Related papers: Shutdownable Agents through POST-Agency
Assistive agents should make humans' lives easier. Classically, such assistance is studied through the lens of inverse reinforcement learning, where an assistive agent (e.g., a chatbot, a robot) infers a human's intention and then selects…
Recent works began to automate the design of agentic systems using meta-agents that propose and iteratively refine new agent architectures. In this paper, we examine three key challenges in a common class of meta-agents. First, we…
The actions of intelligent agents, such as chatbots, recommender systems, and virtual assistants are typically not fully transparent to the user. Consequently, using such an agent involves the user exposing themselves to the risk that the…
This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents optimize only the features specified in a reward function and are indifferent to anything left out inadvertently. This means that we must not only specify what to do, but also the much larger space of what…
Is transparency always beneficial in complex systems such as traffic networks and stock markets? How is transparency defined in multi-agent systems, and what is its optimal degree at which social welfare is highest? We take an agent-based…
This paper considers a network of agents, where each agent is assumed to take actions optimally with respect to a predefined payoff function involving the latest actions of the agent's neighbors. Neighborhood relationships stem from payoff…
This paper establishes a rigorous measurement science for AI agent reliability, providing a foundational framework for quantifying consistency under semantically preserving perturbations. By leveraging $U$-statistics for output-level…
A principal has $m$ identical objects to allocate among a group of $n$ agents. Objects are desirable and the principal's value of assigning an object to an agent is the agent's private information. The principal can verify up to $k$ agents,…
In multi-agent systems, the agents may have goals that depend on a social, shared interpretation about the facts occurring in the system. These are the so-called social goals. Artificial institutions provide such a social interpretation by…
We present a silent, self-stabilizing ranking protocol for the population protocol model of distributed computing, where agents interact in randomly chosen pairs to solve a common task. We are given $n$ anonymous agents, and the goal is to…
Reinforcement learners are agents that learn to pick actions that lead to high reward. Ideally, the value of a reinforcement learner's policy approaches optimality--where the optimal informed policy is the one which maximizes reward.…
We consider the problem of creating assistants that can help agents solve new sequential decision problems, assuming the agent is not able to specify the reward function explicitly to the assistant. Instead of acting in place of the agent…
Modern multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms hold great potential for solving a variety of real-world problems. However, they do not fully exploit cross-agent knowledge to reduce sample complexity and improve performance.…
Work on persona-persistent post-mortem agents typically frames design around a life/death binary. This framing neglects a consequential yet under-theorised condition: when individuals remain alive but have impaired decisional capacity.…
Affordances describe the possibilities for an agent to perform actions with an object. While the significance of the affordance concept has been previously studied from varied perspectives, such as psychology and cognitive science, these…
This paper studies a dynamic screening model in which a principal hires an agent with limited liability. The agent's private cost of working is an i.i.d. draw from a continuous distribution. His working status is publicly observable. The…
Learning in multi-agent environments is difficult due to the non-stationarity introduced by an opponent's or partner's changing behaviors. Instead of reactively adapting to the other agent's (opponent or partner) behavior, we propose an…
An unconventional approach for optimal stopping under model ambiguity is introduced. Besides ambiguity itself, we take into account how ambiguity-averse an agent is. This inclusion of ambiguity attitude, via an $\alpha$-maxmin nonlinear…
We initiate the study of a repeated principal-agent problem over a finite horizon $T$, where a principal sequentially interacts with $K\geq 2$ types of agents arriving in an adversarial order. At each round, the principal strategically…