Publications by Year: 2019

2019
Kai Wang, Aditya Mate, Bryan Wilder, Andrew Perrault, and Milind Tambe. 2019. “Using Graph Convolutional Networks to Learn Interdiction Games .” In AI for Social Good workshop (AI4SG) at International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2019.Abstract
Illegal smuggling is one of the most important issues across countries, where more than $10 billion a year of illegal wildlife trafficking is conducted within transnational criminal networks. Governments have tried to deploy inspections at checkpoints to stop illegal smuggling, though the effect is quite limited due to vast protection areas but limited human resources. We study these problems from the perspective of network interdiction games with a boundedly rational attacker. In this paper, we aim to improve the efficiency of the limited number of checkpoints. The problem involves two main stages: i) a predictive stage to predict the attacker’s behavior based on the historical interdiction; ii) a prescriptive stage to optimally allocate limited checkpoints to interdict the attacker. In this paper, we propose a novel boundedly rational model which resolves the issue of exponentially many attacker strategies by making memoryless assumption about the attacker’s behavior. We show that the attacker’s behavior can be reduced to an absorbing Markov chain, where the success probability of reaching any target can be computed analytically, thus optimized via any gradient-based optimization technique. We incorporate graph convolutional neural networks with K-hops look-ahead to model the attacker’s reasoning. Our proposed model provides a new perspective to study the boundedly rationality in traditional interdiction games with graph structure. This novel model possesses nice analytical properties and scales up very well by avoiding enumerating all paths in the graph.
2019_22_teamcore_ijcai_ai4sg_gcn_interdiction.pdf
Elizabeth Bondi. 2019. “Visionary Security: Using Uncertain Real-Time Information in Signaling Games .” In International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2019 (Doctoral Consortium).Abstract
In important domains from natural resource conservation to public safety, real-time information is becoming increasingly important. Strategic deployment of security cameras and mobile sensors such as drones can provide real-time updates on illegal activities. To help plan for such strategic deployments of sensors and human patrollers, as well as warning signals to ward off adversaries, the defender-attacker security games framework can be used. [Zhang et al., 2019] has shown that real-time data (e.g., human view from a helicopter) may be used in conjunction with security game models to interdict criminals. Other recent work relies on real-time information from sensors that can notify the patroller when an opponent is detected [Basilico et al., 2017; Xu et al., 2018]. Despite considering real-time information in all cases, these works do not consider the combined situation of uncertainty in real-time information in addition to strategically signaling to adversaries. In this thesis, we will not only address this gap, but also improve the overall security result by considering security game models and computer vision algorithms together. A major aspect of this work is in applying it to real-world challenges, such as conservation. Although it applies to many environmental challenges, such as protecting forests and avoiding illegal mining, we will focus particularly on reducing poaching of endangered wildlife as an example. To reduce poaching, human patrollers typically search for snares and poaching activity as they patrol, as well as intervene if poaching activity is found. Drones are useful patrolling aids due to their ability to cover additional ground, but they must interpret their environments, notify nearby human patrollers for intervention, and send potentially deceptive signals to the adversary to deter poaching. Rather than treating these as separate tasks, models must coordinate to handle challenges found in real-world conservation scenarios (Fig. 1). We will determine the success of this work both in simulated experiments and through work with conservation agencies such as Air Shepherd to implement the system in the real world.
2019_15-5_teamcore_0902.pdf
Sarah Cooney, Phebe Vayanos, Thanh H. Nguyen, Cleotilde Gonzalez, Christian Lebiere, Edward A. Cranford, and Milind Tambe. 2019. “Warning Time: Optimizing Strategic Signaling for Security Against Boundedly Rational Adversaries.” In International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (Extended Abstract) (AAMAS-19).Abstract
Defender-attacker Stackelberg security games (SSGs) have been
applied for solving many real-world security problems. Recent work
in SSGs has incorporated a deceptive signaling scheme into the
SSG model, where the defender strategically reveals information
about her defensive strategy to the attacker, in order to inuence
the attacker’s decision making for the defender’s own benet. In
this work, we study the problem of signaling in security games
against a boundedly rational attacker.
2019_7_teamcore_sample_aamas19.pdf
Han-Ching Ou, Arunesh Sinha, Sze-Chuan Suen, Andrew Perrault, and Milind Tambe. 2019. “Who and When to Screen: Multi-Round Active Screening for Recurrent Infectious Diseases Under Uncertainty .” In Joint Workshop on Autonomous Agents for Social Good (AASG) at International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-19).Abstract
Controlling recurrent infectious diseases is a vital yet complicated problem. In this paper, we propose a novel active screening
model (ACTS) and algorithms to facilitate active screening for recurrent diseases (no permanent immunity) under infection uncertainty. Our
contributions are: (1) A new approach to modeling multi-round networkbased screening/contact tracing under uncertainty, which is a common
real-life practice in a variety of diseases [10, 30]; (2) Two novel algorithms,
Full- and Fast-REMEDY. Full-REMEDY considers the effect of future actions and finds a policy that provides high solution quality, where
Fast-REMEDY scales linearly in the size of the network; (3) We evaluate
Full- and Fast-REMEDY on several real-world datasets which emulate human contact and find that they control diseases better than the
baselines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on multiround active screening with uncertainty for diseases with no permanent
immunity.
2019_1_teamcore_whoandwhentoscreenmultiroundactivescreeningforrecurrentinfectiousdiseasesunderuncertainty.pdf
Bryan Wilder, Eric Ewing, Bistra Dilkina, and Milind Tambe. 2019. “End to End Learning and Optimization on Graphs.” In Advances in Neural and Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS-19), 2019.Abstract
Real-world applications often combine learning and optimization problems on graphs. For instance, our objective may be to cluster the graph in order to detect meaningful communities (or solve other common graph optimization problems such as facility location, maxcut, and so on). However, graphs or related attributes are often only partially observed, introducing learning problems such as link prediction which must be solved prior to optimization. Standard approaches treat learning and optimization entirely separately, while recent machine learning work aims to predict the optimal solution directly from the inputs. Here, we propose an alternative decision-focused learning approach that integrates a differentiable proxy for common graph optimization problems as a layer in learned systems. The main idea is to learn a representation that maps the original optimization problem onto a simpler proxy problem that can be efficiently differentiated through. Experimental results show that our CLUSTERNET system outperforms both pure end-to-end approaches (that directly predict the optimal solution) and standard approaches that entirely separate learning and optimization. Code for our system is available at https://github.com/bwilder0/clusternet.
graphopt_neurips.pdf
Aida Rahmattalabi, Phebe Vayanos, Anthony Fulginiti, Eric Rice, Bryan Wilder, Amulya Yadav, and Milind Tambe. 2019. “Exploring Algorithmic Fairness in Robust Graph Covering Problems.” In . Advances in Neural and Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS-19), 2019.Abstract
Fueled by algorithmic advances, AI algorithms are increasingly being deployed in
settings subject to unanticipated challenges with complex social effects. Motivated
by real-world deployment of AI driven, social-network based suicide prevention
and landslide risk management interventions, this paper focuses on robust graph
covering problems subject to group fairness constraints. We show that, in the
absence of fairness constraints, state-of-the-art algorithms for the robust graph covering problem result in biased node coverage: they tend to discriminate individuals
(nodes) based on membership in traditionally marginalized groups. To mitigate
this issue, we propose a novel formulation of the robust graph covering problem
with group fairness constraints and a tractable approximation scheme applicable to
real-world instances. We provide a formal analysis of the price of group fairness
(PoF) for this problem, where we show that uncertainty can lead to greater PoF. We
demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on several real-world social networks.
Our method yields competitive node coverage while significantly improving group
fairness relative to state-of-the-art methods.
camera-ready-faircovering.pdf
Aida Rahmattalabi, Anamika Barman Adhikari, Phebe Vayanos, Milind Tambe, Eric Rice, and Robin Baker. 2019. “Social Network Based Substance Abuse Prevention via Network Modification (A Preliminary Study).” In Strategic Reasoning for Societal Challenges (SRSC) Workshop at International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-19).Abstract
Substance use and abuse is a significant public health problem in the
United States. Group-based intervention programs offer a promising
means of preventing and reducing substance abuse. While effective,
unfortunately, inappropriate intervention groups can result in an
increase in deviant behaviors among participants, a process known
as deviancy training. This paper investigates the problem of optimizing the social influence related to the deviant behavior via careful
construction of the intervention groups. We propose a Mixed Integer Optimization formulation that decides on the intervention
groups to be formed, captures the impact of the intervention groups
on the structure of the social network, and models the impact of
these changes on behavior propagation. In addition, we propose
a scalable hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm that combines Mixed
Integer Programming and Large Neighborhood Search to find nearoptimal network partitions. Our algorithm is packaged in the form
of GUIDE, an AI-based decision aid that recommends intervention groups. Being the first quantitative decision aid of this kind,
GUIDE is able to assist practitioners, in particular social workers, in
three key areas: (a) GUIDE proposes near-optimal solutions that are
shown, via extensive simulations, to significantly improve over the
traditional qualitative practices for forming intervention groups;
(b) GUIDE is able to identify circumstances when an intervention
will lead to deviancy training, thus saving time, money, and effort;
(c) GUIDE can evaluate current strategies of group formation and
discard strategies that will lead to deviancy training. In developing
GUIDE, we are primarily interested in substance use interventions
among homeless youth as a high risk and vulnerable population.
GUIDE is developed in collaboration with Urban Peak, a homelessyouth serving organization in Denver, CO, and is under preparation
for deployment.
2019_5_teamcore_aida_aamas2019_workshop_substance_abuse.pdf
Xinrun Wang, Milind Tambe, Branislav Boˇsansky ́, and Bo An. 2019. “When Players Affect Target Values: Modeling and Solving Dynamic Partially Observable Security Games.” In . Conference on Decision and Game Theory for Security, 2019.Abstract
Most of the current security models assume that the values of targets/areas are static or the changes (if any) are scheduled and
known to the defender. Unfortunately, such models are not sufficient
for many domains, where actions of the players modify the values of
the targets. Examples include wildlife scenarios, where the attacker can
increase value of targets by secretly building supporting facilities. To address such security game domains with player-affected values, we first
propose DPOS3G, a novel partially observable stochastic Stackelberg
game where target values are determined by the players’ actions; the defender can only partially observe these targets’ values, while the attacker
can fully observe the targets’ values and the defender’s strategy. Second,
we propose RITA (Reduced game Iterative Transfer Algorithm), which
is based on the heuristic search value iteration algorithm for partially observable stochastic game (PG-HSVI) and introduces three key novelties:
(a) building a reduced game with only key states (derived from partitioning the state space) to reduce the numbers of states and transitions
considered when solving the game; (b) incrementally adding defender’s
actions to further reduce the number of transitions of the game; (c) providing novel heuristics for lower bound initialization of the algorithm.
Third, we conduct extensive experimental evaluations of the algorithms
and the results show that RITA significantly outperforms the baseline
PG-HSVI algorithm on scalability while allowing for trade off in scalability and solution quality.
2019_20_teamcore_stochastic_usc_game_sec_08052019_updated.pdf

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