We present a novel negotiation model that allows an agent to learn how to negotiate during concurrent bilateral negotiations in unknown and dynamic e-markets. The agent uses an actor-critic architecture with model-free reinforcement learning to learn a strategy expressed as a deep neural network. We pre-train the strategy by supervision from synthetic market data, thereby decreasing the exploration time required for learning during negotiation. As a result, we can build automated agents for concurrent negotiations that can adapt to different e-market settings without the need to be pre-programmed. Our experimental evaluation shows that our deep reinforcement learning-based agents outperform two existing well-known negotiation strategies in one-to-many concurrent bilateral negotiations for a range of e-market settings.
We present a novel bilateral negotiation model that allows a self-interested agent to learn how to negotiate over multiple issues in the presence of user preference uncertainty. The model relies upon interpretable strategy templates representing the tactics the agent should employ during the negotiation and learns template parameters to maximize the average utility received over multiple negotiations, thus resulting in optimal bid acceptance and generation. Our model also uses deep reinforcement learning to evaluate threshold utility values, for those tactics that require them, thereby deriving optimal utilities for every environment state. To handle user preference uncertainty, the model relies on a stochastic search to find user model that best agrees with a given partial preference profile. Multi-objective optimization and multi-criteria decision-making methods are applied at negotiation time to generate Pareto-optimal outcomes thereby increasing the number of successful (win-win) negotiations. Rigorous experimental evaluations show that the agent employing our model outperforms the winning agents of the 10th Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC19) in terms of individual as well as social-welfare utilities.
Collective human knowledge has clearly benefited from the fact that innovations by individuals are taught to others through communication. Similar to human social groups, agents in distributed learning systems would likely benefit from communication to share knowledge and teach skills. The problem of teaching to improve agent learning has been investigated by prior works, but these approaches make assumptions that prevent application of teaching to general multiagent problems, or require domain expertise for problems they can apply to. This learning to teach problem has inherent complexities related to measuring long-term impacts of teaching that compound the standard multiagent coordination challenges. In contrast to existing works, this paper presents the first general framework and algorithm for intelligent agents to learn to teach in a multiagent environment. Our algorithm, Learning to Coordinate and Teach Reinforcement (LeCTR), addresses peer-to-peer teaching in cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning. Each agent in our approach learns both when and what to advise, then uses the received advice to improve local learning. Importantly, these roles are not fixed; these agents learn to assume the role of student and/or teacher at the appropriate moments, requesting and providing advice in order to improve teamwide performance and learning. Empirical comparisons against state-of-the-art teaching methods show that our teaching agents not only learn significantly faster, but also learn to coordinate in tasks where existing methods fail.
Mobile robot navigation has seen extensive research in the last decades. The aspect of collaboration with robots and humans sharing workspaces will become increasingly important in the future. Therefore, the next generation of mobile robots needs to be socially-compliant to be accepted by their human collaborators. However, a formal definition of compliance is not straightforward. On the other hand, empowerment has been used by artificial agents to learn complicated and generalized actions and also has been shown to be a good model for biological behaviors. In this paper, we go beyond the approach of classical acf{RL} and provide our agent with intrinsic motivation using empowerment. In contrast to self-empowerment, a robot employing our approach strives for the empowerment of people in its environment, so they are not disturbed by the robots presence and motion. In our experiments, we show that our approach has a positive influence on humans, as it minimizes its distance to humans and thus decreases human travel time while moving efficiently towards its own goal. An interactive user-study shows that our method is considered more social than other state-of-the-art approaches by the participants.
We study reinforcement learning in settings where sampling an action from the policy must be done concurrently with the time evolution of the controlled system, such as when a robot must decide on the next action while still performing the previous action. Much like a person or an animal, the robot must think and move at the same time, deciding on its next action before the previous one has completed. In order to develop an algorithmic framework for such concurrent control problems, we start with a continuous-time formulation of the Bellman equations, and then discretize them in a way that is aware of system delays. We instantiate this new class of approximate dynamic programming methods via a simple architectural extension to existing value-based deep reinforcement learning algorithms. We evaluate our methods on simulated benchmark tasks and a large-scale robotic grasping task where the robot must think while moving.
The development of intelligent traffic light control systems is essential for smart transportation management. While some efforts have been made to optimize the use of individual traffic lights in an isolated way, related studies have largely ignored the fact that the use of multi-intersection traffic lights is spatially influenced and there is a temporal dependency of historical traffic status for current traffic light control. To that end, in this paper, we propose a novel SpatioTemporal Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (STMARL) framework for effectively capturing the spatio-temporal dependency of multiple related traffic lights and control these traffic lights in a coordinating way. Specifically, we first construct the traffic light adjacency graph based on the spatial structure among traffic lights. Then, historical traffic records will be integrated with current traffic status via Recurrent Neural Network structure. Moreover, based on the temporally-dependent traffic information, we design a Graph Neural Network based model to represent relationships among multiple traffic lights, and the decision for each traffic light will be made in a distributed way by the deep Q-learning method. Finally, the experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data have demonstrated the effectiveness of our STMARL framework, which also provides an insightful understanding of the influence mechanism among multi-intersection traffic lights.