The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

In many different applications on the Web, distributed agents would like to discover and access high quality information sources. This is a challenging problem since an agent does not know a priori which information source would provide high quality information for particular topics. In this paper, we utilize machine learning techniques to allow a set of distributed agents to use their past experience and collaborate with others to identify information sources with the best payoff. The proposed method allows an individual agent to estimate the next payoff based on its own history of interactions with the information source and also on collaboration with other agents whose individual analysis of the next payoff the agent trusts. Q-learning is applied for stochastic updates to the payoff. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides the best results when an individual agent collaborates with a moderate number of neighbors.

Keywords

Multi-Agent Interaction Modeling, Multi-Agent System, Machine Learning, Q-Learning, Intelligent Software Agent

Notes

Sponsor: ARDA under the CTA sub-contract, DARPA

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Center for Integrated Manfacturing Decision Systems

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Advanced Agent - Robotics Technology Lab

Number of pages: 7

Note: IAT-2005, http://www.hds.utc.fr/IAT05

Text Reference

Young-Woo Seo and Katia Sycara, "Exploiting Multi-Agent Interactions for Identifying the Best-Payoff Information Source," IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT-2005), September, 2005, pp. 344 - 350.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Seo_2005_5079,
   author = "Young-Woo Seo and Katia Sycara",
   title = "Exploiting Multi-Agent Interactions for Identifying the Best-Payoff Information Source",
   booktitle = "IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT-2005)",
   pages = "344 - 350",
   publisher = "IEEE Computer Society Press",
   month = "September",
   year = "2005",
   Notes = "IAT-2005, http://www.hds.utc.fr/IAT05"
}

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