Multi-Criteria Multi-Participant Automated Negotiation: Belief Propagation-based Proposal Preparation and Real Time Opponent Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Automated negotiation has received considerable attention in the past few decades as a computer tool for modeling human negotiations. The aim of automated negotiation is capturing the model of interactions during the negotiation process and improving the efficiency and quality of real-world negotiations. Due to the complexity of negotiations, there are many challenges in modelling different aspects of this process. One of the important types of negotiation, which is the focus of this thesis, is multi-issue multi-participant argumentation-based negotiation. In such negotiations, several participants with different viewpoints and perspectives negotiate over several criteria. The involved parties in these negotiations exchange proposals (a set of values assigned to negotiation issues) and receive their opponents’ evaluation of the offered proposals as well as possible arguments. The primary goal of the negotiation is finding a solution that can satisfy all the involved parties. However, in multi-issue multi-participant negotiations, finding such a solution can be quite challenging because: 1- participants have different and, sometimes, conflicting preferences about the negotiation issues; and 2- these preferences are not usually revealed to others. The higher the number of negotiation issues (i.e., the dimensions of the search space for a satisfactory solution), the higher the number of unknown preferences and therefore, the harder to reach an agreement. Therefore, the negotiation process can take a long time before approaching a possible agreement. The current thesis studies two critical aspects of automated negotiation: proposal preparation and opponent modelling. The order of the offered proposals in consecutive rounds of the negotiation directly impacts the pace of reaching an agreement. Therefore, selecting the right proposal for each round based on the interactions in the previous rounds is the key to effective negotiation. In this thesis, a novel proposal-preparation solution is proposed. It represents the negotiation issues and participants’ preferences via a graphical model and applies belief propagation to optimize this graph, the output of which is a proposal to offer to the participants. The thesis also discusses the problem of unknown preferences of the participants in this negotiation context. A recursive Bayesian filtering algorithm is proposed to learn/estimate the preferences of the opponents only through the limited information they exchange as the negotiation proceeds. The proposed approaches are then applied to two case studies to investigate their impact on the efficiency of the negotiation process. The experimental results show that using the presented proposal preparation and opponent modelling techniques, the efficiency of the negotiation process is increased by up to 85% in both case studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".