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Munindar Singh

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15 papers
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15

IJCAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Socially Intelligent Genetic Agents for the Emergence of Explicit Norms

  • Rishabh Agrawal
  • Nirav Ajmeri
  • Munindar Singh

Norms help regulate a society. Norms may be explicit (represented in structured form) or implicit. We address the emergence of explicit norms by developing agents who provide and reason about explanations for norm violations in deciding sanctions and identifying alternative norms. These agents use a genetic algorithm to produce norms and reinforcement learning to learn the values of these norms. We find that applying explanations leads to norms that provide better cohesion and goal satisfaction for the agents. Our results are stable for societies with differing attitudes of generosity.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Clouseau: Generating Communication Protocols from Commitments

  • Munindar Singh
  • Amit Chopra

Engineering a decentralized multiagent system (MAS) requires realizing interactions modeled as a communication protocol between autonomous agents. We contribute Clouseau, an approach that takes a commitment-based specification of an interaction and generates a communication protocol amenable to decentralized enactment. We show that the generated protocol is (1) correct—realizes all and only the computations that satisfy the input specification; (2) safe—ensures the agents’ local views remain consistent; and (3) live—ensures the agents can proceed to completion.

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AAAI Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Kont: Computing Tradeoffs in Normative Multiagent Systems

  • Ozgur Kafali
  • Nirav Ajmeri
  • Munindar Singh

We propose KONT, a formal framework for comparing normative multiagent systems (nMASs) by computing tradeoffs among liveness (something good happens) and safety (nothing bad happens). Safety-focused nMASs restrict agents’ actions to avoid undesired enactments. However, such restrictions hinder liveness, particularly in situations such as medical emergencies. We formalize tradeoffs using norms, and develop an approach for understanding to what extent an nMAS promotes liveness or safety. We propose patterns to guide the design of an nMAS with respect to liveness and safety, and prove their correctness. We further quantify liveness and safety using heuristic metrics for an emergency healthcare application. We show that the results of the application corroborate our theoretical development.

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AAAI Conference 2015 Conference Paper

Cupid: Commitments in Relational Algebra

  • Amit Chopra
  • Munindar Singh

We propose Cupid, a language for specifying commitments that supports their information-centric aspects, and offers crucial benefits. One, Cupid is first-order, enabling a systematic treatment of commitment instances. Two, Cupid supports features needed for real-world scenarios such as deadlines, nested commitments, and complex event expressions for capturing the lifecycle of commitment instances. Three, Cupid maps to relational database queries and thus provides a setbased semantics for retrieving commitment instances in states such as being violated, discharged, and so on. We prove that Cupid queries are safe. Four, to aid commitment modelers, we propose the notion of well-identified commitments, and finitely violable and finitely expirable commitments. We give syntactic restrictions for obtaining such commitments.

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AAAI Conference 2013 Conference Paper

A First-Order Formalization of Commitments and Goals for Planning

  • Felipe Meneguzzi
  • Pankaj Telang
  • Munindar Singh

Commitments help model interactions in multiagent systems in a computationally realizable yet high-level manner without compromising the autonomy and heterogeneity of the member agents. Recent work shows how to combine commitments with goals and apply planning methods to enable agents to determine their actions. However, previous approaches to modeling commitments are confined to propositional representations, which limits their applicability in practical cases. We propose a first-order representation and reasoning technique that accommodates templatic commitments and goals that may be applied repeatedly with differing bindings for domain objects. Doing so not only leads to a more perspicuous modeling, but also supports many practical patterns.

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AAMAS Conference 2012 Conference Paper

Comma: A Commitment-Based Business Modeling Methodology and its Empirical Evaluation

  • Pankaj Telang
  • Munindar Singh

We introduce Comma, a methodology for developing cross-organizational business models. Comma gives prime position to patterns of business relationships understood in terms of commitments. In this manner, it contrasts with traditional operational approaches such as RosettaNet that are commonly used in industry. We report the results of a developer study comparing Comma with a methodology recommended by the RosettaNet Consortium. Ours is one of the only evaluations of an agent-oriented methodology that (1) involves developers other than the proposing researchers and (2) compares against a traditional nonagent approach. We found that Comma yields improved model quality, a greater focus in relative effort on the more important aspects of modeling, and a general reduction in total time despite yielding more comprehensive models. Certain anomalies in effort expended point toward the need for improved tooling.

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AAMAS Conference 2012 Conference Paper

Protos: A Cross-Organizational Business Modeling Tool

  • Anup Kalia
  • Pankaj Telang
  • Munindar Singh

Traditional approaches to cross-organizational business modeling use low-level abstractions such as data and control flow. These approaches result in rigid models that over-constrain business execution. Further, because such approaches ignore the underlying business relationships that drive process execution, they lack the notion of business level correctness. Telang and Singh propose a high-level business modeling approach based upon (social) commitments to address these shortcomings. The high-level model captures the business relationships in terms of commitments between the participants. Telang and Singh develop a method for verifying if a low-level interaction model satisfies a high-level business model. They propose a top-down methodology in which a Business analyst first develops a high-level business model. An IT analyst then develops UML 2. 0 sequence diagrams, and verifies if they satisfy the high-level model. Protos is an Eclipse-based tool that implements Telang and Singh's methodology. It enables: (a) the development of a high-level business model using reusable patterns, (b) the development of UML 2. 0 sequence diagrams, as a low-level operational representation, and (c) the automated verification of the UML 2. 0 sequence diagrams with respect to the high-level business model.

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AAMAS Conference 2012 Conference Paper

Semantics and Verification of Information-Based Protocols

  • Munindar Singh

Information-Based Interaction-Oriented Programming, specifically as epitomized by the Blindingly Simple Protocol Language (BSPL), is a promising new approach for declaratively expressing multi-agent protocols. BSPL eschews traditional control flow operators and instead emphisizes causality and integrity based solely on the information models of the messages exchanged. BSPL has been shown to support a rich variety of practical protocols and can be realized in a distributed asynchronous architecture wherein the agents participating in a protocol act based on local knowledge alone. The flexibility and generality of BSPL mean that it needs a strong formal semantics to ensure correctness as well as automated tools to help develop protocol specifications. We provide a formal semantics for BSPL and formulate important technical properties, namely, enactability, safety, and liveness. We further describe our declarative implementation of the BSPL semantics as well as of verifiers for the above properties using a temporal reasoner. We have validated our implementation by verifying the correctness of several protocols of practical interest.

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AAMAS Conference 2008 Conference Paper

An Adaptive Probabilistic Trust Model and its Evaluation

  • Chung-Wei Hang
  • Yonghong Wang
  • Munindar Singh

In open settings, the participants are autonomous and there is no central authority to ensure the felicity of their interactions. When agents interact in such settings, each relies upon being able to model the trustworthiness of the agents with whom it interacts. Fundamentally, such models must consider the past behavior of the other parties in order to predict their future behavior. Further, it is sensible for the agents to share information via referrals to trustworthy agents. Much progress has recently been made on probabilistic trust models including those that support the aggregation of information from multiple sources. However, current models do not support trust updates, leaving updates to be handled in an ad hoc manner. This paper proposes a trust representation that combines probabilities and certainty (defined as a function of a probability-certainty density function). Further, it offers a trust update mechanism to estimate the trustworthiness of referrers. This paper describes a testbed that goes beyond existing testbeds to enable the evaluation of a composite probability-certainty model. It then evaluates the proposed trust model showing that the trust model can (a) estimate trustworthiness of damping and capricious agents correctly, (b) update trust values of referrers accurately, and (c) resolve the conflicts in referral networks by certainty discounting.

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AAMAS Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Checking Correctness of Business Contracts via Commitments

  • Nirmit Desai
  • Nanjangud Narendra
  • Munindar Singh

Business contracts tend to be complex. In current practice, contracts are often designed by hand and adopted by their participants after, at best, a manual analysis. This paper motivates and formalizes two aspects of contract correctness from the perspective of the preferences of the agents participating in them. A contract is safe for a participant if participating in the contract would not leave the participant worse off than otherwise. More strongly, a contract is beneficial to a participant if participating in the contract would leave the participant better off than otherwise. This paper seeks to partially automate reasoning about the correctness of formally modeled business contracts. It represents contracts formally as a set of commitments. It motivates constraints on how cooperative agents might value the various states of commitments. Further, it shows that such constraints are consistent and promote cooperation. Lastly, it presents algorithms for checking the safety and guaranteed benefits of a contract.

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AAMAS Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Constitutive Interoperability

  • Amit Chopra
  • Munindar Singh

Commitments have recently emerged as a valuable abstraction for characterizing interactions among autonomous agents at the level of their business relationships. Traditionally, interoperation is approached from the standpoint of data exchange or of messaging. We use commitments to characterize interoperability in high-level terms: at the level of the communications among agents. Specifically, two agents are interoperable if their commitments align. Drawing upon Kant’s famous distinction, we distinguish between two kinds of interoperability, constitutive and regulative. Constitutive interoperability takes into account solely the meaning of messages whereas regulative interoperability also takes into consideration message order, occurrence, and data flow. We present a language for specifying agents constitutively and a decision procedure for determining their interoperability.

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