recent works have found the emergence of grounded compositional language in the communication protocols developed by mostly cooperative multi-agent systems when learned end-to-end to maximize performance on a downstream task. However, human populations learn to solve complex tasks involving communicative behaviors not only in fully cooperative settings but also in scenarios where competition acts as an additional external pressure for improvement. In this work, we investigate whether competition for performance from an external, similar agent team could act as a social influence that encourages multi-agent populations to develop better communication protocols for improved performance, compositionality, and convergence speed. We start from Task & Talk, a previously proposed referential game between two cooperative agents as our testbed and extend it into Task, Talk & Compete, a game involving two competitive teams each consisting of two aforementioned cooperative agents. Using this new setting, we provide an empirical study demonstrating the impact of competitive influence on multi-agent teams. Our results show that an external competitive influence leads to improved accuracy and generalization, as well as faster emergence of communicative languages that are more informative and compositional.

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). 

"In multi-capacity ridesharing, multiple requests (e.g., customers, food items, parcels) with different origin and destination pairs travel in one resource. In recent years, online multi-capacity ridesharing services (i.e., where assignments are made online) like Uber-pool, foodpanda, and on-demand shuttles have become hugely popular in transportation, food delivery, logistics and other domains. This is because multi-capacity ridesharing services benefit all parties involved – the customers (due to lower costs), the drivers (due to higher revenues) and the matching platforms (due to higher revenues per vehicle/resource). Most importantly these services
can also help reduce carbon emissions (due to fewer vehicles on roads).
Online multi-capacity ridesharing is extremely challenging as the underlying matching graph is no longer bipartite (as in the unit-capacity case) but a tripartite graph with resources (e.g., taxis,
cars), requests and request groups (combinations of requests that can travel together). The desired matching between resources and request groups is constrained by the edges between requests and request groups in this tripartite graph (i.e., a request can be part of at most one request group in the final assignment). While there have been myopic heuristic approaches employed for solving the online multi-capacity ridesharing problem, they do not provide any
guarantees on the solution quality. To that end, this paper presents the first approach with bounds on the competitive ratio for online multi-capacity ridesharing (when resources rejoin the system at their initial location/depot after serving a group of requests)."

Competitive Ratios for Online Multi-capacity Ridesharing

How about Explainability in Human-Agent Systems

Incentivised decision markets are mechanisms that allow selecting one action among a set of actions based on properly incentivised forecasts about the actions' consequences. Existing research on decision markets is based on scoring rules. Because scoring rules based decision markets involve two-side liabilities that can be difficult to track, we here study more convenient securities based decision markets. We present a decision market setting that prices securities using a cost function derived from a scoring rule. In such a decision market setting, traders will have the same expected utility as forecasters measured by the corresponding scoring rule. Moreover, we identify differences between scoring rules based decision markets and securities based decision markets in terms of actual payoffs. Lastly, we describe an insurance mechanism that can shift risk from the market creator to a risk-neutral third party.

Decision Markets Implementation

Moving target defense has emerged as a critical paradigm of protecting a vulnerable system against persistent and stealthy attacks. To protect a system, a defender proactively changes the system configurations to limit the exposure of security vulnerabilities to potential attackers. In doing so, the defender creates asymmetric uncertainty and complexity for the attackers, making it much harder for them to compromise the system. In practice, the defender incurs a switching cost for each migration of the system configurations. The switching cost usually depends on both the current configuration and the following configuration. Besides, different system configurations typically require a different amount of time for an attacker to exploit and attack. Therefore, a defender must simultaneously decide both the optimal sequences of system configurations and the optimal timing for switching. In this paper, we propose a Markov Stackelberg Game framework to precisely characterize the defender's spatial and temporal decision-making in the face of advanced attackers. We introduce a relative value iteration algorithm that computes the defender's optimal moving target defense strategies. Empirical evaluation on real-world problems demonstrates the advantages of the Markov Stackelberg game model for spatial-temporal moving target defense.

Spatial-Temporal Moving Target Defense: A Markov Stackelberg Game Model

Introducing DCRAC, a deep reinforcement learning framework for solving multi-objective partially-observable problems. DCRAC follows a conditioned actor-critic approach in
learning the optimal policy.

DCRAC: Deep Conditioned Recurrent Actor-Critic for Multi-Objective Partially Observable Environments

This tutorial will survey results on fairness in resource allocation. Starting from the classical setting of cake-cutting, the tutorial will explore the allocation of divisible and indivisible goods, public decision-making, and online resource allocation. The tutorial will include various formal definitions of fairness, relations among these definitions, and algorithms for (and complexity of) satisfying such definitions.

Recent Advances in Fair Resource Allocation Tutorial Part 1

A quadcopter can capture photos from vantage points unattainable for a human photographer, but teloperating it to a good viewpoint is a non-trivial task. Since humans are good at composing photos, the aim of our research is to leverage deep learning to create a customizable flight controller that can capture photos under the guidance of a human photographer. Our system, the Selfie Drone Stick, allows the user to assign a vantage point to the quadcopter based on the phone's sensors. The user takes a selfie with the phone once, and the quadcopter autonomously flies to the target viewpoint. The proliferation of open source deep learning models provided us with a large variety of options for the computer vision and flight control systems. This article describes three key innovations required to deploy the models on a real robot: 1) a new architecture for rapid object detection, DUNet; 2) an abstract state representation for transferring learning from simulation to the hardware platform; 3) reward shaping and staging paradigms for training a deep reinforcement learning controller. Without these improvements, we were unable to learn a flight controller that adequately supported the intuitive user interface.

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Competitive Ratios for Online Multi-capacity Ridesharing

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Multi-Agent Curricula and Emergent Implicit Signaling

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