Publications

Pure Exploration in Bandits with Linear Constraints

Emil Carlsson, Debabrota Basu, Fredrik D Johansson, Devdatt Dubhashi. Published in Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2024, 2024

We address the problem of identifying the optimal policy with a fixed confidence level in a multi-armed bandit setup, when \emph{the arms are subject to linear constraints}. Unlike the standard best-arm identification problem which is well studied, the optimal policy in this case may not be deterministic and could mix between several arms. This changes the geometry of the problem which we characterize via an information-theoretic lower bound. We introduce two asymptotically optimal algorithms for this setting, one based on the Track-and-Stop method and the other based on a game-theoretic approach. Both these algorithms try to track an optimal allocation based on the lower bound and computed by a weighted projection onto the boundary of a normal cone. Finally, we provide empirical results that validate our bounds and visualize how constraints change the hardness of the problem.

Iterated learning and communication jointly explain efficient color naming systems

Emil Carlsson, Devdatt Dubhashi, Terry Regier. Published in Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2023

It has been argued that semantic systems reflect pressure for efficiency, and a current debate concerns the cultural evolutionary process that produces this pattern. We consider efficiency as instantiated in the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle, and a model of cultural evolution that combines iterated learning and communication. We show that this model, instantiated in neural networks, converges to color naming systems that are efficient in the IB sense and similar to human color naming systems. We also show that iterated learning alone, and communication alone, do not yield the same outcome as clearly.

Pragmatic Reasoning in Structured Signaling Games

Emil Carlsson, Devdatt Dubhashi. Published in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 44, 2022

In this work we introduce a structured signaling game, an extension of the classical signaling game with a similarity structure between meanings in the context, along with a variant of the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework which we call structured-RSA (sRSA) for pragmatic reasoning in structured domains. We explore the behavior of the sRSA in the domainof color and show that pragmatic agents using sRSA on top of semantic representations, derived from the World Color Survey, attain efficiency very close to the information-theoretic limit after only 1 or 2 levels of recursion. We also explore the interaction between pragmatic reasoning and learning in multi-agent reinforcement learning framework. Our results illustrate that artificial agents using sRSA develop communication closer to the information theoretic frontier compared to agents using RSA and just reinforcement learning. We also find that the ambiguity of the semantic representation increasesas the pragmatic agents are allowed to perform deeper reasoning about each other during learning

Towards Learning Abstractions via Reinforcement Learning

Erik Jergéus, Leo Karlsson Oinonen, Emil Carlsson, Moa Johansson. Published in AIC 2022, 8th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Cognition, 2022

In this paper we take the first steps in studying a new approach to synthesis of efficient communication schemes in multi-agent systems, trained via reinforcement learning. We combine symbolic methods with machine learning, in what is referred to as a neuro-symbolic system. The agents are not restricted to only use initial primitives: reinforcement learning is interleaved with steps to extend the current language with novel higher-level concepts, allowing generalisation and more informative communication via shorter messages. We demonstrate that this approach allow agents to converge more quickly on a small collaborative construction task.

Thompson Sampling for Bandits with Clustered Arms

Emil Carlsson, Devdatt Dubhashi, Fredrik D. Johansson. Published in Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence Main Track. Pages 2212-2218., 2021

We propose algorithms based on a multi-level Thompson sampling scheme, for the stochastic multi-armed bandit and its contextual variant with linear expected rewards, in the setting where arms are clustered. We show, both theoretically and empirically, how exploiting a given cluster structure can significantly improve the regret and computational cost compared to using standard Thompson sampling. In the case of the stochastic multi-armed bandit we give upper bounds on the expected cumulative regret showing how it depends on the quality of the clustering. Finally, we perform an empirical evaluation showing that our algorithms perform well compared to previously proposed algorithms for bandits with clustered arms.

Learning Approximate and Exact Numeral Systems via Reinforcement Learning

Emil Carlsson, Devdatt Dubhashi, Fredrik D. Johansson. Published in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 43, 2021

Recent work (Xu et al., 2020) has suggested that numeral systems in different languages are shaped by a functional need for efficient communication in an information-theoretic sense. Here we take a learning-theoretic approach and show how efficient communication emerges via reinforcement learning. In our framework, two artificial agents play a Lewis signaling game where the goal is to convey a numeral concept. The agents gradually learn to communicate using reinforcement learning and the resulting numeral systems are shown to be efficient in the information-theoretic framework of Regier et al.(2015); Gibson et al. (2017). They are also shown to be similar to human numeral systems of same type. Our results thus provide a mechanistic explanation via reinforcement learning of the recent results in Xu et al. (2020) and can potentially be generalized to other semantic domains.

A reinforcement-learning approach to efficient communication

Mikael Kågebäck, Emil Carlsson, Devdatt Dubhashi, Asad Sayeed. Published in PlosOne, 2020

We present a multi-agent computational approach to partitioning semantic spaces using reinforcement-learning (RL). Two agents communicate using a finite linguistic vocabulary in order to convey a concept. This is tested in the color domain, and a natural reinforcement learning mechanism is shown to converge to a scheme that achieves a near-optimal trade-off of simplicity versus communication efficiency. Results are presented both on the communication efficiency as well as on analyses of the resulting partitions of the color space. The effect of varying environmental factors such as noise is also studied. These results suggest that RL offers a powerful and flexible computational framework that can contribute to the development of communication schemes for color names that are near-optimal in an information-theoretic sense and may shape color-naming systems across languages. Our approach is not specific to color and can be used to explore cross-language variation in other semantic domains.