An Autonomous Negotiating Agent Framework with Reinforcement Learning Based Strategies and Adaptive Strategy Switching Mechanism

Abstract

Despite abundant negotiation strategies in literature, the complexity of automated negotiation forbids a single strategy from being dominant against all others in different negotiation scenarios. To overcome this, one approach is to use mixture of experts, but at the same time, one problem of this method is the selection of experts, as this approach is limited by the competency of the experts selected. Another problem with most negotiation strategies is their incapability of adapting to dynamic variation of the opponent's behaviour within a single negotiation session resulting in poor performance. This work focuses on both, solving the problem of expert selection and adapting to the opponent's behaviour with our Autonomous Negotiating Agent Framework. This framework allows real-time classification of opponent's behaviour and provides a mechanism to select, switch or combine strategies within a single negotiation session. Additionally, our framework has a reviewer component which enables self-enhancement capability by deciding to include new strategies or replace old ones with better strategies periodically. We demonstrate an instance of our framework by implementing maximum entropy reinforcement learning based strategies with a deep learning based opponent classifier. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our agent against state-of-the-art negotiators under varied negotiation scenarios.