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We study a dynamic model of Bayesian persuasion in sequential decision-making settings. An informed principal observes an external parameter of the world and advises an uninformed agent about actions to take over time. The agent takes…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Jiarui Gan , Rupak Majumdar , Goran Radanovic , Adish Singla

We consider the classical mathematical economics problem of {\em Bayesian optimal mechanism design} where a principal aims to optimize expected revenue when allocating resources to self-interested agents with preferences drawn from a known…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2010-01-15 Shuchi Chawla , Jason Hartline , David Malec , Balasubramanian Sivan

In dynamic programming and reinforcement learning, the policy for the sequential decision making of an agent in a stochastic environment is usually determined by expressing the goal as a scalar reward function and seeking a policy that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Simon Dima , Simon Fischer , Jobst Heitzig , Joss Oliver

In the coming years, AI agents will be used for making more complex decisions, including in situations involving many different groups of people. One big challenge is that AI agent tends to act in its own interest, unlike humans who often…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Shunichi Akatsuka , Yaemi Teramoto , Aaron Courville

Individuals are often faced with temptations that can lead them astray from long-term goals. We're interested in developing interventions that steer individuals toward making good initial decisions and then maintaining those decisions over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Shruthi Sukumar , Adrian F. Ward , Camden Elliott-Williams , Shabnam Hakimi , Michael C. Mozer

This work considers a novel information design problem and studies how the craft of payoff-relevant environmental signals solely can influence the behaviors of intelligent agents. The agents' strategic interactions are captured by a Markov…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Tao Zhang , Quanyan Zhu

We consider active learning under incentive compatibility constraints. The main application of our results is to economic experiments, in which a learner seeks to infer the parameters of a subject's preferences: for example their attitudes…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Federico Echenique , Siddharth Prasad

An algorithmic decision-maker incentivizes people to act in certain ways to receive better decisions. These incentives can dramatically influence subjects' behaviors and lives, and it is important that both decision-makers and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-15 Yonadav Shavit , William S. Moses

We are interested in how to design reinforcement learning agents that provably reduce the sample complexity for learning new tasks by transferring knowledge from previously-solved ones. The availability of solutions to related problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-03 Andrea Tirinzoni , Riccardo Poiani , Marcello Restelli

The principal problem in algorithmic mechanism design is in merging the incentive constraints imposed by selfish behavior with the algorithmic constraints imposed by computational intractability. This field is motivated by the observation…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-08-21 Jason D. Hartline , Brendan Lucier

A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alireza Kazemipour , Simone Parisi , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling

We study the incentivized information acquisition problem, where a principal hires an agent to gather information on her behalf. Such a problem is modeled as a Stackelberg game between the principal and the agent, where the principal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Siyu Chen , Jibang Wu , Yifan Wu , Zhuoran Yang

This paper looks at predictability problems, i.e., wherein an agent must choose its strategy in order to optimize the predictions that an external observer could make. We address these problems while taking into account uncertainties on the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Salomé Lepers , Sophie Lemonnier , Vincent Thomas , Olivier Buffet

We study Bayesian automated mechanism design in unstructured dynamic environments, where a principal repeatedly interacts with an agent, and takes actions based on the strategic agent's report of the current state of the world. Both the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-05-14 Hanrui Zhang , Vincent Conitzer

Recently there has been a proliferation of intrinsic motivation (IM) reward-shaping methods to learn in complex and sparse-reward environments. These methods can often inadvertently change the set of optimal policies in an environment,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Grant C. Forbes , Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , Jianxun Wang , Arnav Jhala , David L. Roberts

Motivated by applications such as online labor markets we consider a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where we have a collection of arms representing strategic agents with different performance characteristics. The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Seyed A. Esmaeili , Suho Shin , Aleksandrs Slivkins

The automatic synthesis of a policy through reinforcement learning (RL) from a given set of formal requirements depends on the construction of a reward signal and consists of the iterative application of many policy-improvement steps. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Luigi Berducci , Radu Grosu

We study the problem of how to construct a set of policies that can be composed together to solve a collection of reinforcement learning tasks. Each task is a different reward function defined as a linear combination of known features. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-13 Tom Zahavy , Andre Barreto , Daniel J Mankowitz , Shaobo Hou , Brendan O'Donoghue , Iurii Kemaev , Satinder Singh

The challenge of developing powerful and general Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents has received increasing attention in recent years. Much of this effort has focused on the single-agent setting, in which an agent maximizes a predefined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Jiachen Yang , Ang Li , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Peter Sunehag , Edward Hughes , Hongyuan Zha

We consider the problem of incentivising desirable behaviours in multi-agent systems by way of taxation schemes. Our study employs the concurrent games model: in this model, each agent is primarily motivated to seek the satisfaction of a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-07-12 David Hyland , Julian Gutierrez , Michael Wooldridge