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Shared autonomy refers to approaches for enabling an autonomous agent to collaborate with a human with the aim of improving human performance. However, besides improving performance, it may often also be beneficial that the agent concurrently accounts for preserving the user&#39;s experience or satisfaction of collaboration. In order to address this additional goal, we examine approaches for improving the user experience by constraining the number of interventions by the autonomous agent. We propose two model-free reinforcement learning methods that can account for both hard and soft constraints on the number of interventions. We show that not only does our method outperform the existing baseline, but also eliminates the need to manually tune a black-box hyperparameter for controlling the level of assistance. We also provide an in-depth analysis of intervention scenarios in order to further illuminate system understanding.

AAAI 2022

On Optimizing Interventions in Shared Autonomy

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.

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AAMAS 2020

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). 

Shared autonomy refers to approaches for enabling an autonomous agent to collaborate with a human with the aim of improving human performance. However, besides improving performance, it may often also be beneficial that the agent concurrently accounts for preserving the user's experience or satisfaction of collaboration. In order to address this additional goal, we examine approaches for improving the user experience by constraining the number of interventions by the autonomous agent. We propose two model-free reinforcement learning methods that can account for both hard and soft constraints on the number of interventions. We show that not only does our method outperform the existing baseline, but also eliminates the need to manually tune a black-box hyperparameter for controlling the level of assistance. We also provide an in-depth analysis of intervention scenarios in order to further illuminate system understanding.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Standard contrastive learning approaches usually require a large number of negatives for effective unsupervised learning and often exhibit slow convergence. We suspect this behavior is due to the suboptimal selection of negatives used for offering contrast to the positives. We counter this difficulty by taking inspiration from support vector machines (SVMs) to present max-margin contrastive learning (MMCL). Our approach selects negatives as the sparse support vectors obtained via a quadratic optimization problem, and contrastiveness is enforced by maximizing the decision margin. As SVM optimization can be computationally demanding, especially in an end-to-end setting, we present simplifications that alleviate the computational burden. We validate our approach on standard vision benchmark datasets, demonstrating better performance in unsupervised representation learning over state-of-the-art, while having better empirical convergence properties.

Max-Margin Contrastive Learning

When humans collaborate with each other, they often make decisions by observing others and considering the consequences that their actions may have on the entire team, instead of greedily doing what is best for just themselves. We would like our AI agents to effectively collaborate in a similar way by capturing a model of their partners. In this work, we propose and analyze a decentralized Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem with coupled rewards as an abstraction of more general multi-agent collaboration. We demonstrate that naive extensions of single-agent optimal MAB algorithms fail when applied for decentralized bandit teams. Instead, we propose a Partner-Aware strategy for joint sequential decision-making that extends the well-known single-agent Upper Confidence Bound algorithm. We analytically show that our proposed strategy achieves logarithmic regret, and provide extensive experiments involving human-AI and human-robot collaboration to validate our theoretical findings. Our results show that the proposed partner-aware strategy outperforms other known methods, and our human subject studies suggest humans prefer to collaborate with AI agents implementing our partner-aware strategy.

Partner-Aware Algorithms in Decentralized Cooperative Bandit Teams

We propose a new problem setting to study the sequential interactions between a recommender system and a user. Instead of assuming the user is omniscient, static, and explicit, as the classical practice does, we sketch a more realistic user behavior model, under which the user: 1) rejects recommendations if they are clearly worse than others; 2) updates her utility estimation based on rewards from her accepted recommendations; 3) withholds realized rewards from the system. We formulate the interactions between the system and such an explorative user in a K-armed bandit framework and study the problem of learning the optimal recommendation on the system side. We show that efficient system learning is still possible but is more difficult. In particular, the system can identify the best arm with probability at least 1-delta within O(1/delta) interactions, and we prove this is tight. Our finding contrasts the result for the problem of best arm identification with fixed confidence, in which the best arm can be identified with probability 1-delta within O(log(1/delta)) interactions. This gap illustrates the inevitable cost the system has to pay when it learns from an explorative user's revealed preferences on its recommendations rather than from the realized rewards.

Learning the Optimal Recommendation from Explorative Users

We consider a distributed learning setting where strategic users are incentivized by a fusion center, to train a learning model based on local data. The users are not obliged to provide their true gradient updates and the fusion center is not capable of validating the authenticity of reported updates. Thus motivated, we formulate the interactions between the fusion center and the users as repeated games, manifesting an under-explored interplay between machine learning and game theory. We then develop an incentive mechanism for the fusion center based on a joint gradient estimation and user action classification scheme, and study its impact on the convergence performance of distributed learning. Further, we devise adaptive zero-determinant (ZD) strategies, thereby generalizing the classical ZD strategies to the repeated games with time-varying stochastic errors. Theoretical and empirical analysis show that the fusion center can incentivize the strategic users to cooperate and report informative gradient updates, thus ensuring the convergence.

Distributed Learning with Strategic Users: A Repeated Game Approach

This paper presents a novel collaborative generative modeling (CGM) framework that incentivizes collaboration among self-interested parties to contribute data to a pool for training a generative model (e.g., GAN), from which synthetic data are drawn and distributed to the parties as rewards commensurate to their contributions. Distributing synthetic data as rewards (instead of trained models or money) offers task- and model-agnostic benefits for downstream learning tasks and is less likely to violate data privacy regulation. To realize the framework, we firstly propose a data valuation function using maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) that values data based on its quantity and quality in terms of its closeness to the true data distribution and provide theoretical results guiding the kernel choice in our MMD-based data valuation function. Then, we formulate the reward scheme as a linear optimization problem that when solved, guarantees certain incentives such as fairness in the CGM framework. We devise a weighted sampling algorithm for generating synthetic data to be distributed to each party as reward such that the value of its data and the synthetic data combined matches its assigned reward value by the reward scheme. We empirically show using simulated and real-world datasets that the parties' synthetic data rewards are commensurate to their contributions.

Incentivizing Collaboration in Machine Learning via Synthetic Data Rewards

Centralized Training for Decentralized Execution, where training is done in a centralized offline fashion, has become a popular solution paradigm in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning.
Many such methods take the form of actor-critic with state-based critics, since centralized training allows access to the true system state, which can be useful during training despite not being available at execution time.
State-based critics have become a common empirical choice, albeit one which has had limited theoretical justification or analysis.
In this paper, we show that state-based critics can introduce bias in the policy gradient estimates, potentially undermining the asymptotic guarantees of the algorithm.
We also show that, even if the state-based critics do not introduce any bias, they can still result in a larger gradient variance, contrary to the common intuition.
Finally, we show the effects of the theories in practice by comparing different forms of centralized critics on a wide range of common benchmarks, and detail how various environmental properties are related to the effectiveness of different types of critics.

A Deeper Understanding of State-Based Critics in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) provides an efficient way for simultaneously learning policies for multiple agents interacting with each other. However, in scenarios requiring complex interactions, existing algorithms can suffer from an inability to accurately anticipate the influence of self-actions on other agents. Incorporating an ability to reason about other agents' potential responses can allow an agent to formulate more effective strategies. This paper adopts a recursive reasoning model in a centralized-training-decentralized-execution framework to help learning agents better cooperate with or compete against others. 
 The proposed algorithm, referred to as the Recursive Reasoning Graph (R2G), shows state-of-the-art performance on multiple multi-agent particle and robotics games.

Recursive Reasoning Graph for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Estimating value functions is a core component of reinforcement learning algorithms. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms use bootstrapping, i.e. they update the value function toward a learning target using value estimates at subsequent time-steps. Alternatively, the value function can be updated toward a learning target constructed by separately predicting successor features (SF)â€”a policy-dependent modelâ€”and linearly combining them with instantaneous rewards. 
 
We focus on bootstrapping targets used when estimating value functions, and propose a new backup target, the ?-return mixture, which implicitly combines value-predictive knowledge (used by TD methods) with (successor) feature-predictive knowledgeâ€”with a parameter ? capturing how much to rely on each. We illustrate that incorporating predictive knowledge through an ??-discounted SF model makes more efficient use of sampled experience, compared to either extreme, i.e. bootstrapping entirely on the value function estimate, or bootstrapping on the product of separately estimated successor features and instantaneous reward models. We empirically show this approach leads to faster policy evaluation and better control performance, for tabular and nonlinear function approximations, indicating scalability and generality.

A Generalized Bootstrap Target for Value-Learning, Efficiently Combining Value and Feature Predictions

Many active learning and search approaches are intractable for large-scale industrial settings with billions of unlabeled examples. Existing approaches search globally for the optimal examples to label, scaling linearly or even quadratically with the unlabeled data. In this paper, we improve the computational efficiency of active learning and search methods by restricting the candidate pool for labeling to the nearest neighbors of the currently labeled set instead of scanning over all of the unlabeled data. We evaluate several selection strategies in this setting on three large-scale computer vision datasets: ImageNet, OpenImages, and a de-identified and aggregated dataset of 10 billion publicly shared images provided by a large internet company. Our approach achieved similar mAP and recall as the traditional global approach while reducing the computational cost of selection by up to three orders of magnitude, enabling web-scale active learning.

Similarity Search for Efficient Active Learning and Search of Rare Concepts

It is of significance for an agent to autonomously explore the environment and learn a widely applicable and general-purpose goal-conditioned policy that can achieve diverse goals including images and text descriptions. Considering such perceptually-specific goals, one natural approach is to reward the agent with a prior non-parametric distance over the embedding spaces of states and goals. However, this may be infeasible in some situations, either because it is unclear how to choose suitable measurement, or because embedding (heterogeneous) goals and states is non-trivial. The key insight of this work is that we introduce a latent-conditioned policy to provide goals and intrinsic rewards for learning the goal-conditioned policy. As opposed to directly scoring current states with regards to goals, we obtain rewards by scoring current states with associated latent variables. We theoretically characterize the connection between our unsupervised objective and the multi-goal setting, and empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method which substantially outperforms prior techniques in a variety of tasks.

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