Consensus, cooperative learning, and flocking for multiagent predator avoidance

Multiagent coordination is highly desirable with many uses in a variety of tasks. In nature, the phenomenon of coordinated flocking is highly common with applications related to defending or escaping from predators. In this article, a hybrid multiagent system that integrates consensus, cooperative learning, and flocking control to determine the direction of attacking predators and learns to flock away from them in a coordinated manner is proposed. This system is entirely distributed requiring only communication between neighboring agents. The fusion of consensus and collaborative reinforcement learning allows agents to cooperatively learn in a variety of multiagent coordination tasks, but this article focuses on flocking away from attacking predators. The results of the flocking show that the agents are able to effectively flock to a target without collision with each other or obstacles. Multiple reinforcement learning methods are evaluated for the task with cooperative learning utilizing function approximation for state-space reduction performing the best. The results of the proposed consensus algorithm show that it provides quick and accurate transmission of information between agents in the flock. Simulations are conducted to show and validate the proposed hybrid system in both one and two predator environments, resulting in an efficient cooperative learning behavior. In the future, the system of using consensus to determine the state and reinforcement learning to learn the states can be applied to additional multiagent tasks.

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On State Space Reduction for Reinforcement Learning

The Proceedings of JSME annual Conference on Robotics and Mechatronics (Robomec) ◽

10.1299/jsmermd.2003.81_5 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 2003 (0) ◽

pp. 81

Author(s):

K. Senda ◽

S. Mano

Keyword(s):

Reinforcement Learning ◽

State Space ◽

Space Reduction ◽

State Space Reduction

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Teaching AI Agents Ethical Values Using Reinforcement Learning and Policy Orchestration

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence ◽

10.24963/ijcai.2019/891 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Ritesh Noothigattu ◽

Djallel Bouneffouf ◽

Nicholas Mattei ◽

Rachita Chandra ◽

Piyush Madan ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Reinforcement Learning ◽

Ethical Values ◽

Large Role ◽

Learning To Learn ◽

Inverse Reinforcement Learning ◽

Time Step ◽

Novel Approach

Autonomous cyber-physical agents play an increasingly large role in our lives. To ensure that they behave in ways aligned with the values of society, we must develop techniques that allow these agents to not only maximize their reward in an environment, but also to learn and follow the implicit constraints of society. We detail a novel approach that uses inverse reinforcement learning to learn a set of unspecified constraints from demonstrations and reinforcement learning to learn to maximize environmental rewards. A contextual bandit-based orchestrator then picks between the two policies: constraint-based and environment reward-based. The contextual bandit orchestrator allows the agent to mix policies in novel ways, taking the best actions from either a reward-maximizing or constrained policy. In addition, the orchestrator is transparent on which policy is being employed at each time step. We test our algorithms using Pac-Man and show that the agent is able to learn to act optimally, act within the demonstrated constraints, and mix these two functions in complex ways.

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ANEGMA: an automated negotiation model for e-markets

Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems ◽

10.1007/s10458-021-09513-x ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 35 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Pallavi Bagga ◽

Nicola Paoletti ◽

Bedour Alrayes ◽

Kostas Stathis

Keyword(s):

Reinforcement Learning ◽

Deep Neural Network ◽

Automated Negotiation ◽

Learning To Learn ◽

Negotiation Model ◽

Negotiation Strategies ◽

Exploration Time ◽

Model Free ◽

Bilateral Negotiations ◽

Time Required

AbstractWe 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.

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