Friday, April 2nd at noon 12:00 PM EST by Prof. Naomi Leonard (Princeton). Please find the talk information as follows:
Title: Nonlinear Opinion Dynamics and Games
Abstract: I will discuss a recently proposed model of opinion dynamics and its use in the study of multi-agent strategic interaction. Our model describes continuous-time opinion dynamics for an arbitrary number of agents that communicate over a network and form real-valued opinions about an arbitrary number of options. Many models in the literature update agent opinions using a weighted average of their neighbors’ opinions. Our model generalizes these models by applying a sigmoidal saturation function to opinion exchanges. This makes the update fundamentally nonlinear: opinions form through a bifurcation yielding multi-stability of network opinion configurations. Leveraging idealized symmetries in the system, qualitative behavioral regimes can be distinguished explicitly in terms of just a few parameters. I will show how to interpret the opinion dynamics as a model of multi-agent reinforcement learning in games and discuss implications for games including the traveler’s dilemma and the prisoner’s dilemma.
Modeling and analysis of opinion dynamics is joint work with Anastasia Bizyaeva and Alessio Franci and based on the paper
https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04332v2. Using the model in games is joint work with Shinkyu Park, Anastasia Bizyaeva, and Yunxiu Zhou.
Bio: Naomi Ehrich Leonard is Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and associated faculty in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. She received her BSE in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University and her PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland. She is Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, SIAM, IEEE, IFAC, and ASME and a MacArthur Fellow. Her current research focuses on dynamics and control of multi-agent systems on networks with application to distributed decision making, spreading processes, multi-robot teams, and collective behavior.
You can participate in the seminar via Zoom at:
https://mit.zoom.us/j/97000435867, or watch the Youtube livestream at:
https://youtu.be/PriKe6KiuSo.--
FROM 211.161.245.*