Related papers: Diffusion of Responsibility in Collective Decision…

While imitation learning provides a simple and effective framework for policy learning, acquiring consistent actions during robot execution remains a challenging task. Existing approaches primarily focus on either modifying the action…

Humans have been arguing about the benefits of dictatorial versus democratic regimes for millennia. Despite drastic differences between the dictatorships in the world, one of the key common features is the \emph{Dictator's Dilemma} as…

This paper introduces a measure of the diffusion of binary outcomes over a large, sparse network, when the diffusion is observed in two time periods. The measure captures the aggregated spillover effect of the state-switches in the initial…

We study a problem where a group of agents has to decide how a joint reward should be shared among them. We focus on settings where the share that each agent receives depends on the subjective opinions of its peers concerning that agent's…

This paper introduces a novel bio-mimetic approach for distributed control of robotic swarms, inspired by the collective behaviors of swarms in nature such as schools of fish and flocks of birds. The agents are assumed to have limited…

This paper introduces a diffusion-based planner for leader--follower formation control in cluttered environments. The diffusion policy is used to generate the trajectory of the midpoint of two leaders as a rigid bar in the plane, thereby…

Shared autonomy is an enabling technology that provides users with control authority over robots that would otherwise be difficult if not impossible to directly control. Yet, standard methods make assumptions that limit their adoption in…

We design two mechanisms that ensure that the majority preferred option wins in all equilibria. The first one is a simultaneous game where agents choose other agents to cooperate with on top of the vote for an alternative, thus overcoming…

We propose an exactly solvable model for the dynamics of voters in a two-party system. The opinion formation process is modeled on a random network of agents. The dynamical nature of interpersonal relations is also reflected in the model,…

We consider an agent community wishing to decide on several binary issues by means of issue-by-issue majority voting. For each issue and each agent, one of the two options is better than the other. However, some of the agents may be…

A current paradigm in computer simulation studies of social sciences problems by physicists is the emergence of consensus. The question is to establish when the dynamics of a set of interacting agents that can choose among several options…

This brief addresses the distributed consensus problem of nonlinear multi-agent systems under a general directed communication topology. Each agent is governed by higher-order dynamics with mismatched uncertainties, multiple completely…

The understanding and prediction of information diffusion processes on networks is a major challenge in network theory with many implications in social sciences. Many theoretical advances occurred due to stochastic spreading models.…

We consider the allocation of indivisible objects when agents have preferences over their own allocations, but share the ownership of the resources to be distributed. Examples might include seats in public schools, faculty offices, and time…

In this paper, we tackle the problem of innovation spreading from a modeling point of view. We consider a networked system of individuals, with a competition between two groups. We show its relation to the innovation spreading issues. We…

In many real-world settings, agents must learn from an offline dataset gathered by some prior behavior policy. Such a setting naturally leads to distribution shift between the behavior policy and the target policy being trained - requiring…

The question that how cultural variation emerges has drawn lots of interest in sociological inquiry. Sociologists predominantly study such variation through the lens of social contagion, which mostly attributes cultural variation to the…

This paper introduces a microscopic approach to model epidemics, which can explicitly consider the consequences of individual's decisions on the spread of the disease. We first formulate a microscopic multi-agent epidemic model where every…

In randomized experiments, interactions between units might generate a treatment diffusion process. This is common when the treatment of interest is an actual object or product that can be shared among peers (e.g., flyers, booklets,…

Whether an idea, information, infection, or innovation diffuses throughout a society depends not only on the structure of the network of interactions, but also on the timing of those interactions. Recent studies have shown that diffusion…