Back to the Future: Toward a Hybrid Architecture for Ad Hoc Teamwork

Abstract

State of the art methods for ad hoc teamwork, i.e., for collaboration without prior coordination, often use a long history of prior observations to model the behavior of other agents (or agent types) and to determine the ad hoc agent's behavior. In many practical domains, it is difficult to obtain large training datasets, and necessary to quickly revise the existing models to account for changes in team composition or domain attributes. Our architecture builds on the principles of step-wise refinement and ecological rationality to enable an ad hoc agent to perform non-monotonic logical reasoning with prior commonsense domain knowledge and models learned rapidly from limited examples to predict the behavior of other agents. In the simulated multiagent collaboration domain Fort Attack, we experimentally demonstrate that our architecture enables an ad hoc agent to adapt to changes in the behavior of other agents, and provides enhanced transparency and better performance than a state of the art data-driven baseline.