Related papers: Definition and Complexity of Some Basic Metareason…
Can AI agents deal with hard choices -- cases where options are incommensurable because multiple objectives are pursued simultaneously? Adopting a technologically engaged approach distinct from existing philosophical literature, I submit…
The conventional model for online planning under uncertainty assumes that an agent can stop and plan without incurring costs for the time spent planning. However, planning time is not free in most real-world settings. For example, an…
We can achieve significant gains in the value of computation by metareasoning about the nature or extent of base-level problem solving before executing a solution. However, resources that are irrevocably committed to metareasoning are not…
When agents are acting together, they may need a simple mechanism to decide on joint actions. One possibility is to have the agents express their preferences in the form of a ballot and use a voting rule to decide the winning action(s).…
\textit{Reasoning} may be viewed as an algorithm $P$ that makes a choice of an action $a^* \in \mathcal{A}$, aiming to optimize some outcome. However, executing $P$ itself bears costs (time, energy, limited capacity, etc.) and needs to be…
Agents that plan and act in the real world must deal with the fact that time passes as they are planning. When timing is tight, there may be insufficient time to complete the search for a plan before it is time to act. By commencing…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is supposed to help us make better choices. Some of these choices are small, like what route to take to work, or what music to listen to. Others are big, like what treatment to administer for a disease or how…
Explanation is necessary for humans to understand and accept decisions made by an AI system when the system's goal is known. It is even more important when the AI system makes decisions in multi-agent environments where the human does not…
In recent years, agents have become capable of communicating seamlessly via natural language and navigating in environments that involve cooperation and competition, a fact that can introduce social dilemmas. Due to the interleaving of…
Reinforcement learning algorithms can train agents that solve problems in complex, interesting environments. Normally, the complexity of the trained agent is closely related to the complexity of the environment. This suggests that a highly…
As generative foundation models improve, they also tend to become more persuasive, raising concerns that AI automation will enable governments, firms, and other actors to manipulate beliefs with unprecedented scale and effectiveness at…
Decision support systems enhanced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) are increasingly being used in high-stakes scenarios where errors or biased outcomes can have significant consequences. In this work, we explore the conditions under which…
I explain the shutdown problem: the problem of designing artificial agents that (1) shut down when a shutdown button is pressed, (2) don't try to prevent or cause the pressing of the shutdown button, and (3) otherwise pursue goals…
Most theoretical definitions about the complexity of manipulating elections focus on the decision problem of recognizing which instances can be successfully manipulated, rather than the search problem of finding the successful manipulative…
AI systems are often used to make or contribute to important decisions in a growing range of applications, including criminal justice, hiring, and medicine. Since these decisions impact human lives, it is important that the AI systems act…
Markov decision problems (MDPs) provide the foundations for a number of problems of interest to AI researchers studying automated planning and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we summarize results regarding the complexity of solving…
We consider a setting where one has to organize one or several group activities for a set of agents. Each agent will participate in at most one activity, and her preferences over activities depend on the number of participants in the…
The aggregation of conflicting preferences is a central problem in multiagent systems. The key difficulty is that the agents may report their preferences insincerely. Mechanism design is the art of designing the rules of the game so that…
The aggregation of conflicting preferences is a central problem in multiagent systems. The key difficulty is that the agents may report their preferences insincerely. Mechanism design is the art of designing the rules of the game so that…
Decision-theoretic troubleshooting is one of the areas to which Bayesian networks can be applied. Given a probabilistic model of a malfunctioning man-made device, the task is to construct a repair strategy with minimal expected cost. The…