IJCAI 2022: Transfer Learning Based Adaptive Automated Negotiating Agent Framework
Abstract:
With the availability of domain specific historical negotiation data, the practical applications of machine learning techniques can prove to be increasingly effective in the field of automated negotiation. Yet a large portion of the literature focuses on domain independent negotiation and thus passes the possibility of leveraging any domain specific insights from historical data. Moreover, during sequential negotiation, utility functions may alter due to various reasons including market demand, partner agreements, weather conditions, etc. This poses a unique set of challenges and one can easily infer that one strategy that fts all is rather impossible in such scenarios. In this work, we present a simple yet effective method of learning an end-to-end negotiation strategy from historical negotiation data. Next, we show that transfer learning based solutions are effective in designing adaptive strategies when underlying utility functions of agents change. Additionally, we also propose an online method of detecting and measuring such changes in the utility functions. Combining all three contributions we propose an adaptive automated negotiating agent framework that enables the automatic creation of transfer learning based negotiating agents capable of adapting to changes in utility functions. Finally, we present the results of an agent generated using our framework in different ANAC domains with 88 different utility functions each and show that our agent outperforms the benchmark score by domain independent agents by 6%.