Game Theory seminars

Which nodes in a brain network causally influence one another, and how do such interactions utilize the underlying structural connectivity? One of the fundamental goals of neuroscience is to pinpoint such causal relations. Conventionally, these relationships are established by manipulating a node while tracking changes in another node. A causal role is then assigned to the first node if this intervention led to a significant change in the state of the tracked node. In this presentation, I use a series of intuitive thought experiments to demonstrate the methodological shortcomings of the current ‘causation via manipulation’ framework. Namely, a node might causally influence another node, but how much and through which mechanistic interactions? Therefore, establishing a causal relationship, however reliable, does not provide the proper causal understanding of the system, because there often exists a wide range of causal influences that require to be adequately decomposed. To do so, I introduce a game-theoretical framework called Multi-perturbation Shapley value Analysis (MSA). Then, I present our work in which we employed MSA on an Echo State Network (ESN), quantified how much its nodes were influencing each other, and compared these measures with the underlying synaptic strength. We found that: 1. Even though the network itself was sparse, every node could causally influence other nodes. In this case, a mere elucidation of causal relationships did not provide any useful information. 2. Additionally, the full knowledge of the structural connectome did not provide a complete causal picture of the system either, since nodes frequently influenced each other indirectly, that is, via other intermediate nodes. Our results show that just elucidating causal contributions in complex networks such as the brain is not sufficient to draw mechanistic conclusions. Moreover, quantifying causal interactions requires a systematic and extensive manipulation framework. The framework put forward here benefits from employing neural network models, and in turn, provides explainability for them.

How can people coordinate their actions or make joint decisions? One possibility is that each person attempts to predict the actions of the other(s), and best-responds accordingly. But this can lead to bad outcomes, and sometimes even vicious circularity. An alternative view is that each person attempts to work out what the two or more players would agree to do, if they were to bargain explicitly. If the result of such a "virtual" bargain is "obvious," then the players can simply play their respective roles in that bargain. I suggest that virtual bargaining is essential to genuinely social interaction (rather than viewing other people as instruments), and may even be uniquely human. This approach aims to respect methodological individualism, a key principle in many areas of social science, while explaining how human groups can, in a very real sense, be "greater" than the sum of their individual members.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently shown great promise as an approach to networked system control. Arguably, one of the most difficult and important tasks for which large scale networked system control is applicable is common-pool resource (CPR) management. Crucial CPRs include arable land, fresh water, wetlands, wildlife, fish stock, forests and the atmosphere, of which proper management is related to some of society’s greatest challenges such as food security, inequality and climate change. This talk will consist of three parts. In the first, we will briefly look at climate change and how it poses a significant threat to life on our planet. In the second, we will consider the potential of multi-agent systems for climate change mitigation and adaptation. And finally, in the third, we will discuss recent research from InstaDeep into better understanding the behaviour of networked MARL systems used for CPR management. More specifically, we will see how the tools from empirical game-theoretic analysis may be harnessed to analyse the differences in networked MARL systems. The results give new insights into the consequences associated with certain design choices and provide an additional dimension of comparison between systems beyond efficiency, robustness, scalability and mean control performance.