Abstract
Planning for ad hoc teamwork is challenging because it involves agents collaborating without any prior coordination or communication. The focus is on principled methods for a single agent to cooperate with others. This motivates investigating the ad hoc teamwork problem in the context of self-interested decision-making frameworks. Agents engaged in individual decision making in multiagent settings face the task of having to reason about other agents’ actions, which may in turn involve reasoning about others. An established approximation that operationalizes this approach is to bound the infinite nesting from below by introducing level 0 models. For the purposes of this study, individual, self-interested decision making in multiagent settings is modeled using interactive dynamic influence diagrams (I-DID). These are graphical models with the benefit that they naturally offer a factored representation of the problem, allowing agents to ascribe dynamic models to others and reason about them. We demonstrate that an implication of bounded, finitely-nested reasoning by a self-interested agent is that we may not obtain optimal team solutions in cooperative settings, if it is part of a team. We address this limitation by including models at level 0 whose solutions involve reinforcement learning. We show how the learning is integrated into planning in the context of I-DIDs. This facilitates optimal teammate behavior, and we demonstrate its applicability to ad hoc teamwork on several problem domains and configurations.
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A GUI-based software tool called Netus is freely available from http://tinyurl.com/mwrtlvg for designing I-DIDs.
Policy shown in Fig. 11a is also obtained when agent j is modeled using a level 1 I-DID, and models i at level 0.
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Appendix
Appendix
We show I-DIDs for three problem domains—BP, Grid, and MABC. For the sake of clarity, we limit the illustration to two-agent settings in which the level-1 agent i considers two level-0 models for the other agent j. The two IDs differ in their beliefs over the physical states. The conditional probability distributions (CPDs) of all the nodes in each I-DID are specified according to the problem described earlier in Sect. 5.
1.1 Multiagent box pushing
First, an abstract representation of the level-1 I-ID for BP is shown in Fig. 19. The physical state specifies the joint position and orientation of both the agents. We represent this composite state space by a chance node labeled Position&Orientation. Each agent may sense the presence of a wall, other agent, a box, or an empty field in the direction it is facing. These observations are modeled by another chance node SenseFacing. We may unroll the I-ID in Fig. 19 into an I-DID spanning two time slices as shown in Fig. 20. The model node, \(M^t_{j,0}\), contains the different DIDs that are expanded from the level-0 IDs in Fig. 19b.
We may further exploit the structure of the problem by factoring the state space into position and orientation indexed by each participating agent. We draw additional benefits from also factoring the action space because some actions only impact certain factors of the state. For example, each agent may choose to perform one of 4 possible actions—turn left (TL), turn right (TR), move forward (MF) and stay (ST). The turn actions impact the orientation of the agent only, while the move and stay actions impact the agent’s position in the grid only. We illustrate this factorization of the chance nodes Position&Orientation and \(A_j\), and the decision node \(A_i\), in Fig. 21.
Finally, in Fig. 22, we illustrate a fully factored representation of the level-1 I-DID (shown in Fig. 20) for agent i in BP.
1.2 Multiagent grid domain
An abstract representation of the level-1 I-ID for Grid is shown in Fig. 23. The physical states in this domain represent the joint location (x, y coordinates) of each agent in the grid. This composite space is modeled by the chance node GridLocation. We may unroll the I-ID in Fig. 23 into the corresponding I-DID spanning two time slices as shown in Fig. 24.
In agent i’s I-DID, we assign the marginal distribution over the agents’ joint location to the conditional probability distribution (CPD) of the chance node GridLocation \(_i^t\). In the next time step, the CPD of the chance node GridLocation \(_i^{t+1}\), conditioned on GridLocation \(_i^t, A^t_i\), and \(A^t_j\), is the transition function. The CPDs of the chance node GridLocation \(_i^{t+1}\), the observation node SenseWall \(^{t+1}_i\), and the utility node \(R_i\) are specified according to the problem described in Sect. 5. Finally, the CPD of the chance node \(Mod[M^{t+1}_j]\) in the model node, \(M^{t+1}_{j,l1}\), reflects which prior model, action and observation of j results in a model contained in the model node.
As in BP, we may factorize the physical state of Grid to specify the agents’ corresponding locations in terms of their x and y coordinates, as modeled by the chance nodes GridX and GridY shown in Fig. 25. On performing the action(s) at time step t, j may receive observations that detect the presence of a wall on its right, left, or the absence of it on both sides, as modeled in the observation node SenseWall. This is reflected in new beliefs on agent j’s position in the grid within j’s DIDs at time step \(t+1\). Consequently, the model node, \(M^{t+1}_{j,0}\), contains more models of j and i’s updated belief on j’s possible DIDs.
Figure 26 illustrates the fully factored representation of the level-1 agent i’s I-DID (in Fig. 24) for Grid.
1.3 Multi-access broadcast channel
A representation of the level-1 I-ID for MABC is shown in Fig. 27. The physical state represents the status of the each agent’s (i.e., node’s) message buffer, whose size is assumed to be 1 in our setting. At the start of each time step, each node performs one of two actions: send a message (S) or wait (W). After performing an action, the node receives one of two noisy observations: collision (C) or no-collision (NC), as modeled by the chance node, SenseCollision. We may unroll the I-ID in Fig. 27 into the corresponding I-DID spanning two time-slices as shown in Fig. 28.
In agent i’s I-DID, we assign the marginal distribution over the agents’ joint buffer status to the CPD of the chance node BufferStatus \(_i^t\). In the next time step, the CPD of BufferStatus \(_i^{t+1}\), is the transition function. The CPDs of the chance nodes BufferStatus \(_i^{t+1}\), the observation node SenseCollision \(^{t+1}_i\), and the utility node \(R_i\) are specified according to the problem described in Sect. 5. Finally, the CPD of the chance node \(Mod[M^{t+1}_j]\) in the model node, \(M^{t+1}_{j,l1}\), reflects which prior model, action and observation of j results in a model contained in the model node.
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Chandrasekaran, M., Doshi, P., Zeng, Y. et al. Can bounded and self-interested agents be teammates? Application to planning in ad hoc teams. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 31, 821–860 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-016-9354-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-016-9354-4