Agree to disagree: subjective fairness in privacy-restricted decentralised conflict resolution
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Published version
Author(s)
Raymond, Alex
Malencia, Matthew
Paulino-Passos, Guilherme
Prorok, Amanda
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Fairness is commonly seen as a property of the global outcome of a system and assumes centralisation and complete knowledge. However, in real decentralised applications, agents only have partial observation capabilities. Under limited information, agents rely on communication to divulge some of their private (and unobservable) information to others. When an agent deliberates to resolve conflicts, limited knowledge may cause its perspective of a correct outcome to differ from the actual outcome of the conflict resolution. This is subjective unfairness. As human systems and societies are organised by rules and norms, hybrid human-agent and multi-agent environments of the future will require agents to resolve conflicts in a decentralised and rule-aware way. Prior work achieves such decentralised, rule-aware conflict resolution through cultures: explainable architectures that embed human regulations and norms via argumentation frameworks with verification mechanisms. However, this prior work requires agents to have full state knowledge of each other, whereas many distributed applications in practice admit partial observation capabilities, which may require agents to communicate and carefully opt to release information if privacy constraints apply. To enable decentralised, fairness-aware conflict resolution under privacy constraints, we have two contributions: 1) a novel interaction approach and 2) a formalism of the relationship between privacy and fairness. Our proposed interaction approach is an architecture for privacy-aware explainable conflict resolution where agents engage in a dialogue of hypotheses and facts. To measure the privacy-fairness relationship, we define subjective and objective fairness on both the local and global scope and formalise the impact of partial observability due to privacy in these different notions of fairness. We first study our proposed architecture and the privacy-fairness relationship in the abstract, testing different argumentation strategies on a large number of randomised cultures. We empirically demonstrate the trade-off between privacy, objective fairness, and subjective fairness and show that better strategies can mitigate the effects of privacy in distributed systems. In addition to this analysis across a broad set of randomised abstract cultures, we analyse a case study for a specific scenario: we instantiate our architecture in a multi-agent simulation of prioritised rule-aware collision avoidance with limited information disclosure.
Date Issued
2022-02-17
Date Acceptance
2022-01-14
Citation
Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 2022, 9, pp.733876-733876
ISSN
2296-9144
Publisher
Frontiers Media
Start Page
733876
End Page
733876
Journal / Book Title
Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Volume
9
Copyright Statement
© 2022 Raymond , Malencia , Paulino-Passos and Prorok . This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Copyright URL
Identifier
https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2022.733876
Subjects
0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
0906 Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Notes
timestamp: Mon, 14 Mar 2022 17:29:10 +0100 biburl: https://dblp.org/rec/journals/firai/RaymondMPP22.bib bibsource: dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2022-02-17