Making Friends on the Fly: Advances in Ad Hoc Teamwork

This book is devoted to the encounter and interaction of agents such as robots with other agents and describes how they cooperate with their previously unknown teammates, forming an Ad Hoc team. It presents a new algorithm, PLASTIC, that allows agents to quickly adapt to new teammates by reusing knowledge learned from previous teammates. PLASTIC is instantiated in both a model-based approach, PLASTIC-Model and a policy-based approach, PLASTIC-Policy. In addition to reusing knowledge learned from previous teammates, PLASTIC also allows users to provide expert-knowledge and can use transfer learning (such as the new Two Stage Transfer algorithm) to quickly create models of new teammates when it has some information about its new teammates. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated on three domains, ranging from multi-armed bandits to simulated robot soccer games.

Presents advances in Ad Hoc Teamwork and Cooperation with Unknown Agents Devoted to the area of ad hoc teamwork in which an agent may potentially cooperate with a variety of teammates in order to achieve a shared goal Focuses on the three capabilities of ad hoc teamwork 1) robustness to teammate variety, 2) robustness to diverse tasks and 3) fast adaptation Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt

Introduction.- Problem Description.- Background.- Related Work.- The PLASTIC Algorithms.- Theoretical Analysis of PLASTIC.- Empirical Evaluation.- Discussion and Conclusion.