Madeleine Grunde-McLaughlin, Hafsah Usman, Daniel Mitroshkov, Emily Reif, Nino Migineishvili, Lakshya Chauhan. Kevin Yu, Jeffrey Heer, Daniel S. Weld
原文摘要
When an AI agent executes an underspecified task, it embeds choices that may contradict unarticulated user context and preferences. However, interrupting the user for clarification on all such decisions is untenable. How might agents communicate impactful, but unexplored, paths to the user after execution? To investigate, we first distill a design space for communicating alternative paths, supporting the generation of new systems and structuring dimensions of future study. We then measure the impact of one vital design space dimension on user comprehension: the number of alternatives displayed. Through a user study (n=48) in the data analysis domain, we find that participants rarely consider alternative paths of their own volition, but AI overreliance reduces when alternative paths are visualized for them. By revealing paths the agent did not take, we demonstrate how users can better interpret results and incorporate personal context.
Achieving safety in autonomous driving through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a critical yet challenging task due to non-stationarity, partial observability, and the need for effective coordination among agents. Although earlier cooperative MARL methods have aimed to improve coordination by sharing encoded state observations, we find these strategies are insufficient in safety-critical scenarios. To address this gap, we present IntNet, a novel MARL framework that enhances safety by incorporating the transmission of vehicle intent and adaptive communication scheduling into a unified end-to-end learning paradigm, jointly optimising all components for safe coordination. Central to our approach is an observation prediction module that enables agents to forecast subsequent policy outputs, which they can then share across a vehicle-to-vehicle network. Our model-free architecture employs a Graph Attention Network to process incoming messages and a scheduler component to dynamically optimise the communication graph for bandwidth efficiency. We compare IntNet against state-of-the-art communicative MARL methods in complex urban environments with both autonomous and human-operated vehicles, achieving improved coordination, lower collision rates, and reducing communication efforts by up to 60\%. Through extensive experiments, we assess the framework's learning efficiency, scalability, and the balance between information sharing and bandwidth usage for collision-free trajectories.