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Catholijn M. Jonker

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36 papers
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36

AAMAS Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Developing Guidelines for Human-LLM Agent Teams: A Multi-Stakeholder Lens

  • Mireia Yurrita
  • Davide Dell'Anna
  • Pradeep K. Murukannaiah
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • Pinar Yolum

Agents based on Large Language Models (LLM agents) have the potential to work with humans as part of a team to achieve specific goals. The natural language interface of LLM agents and their high level of autonomy enables more seamless collaborations than previous technologies, allowing them to carry out tasks autonomously and engage in conversations with humans, e. g. , to clarify goals, request authorizations, or double-check decisions. However, the current literature lacks systematic design guidelines for these human- LLM agent teams. This gap might foster misunderstandings, misuse of autonomy, and lack of common ground, potentially leading to collaboration pitfalls. To mitigate these risks, we develop 24 guidelines for the principled design of human-LLM agent teams. We adopt a multi-stakeholder approach and propose guidelines for LLM agents, human team members, team designers and embedding organizations. To develop these guidelines, we distill design recommendations from an exploratory workshop with 15 experts on human-AI teaming and a literature review of 93 empirical papers in human-LLM collaboration. Drawing from literature on human teams, we conceptually categorize the recommendations across differentstagesoftheteamingprocess. Auserstudywith10additional experts suggests the guidelines can help prevent collaboration pitfalls in human-LLM agent teams within workplace settings.

AAMAS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

[COMP24] The Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) 2024 Challenges and Results

  • Reyhan Aydogan
  • Tim Baarslag
  • Tamara C. P. Florijn
  • Katsuhide Fujita
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • Yasser Mohammad

This paper introduces the main research challenges and results of the 15th International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2024). The main challenges addressed are learning the reservation value in bilateral negotiation and designing a factory agent employing concurrent negotiation in supply chain management. Additionally, it outlines the future directions for the competition.

JAIR Journal 2025 Journal Article

Value Preferences Estimation and Disambiguation in Hybrid Participatory Systems

  • Enrico Liscio
  • Luciano C. Siebert
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • Pradeep K. Murukannaiah

Understanding citizens’ values in participatory systems is crucial for citizen-centric policy-making. We envision a hybrid participatory system where participants make choices and provide motivations for those choices, and AI agents estimate their value preferences by interacting with them. We focus on situations where a conflict is detected between participants’ choices and motivations, and propose methods for estimating value preferences while addressing detected inconsistencies by interacting with the participants. We operationalize the philosophical stance that “valuing is deliberatively consequential.” That is, if a participant’s choice is based on a deliberation of value preferences, the value preferences can be observed in the motivation the participant provides for the choice. Thus, we propose and compare value preferences estimation methods that prioritize the values estimated from motivations over the values estimated from choices alone. Then, we introduce a disambiguation strategy that combines Natural Language Processing and Active Learning to address the detected inconsistencies between choices and motivations. We evaluate the proposed methods on a dataset of a large-scale survey on energy transition. The results show that explicitly addressing inconsistencies between choices and motivations improves the estimation of an individual’s value preferences. The disambiguation strategy does not show substantial improvements when compared to similar baselines—however, we discuss how the novelty of the approach can open new research avenues and propose improvements to address the current limitations.

JAIR Journal 2024 Journal Article

A Hybrid Intelligence Method for Argument Mining

  • Michiel van der Meer
  • Enrico Liscio
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • Aske Plaat
  • Piek Vossen
  • Pradeep K. Murukannaiah

Large-scale survey tools enable the collection of citizen feedback in opinion corpora. Extracting the key arguments from a large and noisy set of opinions helps in understanding the opinions quickly and accurately. Fully automated methods can extract arguments but (1) require large labeled datasets that induce large annotation costs and (2) work well for known viewpoints, but not for novel points of view. We propose HyEnA, a hybrid (human + AI) method for extracting arguments from opinionated texts, combining the speed of automated processing with the understanding and reasoning capabilities of humans. We evaluate HyEnA on three citizen feedback corpora. We find that, on the one hand, HyEnA achieves higher coverage and precision than a state-of-the-art automated method when compared to a common set of diverse opinions, justifying the need for human insight. On the other hand, HyEnA requires less human effort and does not compromise quality compared to (fully manual) expert analysis, demonstrating the benefit of combining human and artificial intelligence.

IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

NegoLog: An Integrated Python-based Automated Negotiation Framework with Enhanced Assessment Components

  • Anıl Doğru
  • Mehmet Onur Keskin
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • Tim Baarslag
  • Reyhan Aydoğan

The complexity of automated negotiation research calls for dedicated, user-friendly research frameworks that facilitate advanced analytics, comprehensive loggers, visualization tools, and auto-generated domains and preference profiles. This paper introduces NegoLog, a platform that provides advanced and customizable analysis modules to agent developers for exhaustive performance evaluation. NegoLog introduces an automated scenario and tournament generation tool in its Web-based user interface so that the agent developers can adjust the competitiveness and complexity of the negotiations. One of the key novelties of the NegoLog is an individual assessment of preference estimation models independent of the strategies.

AAMAS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Toward a Quality Model for Hybrid Intelligence Teams

  • Davide Dell'Anna
  • Pradeep K. Murukannaiah
  • Bernd Dudzik
  • Davide Grossi
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • Catharine Oertel
  • Pinar Yolum

Hybrid Intelligence (HI) is an emerging paradigm in which artificial intelligence (AI) augments human intelligence. The current literature lacks systematic models that guide the design and evaluation of HI systems. Further, discussions around HI primarily focus on technology, neglecting the holistic human-AI ensemble. In this paper, we take the initial steps toward the development of a quality model for characterizing and evaluating HI systems from a human-AI teams perspective. We conducted a study investigating the adequacy of properties commonly associated with effective human teams to describe HI. Our study, featuring the insights of 50 HI researchers, shows that various human team properties, including boundedness, interdependence, competency, purposefulness, initiative, normativity, and effectiveness, are important for HI systems. Our study also reveals limitations in applying certain human team properties, such as coaching, rewards, and recognition, to HI systems due to the inherent human-AI asymmetry.

JAAMAS Journal 2023 Journal Article

Using psychological characteristics of situations for social situation comprehension in support agents

  • Ilir Kola
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • M. Birna van Riemsdijk

Abstract Support agents that help users in their daily lives need to take into account not only the user’s characteristics, but also the social situation of the user. Existing work on including social context uses some type of situation cue as an input to information processing techniques in order to assess the expected behavior of the user. However, research shows that it is important to also determine the meaning of a situation, a step which we refer to as social situation comprehension. We propose using psychological characteristics of situations, which have been proposed in social science for ascribing meaning to situations, as the basis for social situation comprehension. Using data from user studies, we evaluate this proposal from two perspectives. First, from a technical perspective, we show that psychological characteristics of situations can be used as input to predict the priority of social situations, and that psychological characteristics of situations can be predicted from the features of a social situation. Second, we investigate the role of the comprehension step in human–machine meaning making. We show that psychological characteristics can be successfully used as a basis for explanations given to users about the decisions of an agenda management personal assistant agent.

AAMAS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Value Inference in Sociotechnical Systems

  • Enrico Liscio
  • Roger Lera-Leri
  • Filippo Bistaffa
  • Roel I. J. Dobbe
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • Maite Lopez-Sanchez
  • Juan A. Rodriguez-Aguilar
  • Pradeep K. Murukannaiah

As artificial agents become increasingly embedded in our society, we must ensure that their behavior aligns with human values. Value alignment entails value inference, the process of identifying values and reasoning about how humans prioritize values. We introduce a holistic framework that connects the technical (AI) components necessary for value inference. Subsequently, we discuss how hybrid intelligence—the synergy of human and artificial intelligence—is instrumental to the success of value inference. Finally, we illustrate how value inference both poses significant challenges and provides novel opportunities for multiagent systems research.

AAMAS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Automated Configuration and Usage of Strategy Portfolios Mixed-Motive Bargaining

  • Bram M. Renting
  • Holger H. Hoos
  • Catholijn M. Jonker

Bargaining can be used to resolve mixed-motive games in multiagent systems. Although there is an abundance of negotiation strategies implemented in automated negotiating agents, most agents are based on single fixed strategies, while it is acknowledged that there is no single best-performing strategy for all negotiation settings. In this paper, we focus on bargaining settings where opponents are repeatedly encountered, but the bargaining problems change. We introduce a novel method that automatically creates and deploys a portfolio of complementary negotiation strategies using a training set and optimise pay-off in never-before-seen bargaining settings through per-setting strategy selection. Our method relies on the following contributions. We introduce a feature representation that captures characteristics for both the opponent and the bargaining problem. We model the behaviour of an opponent during a negotiation based on its actions, which is indicative of its negotiation strategy, in order to be more effective in future encounters. Our combination of feature-based methods generalises to new negotiation settings, as in practice, over time, it selects effective counter strategies in future encounters. Our approach is tested in an Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC)-like tournament, and we show that we are capable of winning such a tournament with a 5. 6% increase in pay-off compared to the runnerup agent.

IS Journal 2022 Journal Article

Toward Social Situation Awareness in Support Agents

  • Ilir Kola
  • Pradeep K. Murukannaiah
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • M. Birna van Riemsdijk

Artificial agents that support people in their daily activities (e. g. , virtual coaches and personal assistants) are increasingly prevalent. Since many daily activities are social in nature, support agents should understand a user’s social situation to offer comprehensive support. However, there are no systematic approaches for developing support agents that are social situation aware. We identify key requirements for a support agent to be social situation aware and propose steps to realize those requirements. These steps are presented through a conceptual architecture centered on two key ideas: 1) conceptualizing social situation awareness as an instantiation of “general” situation awareness, and 2) using situation taxonomies for such instantiation. This enables support agents to represent a user’s social situation, comprehend its meaning, and assess its impact on the user’s behavior. We discuss empirical results supporting the effectiveness of the proposed approach and illustrate how the architecture can be used in support agents through two use cases.

AAMAS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

A Collaborative Platform for Identifying Context-Specific Values

  • Enrico Liscio
  • Michiel van der Meer
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • Pradeep K. Murukannaiah

Value alignment is a crucial aspect of ethical multiagent systems. An important step toward value alignment is identifying values specific to an application context. However, identifying contextspecific values is complex and cognitively demanding. To support this process, we develop a methodology and a collaborative web platform that employs AI techniques. We describe this platform, highlighting its intuitive design and implementation.

AAMAS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Axies: Identifying and Evaluating Context-Specific Values

  • Enrico Liscio
  • Michiel van der Meer
  • Luciano C. Siebert
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • Niek Mouter
  • Pradeep K. Murukannaiah

The pursuit of values drives human behavior and promotes cooperation. Existing research is focused on general (e. g. , Schwartz) values that transcend contexts. However, context-specific values are necessary to (1) understand human decisions, and (2) engineer intelligent agents that can elicit human values and take value-aligned actions. We propose Axies, a hybrid (human and AI) methodology to identify context-specific values. Axies simplifies the abstract task of value identification as a guided value annotation process involving human annotators. Axies exploits the growing availability of valueladen text corpora and Natural Language Processing to assist the annotators in systematically identifying context-specific values. We evaluate Axies in a user study involving 60 subjects. In our study, six annotators generate value lists for two timely and important contexts: Covid-19 measures, and sustainable Energy. Then, two policy experts and 52 crowd workers evaluate Axies value lists. We find that Axies yields values that are context-specific, consistent across different annotators, and comprehensible to end users.

TIST Journal 2021 Journal Article

Nova: Value-based Negotiation of Norms

  • Reyhan Aydoğan
  • Özgür Kafali
  • Furkan Arslan
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • Munindar P. Singh

Specifying a normative multiagent system (nMAS) is challenging, because different agents often have conflicting requirements. Whereas existing approaches can resolve clear-cut conflicts, tradeoffs might occur in practice among alternative nMAS specifications with no apparent resolution. To produce an nMAS specification that is acceptable to each agent, we model the specification process as a negotiation over a set of norms. We propose an agent-based negotiation framework, where agents’ requirements are represented as values (e.g., patient safety, privacy, and national security), and an agent revises the nMAS specification to promote its values by executing a set of norm revision rules that incorporate ontology-based reasoning. To demonstrate that our framework supports creating a transparent and accountable nMAS specification, we conduct an experiment with human participants who negotiate against our agent. Our findings show that our negotiation agent reaches better agreements (with small p -value and large effect size) faster than a baseline strategy. Moreover, participants perceive that our agent enables more collaborative and transparent negotiations than the baseline (with small p -value and large effect size in particular settings) toward reaching an agreement.

AAMAS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Responsibility Research for Trustworthy Autonomous Systems

  • Vahid Yazdanpanah
  • Enrico H. Gerding
  • Sebastian Stein
  • Mehdi Dastani
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • Timothy J. Norman

To develop and effectively deploy Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS), we face various social, technological, legal, and ethical challenges in which different notions of responsibility can play a key role. In this work, we elaborate on these challenges, discuss research gaps, and show how the multidimensional notion of responsibility can play a role to bridge them. We argue that TAS requires operational tools to represent and reason about responsibilities of humans as well as AI agents. We review major challenges to which responsibility reasoning can contribute, highlight open research problems, and argue for the application of multiagent responsibility models in a variety of TAS domains.

EUMAS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Challenges and Main Results of the Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) 2019

  • Reyhan Aydogan
  • Tim Baarslag
  • Katsuhide Fujita
  • Johnathan Mell
  • Jonathan Gratch
  • Dave de Jonge
  • Yasser Mohammad
  • Shinji Nakadai

Abstract The Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) is a yearly-organized international contest in which participants from all over the world develop intelligent negotiating agents for a variety of negotiation problems. To facilitate the research on agent-based negotiation, the organizers introduce new research challenges every year. ANAC 2019 posed five negotiation challenges: automated negotiation with partial preferences, repeated human-agent negotiation, negotiation in supply-chain management, negotiating in the strategic game of Diplomacy, and in the Werewolf game. This paper introduces the challenges and discusses the main findings and lessons learnt per league.

IS Journal 2019 Journal Article

A Formal Graphical Language of Interdependence in Teamwork

  • Changyun Wei
  • Koen V. Hindriks
  • M. Birna van Riemsdijk
  • Catholijn M. Jonker

Agents in teamwork may be highly interdependent on each other, and the awareness of interdependences is an important requirement for designing and consequently implementing a multiagent system. In this article, we propose a formal graphical and domain-independent language that can facilitate the identification of comprehensive interdependences among the agents in teamwork. Moreover, a formal semantics is also introduced to precisely express and explain the properties of a graphical structure. The novel feature of the graphical language is that it complements the Interdependence Analysis Color Scheme in a way that explicitly models negative influences and, in addition, provides a visual-communication aid for developers. To demonstrate the applicability and sufficiency of the graphical language in a variety of domains, our case studies include a multirobot scenario and a human-robot scenario.

AAMAS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Deriving Norms from Actions, Values and Context

  • Myrthe L. Tielman
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • M. Birna van Riemsdijk

Personal technology such as electronic partners (e-partners) play an increasing role in our daily lives, and can make an important difference by supporting us in various ways. However, when they offer this support, it is important that they do so with an understanding of our choices and what is important to us. To allow an e-partner to flexibly do this, we propose a formal framework to automatically derive norms which describe how to perform a certain behavior. These norms are directly derived from the user’s actions, values and the context they are in. In this way, the e-partner can take into account the user’s values and offer more flexible personalized support.

AAMAS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Recognising and Explaining Bidding Strategies in Negotiation Support Systems

  • Vincent J. Koeman
  • Koen V. Hindriks
  • Jonathan Gratch
  • Catholijn M. Jonker

To improve a negotiator’s ability to recognise bidding strategies, we pro-actively provide explanations that are based on the opponent’s bids and the negotiator’s guesses about the opponent’s strategy. We introduce an aberration detection mechanism for recognising strategies and the notion of an explanation matrix. The aberration detection mechanism identifies when a bid falls outside the range of expected behaviour for a specific strategy. The explanation matrix is used to decide when to provide what explanations. We evaluated our work experimentally in a task in which participants are asked to identify their opponent’s strategy in the environment of a negotiation support system, namely the Pocket Negotiator (PN). We implemented our explanation mechanism in the PN and experimented with different explanation matrices. As the number of correct guesses increases with explanations, indirectly, these experiments show the effectiveness of our aberration detection mechanism. Our experiments with over 100 participants show that suggesting consistent strategies is more effective than explaining why observed behaviour is inconsistent.

TIME Conference 2018 Conference Paper

A Temporal Logic for Modelling Activities of Daily Living

  • Malte S. Kließ
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • M. Birna van Riemsdijk

Behaviour support technology is aimed at assisting people in organizing their Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). Numerous frameworks have been developed for activity recognition and for generating specific types of support actions, such as reminders. The main goal of our research is to develop a generic formal framework for representing and reasoning about ADLs and their temporal relations. This framework should facilitate modelling and reasoning about 1) durative activities, 2) relations between higher-level activities and subactivities, 3) activity instances, and 4) activity duration. In this paper we present a temporal logic as an extension of the logic TPTL for specification of real-time systems. Our logic TPTL_{bih} is defined over Behaviour Identification Hierarchies (BIHs) for representing ADL structure and typical activity duration. To model execution of ADLs, states of the temporal traces in TPTL_{bih} comprise information about the start, stop and current execution of activities. We provide a number of constraints on these traces that we stipulate are desired for the accurate representation of ADL execution, and investigate corresponding validities in the logic. To evaluate the expressivity of the logic, we give a formal definition for the notion of Coherence for (complex) activities, by which we mean that an activity is done without interruption and in a timely fashion. We show that the definition is satisfiable in our framework. In this way the logic forms the basis for a generic monitoring and reasoning framework for ADLs.

AAMAS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Ordered Preference Elicitation Strategies for Supporting Multi-Objective Decision Making

  • Luisa M. Zintgraf
  • Diederik M. Roijers
  • Sjoerd Linders
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • Ann Now�

In multi-objective decision planning and learning, much attention is paid to producing optimal solution sets that contain an optimal policy for every possible user preference profile. We argue that the step that follows, i. e, determining which policy to execute by maximising the user’s intrinsic utility function over this (possibly infinite) set, is under-studied. This paper aims to fill this gap. We build on previous work on Gaussian processes and pairwise comparisons for preference modelling, extend it to the multi-objective decision support scenario, and propose new ordered preference elicitation strategies based on ranking and clustering. Our main contribution is an in-depth evaluation of these strategies using computer and human-based experiments. We show that our proposed elicitation strategies outperform the currently used pairwise methods, and found that users prefer ranking most. Our experiments further show that utilising monotonicity information in GPs by using a linear prior mean at the start and virtual comparisons to the nadir and ideal points, increases performance. We demonstrate our decision support framework in a real-world study on traffic regulation, conducted with the city of Amsterdam.

IJCAI Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Omniscient Debugging for Cognitive Agent Programs

  • Vincent J. Koeman
  • Koen V. Hindriks
  • Catholijn M. Jonker

For real-time programs reproducing a bug by rerunning the system is likely to fail, making fault localization a time-consuming process. Omniscient debugging is a technique that stores each run in such a way that it supports going backwards in time. However, the overhead of existing omniscient debugging implementations for languages like Java is so large that it cannot be effectively used in practice. In this paper, we show that for agent-oriented programming practical omniscient debugging is possible. We design a tracing mechanism for efficiently storing and exploring agent program runs. We are the first to demonstrate that this mechanism does not affect program runs by empirically establishing that the same tests succeed or fail. Usability is supported by a trace visualization method aimed at more effectively locating faults in agent programs.

IJCAI Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Omniscient Debugging for GOAL Agents in Eclipse (Demonstration)

  • Vincent J. Koeman
  • Koen V. Hindriks
  • Catholijn M. Jonker

The main goal of our demonstration is to show how omniscient debugging can be applied in practice to cognitive agents. A concrete implementation of the mechanisms proposed in Koeman et. al [2017] has been created for the GOAL agent programming language in the Eclipse environment, integrated with the source-level debugger of Koeman et. al [2016], thus fully implementing the proposal within a state-of-the-art setting. The implementation will be used together with typical agent programs to demonstrate its practical use.

IJCAI Conference 2017 Conference Paper

When Will Negotiation Agents Be Able to Represent Us? The Challenges and Opportunities for Autonomous Negotiators

  • Tim Baarslag
  • Michael Kaisers
  • Enrico H. Gerding
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • Jonathan Gratch

Computers that negotiate on our behalf hold great promise for the future and will even become indispensable in emerging application domains such as the smart grid and the Internet of Things. Much research has thus been expended to create agents that are able to negotiate in an abundance of circumstances. However, up until now, truly autonomous negotiators have rarely been deployed in real-world applications. This paper sizes up current negotiating agents and explores a number of technological, societal and ethical challenges that autonomous negotiation systems have brought about. The questions we address are: in what sense are these systems autonomous, what has been holding back their further proliferation, and is their spread something we should encourage? We relate the automated negotiation research agenda to dimensions of autonomy and distill three major themes that we believe will propel autonomous negotiation forward: accurate representation, long-term perspective, and user trust. We argue these orthogonal research directions need to be aligned and advanced in unison to sustain tangible progress in the field.

EUMAS Conference 2016 Invited Paper

An Introduction to the Pocket Negotiator: A General Purpose Negotiation Support System

  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • Reyhan Aydogan
  • Tim Baarslag
  • Joost Broekens
  • Christian A. Detweiler
  • Koen V. Hindriks
  • Alina Huldtgren
  • Wouter Pasman

Abstract The Pocket Negotiator (PN) is a negotiation support system developed at TU Delft as a tool for supporting people in bilateral negotiations over multi-issue negotiation problems in arbitrary domains. Users are supported in setting their preferences, estimating those of their opponent, during the bidding phase and sealing the deal. We describe the overall architecture, the essentials of the underlying techniques, the form that support takes during the negotiation phases, and we share evidence of the effectiveness of the Pocket Negotiator.

AAMAS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Automating Failure Detection in Cognitive Agent Programs

  • Vincent J. Koeman
  • Koen V. Hindriks
  • Catholijn M. Jonker

Debugging is notoriously difficult and extremely time consuming but also essential for ensuring the reliability and quality of a software system. In order to reduce debugging effort and enable automated failure detection, we propose an automated testing framework for detecting failures in cognitive agent programs. Our approach is based on the assumption that modules within such programs are a natural unit for testing. We identify a minimal set of temporal operators that enable the specification of test conditions and show that the test language is sufficiently expressive for detecting all failures in an existing failure taxonomy. We also introduce an approach for specifying test templates that supports a programmer in writing tests. Furthermore, empirical analysis of agent programs allows us to evaluate whether our approach using test templates detects all failures.

JAAMAS Journal 2016 Journal Article

Designing a source-level debugger for cognitive agent programs

  • Vincent J. Koeman
  • Koen V. Hindriks
  • Catholijn M. Jonker

Abstract When an agent program exhibits unexpected behaviour, a developer needs to locate the fault by debugging the agent’s source code. The process of fault localisation requires an understanding of how code relates to the observed agent behaviour. The main aim of this paper is to design a source-level debugger that supports single-step execution of a cognitive agent program. Cognitive agents execute a decision cycle in which they process events and derive a choice of action from their beliefs and goals. Current state-of-the-art debuggers for agent programs provide insight in how agent behaviour originates from this cycle but less so in how it relates to the program code. As relating source code to generated behaviour is an important part of the debugging task, arguably, a developer also needs to be able to suspend an agent program on code locations. We propose a design approach for single-step execution of agent programs that supports both code-based as well as cycle-based suspension of an agent program. This approach results in a concrete stepping diagram ready for implementation and is illustrated by a diagram for both the Goal and Jason agent programming languages, and a corresponding full implementation of a source-level debugger for Goal in the Eclipse development environment. The evaluation that was performed based on this implementation shows that agent programmers prefer a source-level debugger over a purely cycle-based debugger.

ECAI Conference 2016 Conference Paper

The Game of Reciprocation Habits

  • Gleb Polevoy
  • Mathijs de Weerdt
  • Catholijn M. Jonker

People often have reciprocal habits, almost automatically responding to others' actions. A robot who interacts with humans may also reciprocate, in order to come across natural and be predictable. We aim to facilitate decision support that advises on utility-efficient habits in these interactions. To this end, given a model for reciprocation behavior with parameters that represent habits, we define a game that describes what habit one should adopt to increase the utility of the process. This paper concentrates on two agents. The used model defines that an agent's action is a weighted combination of the other's previous actions (reacting) and either i) her innate kindness, or ii) her own previous action (inertia). In order to analyze what happens when everyone reciprocates rationally, we define a game where an agent may choose her habit, which is either her reciprocation attitude (i or ii), or both her reciprocation attitude and weight. We characterize the Nash equilibria of these games and consider their efficiency. We find that the less kind agents should adjust to the kinder agents to improve both their own utility as well as the social welfare. This constitutes advice on improving cooperation and explains real life phenomena in human interaction, such as the societal benefits from adopting the behavior of the kindest person, or becoming more polite as one grows up.

ECAI Conference 2016 Conference Paper

When Do Rule Changes Count - As Legal Rule Changes?

  • Thomas Christopher King
  • Virginia Dignum
  • Catholijn M. Jonker

Institutions regulate societies. Comprising Searle's constitutive counts-as rules, "A counts-as B in context C", an institution ascribes from brute and institutional facts (As), a social reality comprising institutional facts (Bs) conditional on the social reality (contexts Cs). When brute facts change an institution evolves from one social reality to the next. Rule changes are also regulated by rule-modifying counts-as rules ascribing rule change in the past/present/future (e. g. a majority rule change vote counts-as a rule change). Determining rule change legality is difficult, since changing counts-as rules both alters and is conditional on the social reality, and in some cases hypothetical rule-change effects (e. g. not retroactively criminalising people). However, without a rigorous account of rule change ascriptions, AI agents cannot support humans in understanding the laws imposed on them. Moreover, advances in automated governance design for socio-technical systems, are limited by agents' ability to understand how and when to enact institutional changes. Consequently, we answer "when do rule changes count-as legal rule changes? " in a temporal setting with a novel formal framework.

JAAMAS Journal 2015 Journal Article

Learning about the opponent in automated bilateral negotiation: a comprehensive survey of opponent modeling techniques

  • Tim Baarslag
  • Mark J. C. Hendrikx
  • Catholijn M. Jonker

Abstract A negotiation between agents is typically an incomplete information game, where the agents initially do not know their opponent’s preferences or strategy. This poses a challenge, as efficient and effective negotiation requires the bidding agent to take the other’s wishes and future behavior into account when deciding on a proposal. Therefore, in order to reach better and earlier agreements, an agent can apply learning techniques to construct a model of the opponent. There is a mature body of research in negotiation that focuses on modeling the opponent, but there exists no recent survey of commonly used opponent modeling techniques. This work aims to advance and integrate knowledge of the field by providing a comprehensive survey of currently existing opponent models in a bilateral negotiation setting. We discuss all possible ways opponent modeling has been used to benefit agents so far, and we introduce a taxonomy of currently existing opponent models based on their underlying learning techniques. We also present techniques to measure the success of opponent models and provide guidelines for deciding on the appropriate performance measures for every opponent model type in our taxonomy.

EUMAS Conference 2014 Conference Paper

Auction-Based Dynamic Task Allocation for Foraging with a Cooperative Robot Team

  • Changyun Wei
  • Koen V. Hindriks
  • Catholijn M. Jonker

Abstract Many application domains require search and retrieval, which is also known in the robotic domain as foraging. An example domain is search and rescue where a disaster area needs to be explored and transportation of survivors to a safe area needs to be arranged. Performing these tasks by more than one robot increases performance if tasks are allocated and executed efficiently. In this paper, we study the Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) problem in the foraging domain. We assume that a team of robots is cooperatively searching for targets of interest in an environment which need to be retrieved and brought back to a home base. We look at a more general foraging problem than is typically studied where coordination also requires to take temporal constraints into account. As usual, robots have no prior knowledge about the location of targets, but in addition need to deliver targets to the home base in a specific order. This significantly increases the complexity of a foraging problem. We use a graph-based model to analyse the problem and the dynamics of allocating exploration and retrieval tasks. Our main contribution is an extension of auction-based approaches to deal with dynamic foraging task allocation where not all tasks are initially known. We use the Blocks World for Teams (BW4T) simulator to evaluate the proposed approach.

ECAI Conference 2014 Conference Paper

The Significance of Bidding, Accepting and Opponent Modeling in Automated Negotiation

  • Tim Baarslag
  • Alexander Dirkzwager
  • Koen V. Hindriks
  • Catholijn M. Jonker

Given the growing interest in automated negotiation, the search for effective strategies has produced a variety of different negotiation agents. Despite their diversity, there is a common structure to their design. A negotiation agent comprises three key components: the bidding strategy, the opponent model and the acceptance criteria. We show that this three-component view of a negotiating architecture not only provides a useful basis for developing such agents but also provides a useful analytical tool. By combining these components in varying ways, we are able to demonstrate the contribution of each component to the overall negotiation result, and thus determine the key contributing components. Moreover, we study the interaction between components and present detailed interaction effects. Furthermore, we find that the bidding strategy in particular is of critical importance to the negotiator's success and far exceeds the importance of opponent preference modeling techniques. Our results contribute to the shaping of a research agenda for negotiating agent design by providing guidelines on how agent developers can spend their time most effectively.

AAMAS Conference 2011 Conference Paper

Reflection about Capabilities for Role Enactment

  • M. Birna van Riemsdijk
  • Virginia Dignum
  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • Huib Aldewereld

An organizational modeling language can be used to specify an agent organization in terms of its roles, organizational structure, norms, etc. Using such an organizational specification to organize a multi-agent system should make the agents more effective in attaining their purpose, or prevent certain undesired behavior from occurring. Agents who want to enter and play roles in an organization are expected to understand and reason about the organizational specification. An important aspect that such organization-aware agents should be able to reason about is role enactment. In particular, agents should be able to reflect on whether they have the capabilities to play a role in an organization. In future work it needs to be made precise when an agent can be said to have a certain capability, and how an agent can reflect on its capabilities. This is necessary for programming role enactment in organization-aware agents.

JAAMAS Journal 2007 Journal Article

An agent architecture for multi-attribute negotiation using incomplete preference information

  • Catholijn M. Jonker
  • Valentin Robu
  • Jan Treur

Abstract A component-based generic agent architecture for multi-attribute (integrative) negotiation is introduced and its application is described in a prototype system for negotiation about cars, developed in cooperation with, among others, Dutch Telecom KPN. The approach can be characterized as cooperative one-to-one multi-criteria negotiation in which the privacy of both parties is protected as much as desired. We model a mechanism in which agents are able to use any amount of incomplete preference information revealed by the negotiation partner in order to improve the efficiency of the reached agreements. Moreover, we show that the outcome of such a negotiation can be further improved by incorporating a “guessing” heuristic, by which an agent uses the history of the opponent’s bids to predict his preferences. Experimental evaluation shows that the combination of these two strategies leads to agreement points close to or on the Pareto-efficient frontier. The main original contribution of this paper is that it shows that it is possible for parties in a cooperative negotiation to reveal only a limited amount of preference information to each other, but still obtain significant joint gains in the outcome.

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