A General-Purpose Protocol for Multi-Agent based Explanations

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Giovanni Ciatto, Matteo Magnini, Berk Bezcu, Reyhan Aydogan, Andrea Omicini
Davide Calvaresi, Amro Najjar, Andrea Omicini, Reyhan Aydoǧan, Rachele Carli, Giovanni Ciatto, Yazan Mualla, Kary Främling (eds.)
Explainable and Transparent AI and Multi-Agent Systems, chapter 3, pages 38–58
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence) 14127
Springer
September 2023

Building on prior works on explanation negotiation protocols, this paper proposes a general-purpose protocol for multi-agent systems where recommender agents may need to provide explanations for their recommendations. The protocol specifies the roles and responsibilities of the explainee and the explainer agent and the types of information that should be exchanged between them to ensure a clear and effective explanation. However, it does not prescribe any particular sort of recommendation or explanation, hence remaining agnostic w.r.t. such notions. Novelty lays in the extended support for both ordinary and contrastive explanations, as well as for the situation where no explanation is needed as none is requested by the explainee. Accordingly, we formally present and analyse the protocol, motivating its design and discussing its generality. We also discuss the reification of the protocol into a re-usable software library, namely PyXMas, which is meant to support developers willing to build explainable MAS leveraging our protocol. Finally, we discuss how custom notions of recommendation and explanation can be easily plugged into PyXMas.

keywordsXAI • recommender systems • multi-agent systems • explanation protocols • Spade • PyXMas
reference talk
page_white_powerpointA General-Purpose Protocol for Multi-Agent based Explanations (EXTRAAMAS 2023@AAMAS 2023, 29/05/2023) — Giovanni Ciatto (Giovanni Ciatto, Matteo Magnini, Berk Buzcu, Reyhan Aydoğan, Andrea Omicini)
origin event
worldEXTRAAMAS 2023@AAMAS 2023
journal or series
book Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)
container publication
page_white_acrobatExplainable and Transparent AI and Multi-Agent Systems (edited volume, 2023) — Davide Calvaresi, Amro Najjar, Andrea Omicini, Reyhan Aydoǧan, Rachele Carli, Giovanni Ciatto, Yazan Mualla, Kary Främling
funding project
wrenchEXPECTATION — Personalized Explainable Artificial Intelligence for decentralized agents with heterogeneous knowledge (01/04/2021–31/03/2024)
works as
reference publication for talk
page_white_powerpointA General-Purpose Protocol for Multi-Agent based Explanations (EXTRAAMAS 2023@AAMAS 2023, 29/05/2023) — Giovanni Ciatto (Giovanni Ciatto, Matteo Magnini, Berk Buzcu, Reyhan Aydoğan, Andrea Omicini)