Human-Agent Cooperation in Games under Incomplete Information through Natural Language Communication

Human-Agent Cooperation in Games under Incomplete Information through Natural Language Communication

Shenghui Chen, Daniel Fried, Ufuk Topcu

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Human-Centred AI. Pages 7833-7841. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/867

Developing autonomous agents that can strategize and cooperate with humans under information asymmetry is challenging without effective communication in natural language. We introduce a shared-control game, where two players collectively control a token in alternating turns to achieve a common objective under incomplete information. We formulate a policy synthesis problem for an autonomous agent in this game with a human as the other player. To solve this problem, we propose a communication-based approach comprising a language module and a planning module. The language module translates natural language messages into and from a finite set of flags, a compact representation defined to capture player intents. The planning module leverages these flags to compute a policy using an asymmetric information-set Monte Carlo tree search with flag exchange algorithm we present. We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach in a testbed based on Gnomes at Night, a search-and-find maze board game. Results of human subject experiments show that communication narrows the information gap between players and enhances human-agent cooperation efficiency with fewer turns.
Keywords:
Humans and AI: HAI: Human-AI collaboration
Planning and Scheduling: PS: Planning with Incomplete Information
Uncertainty in AI: UAI: Sequential decision making
Natural Language Processing: NLP: Dialogue and interactive systems