Invited Talk by Professor Sarit Kraus from Bar-Ilan University, 27 Aug 2024, Seminar Room 1-1, Academic Building North

Title: Explaining Decisions in Multi-Agent Environments

Time: August 27, 2024 (Tuesday), 10:30 – 11:30am

Venue: Seminar Room 1-1, Academic Building North

Abstract:  Understanding and accepting decisions made by artificial intelligence (AI) systems is crucial for human collaboration and trust. This importance grows even further in multi-agent environments, where AI systems make decisions based on unknown goals, potentially influenced by the preferences of other agents. In such complex scenarios, explanations become important in increasing user satisfaction and acceptance by considering factors like the system's decision, user preferences, agent preferences, environmental settings, and key attributes such as fairness, envy, and privacy. In this talk, we will explore the concept of Explainable Decisions in Multi-Agent Environments (xMASE) through three cases: explanations of constraints-driven optimization problems taking into account privacy consideration, explaining decisions of agents in mixed-motive games, advice explanations in complex repeated decision-making environments, and explanations for multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (RL). For each case, we propose an algorithm that generates comprehensive explanations. Furthermore, we will report on human experiments that demonstrate the informativeness and acceptability of explanations to users.

Bio:  Sarit Kraus (Ph.D. Computer Science, Hebrew University, 1989) is a Professor of Computer Science and Dean of the faculty of Exact Sciences at Bar-Ilan University. Her research is focused on intelligent agents and multi-agent systems integrating machine-learning techniques with optimization and game theory methods. In particular, she studies the development of intelligent agents that can interact proficiently with people and with robots. For her work, she received many prestigious awards. She was awarded the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, the IJCAI Excellent Research Award, the ACM SIGART Agents Research Award, the ACM Athena Lecturer, the EMET prize and was twice the winner of the IFAAMAS influential paper award. She is an ACM, AAAI and EurAI fellow and a recipient of the advanced ERC grant. She also received a special commendation from the city of Los Angeles and was IJCAI 2019 program chair. She is an elected member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.