Gale M. Lucas

Kushal Chawla, Ian Wu, Yu Rong et al.

A natural way to design a negotiation dialogue system is via self-play RL: train an agent that learns to maximize its performance by interacting with a simulated user that has been designed to imitate human-human dialogue data. Although this procedure has been adopted in prior work, we find that it results in a fundamentally flawed system that fails to learn the value of compromise in a negotiation, which can often lead to no agreements (i.e., the partner walking away without a deal), ultimately hurting the model's overall performance. We investigate this observation in the context of the DealOrNoDeal task, a multi-issue negotiation over books, hats, and balls. Grounded in negotiation theory from Economics, we modify the training procedure in two novel ways to design agents with diverse personalities and analyze their performance with human partners. We find that although both techniques show promise, a selfish agent, which maximizes its own performance while also avoiding walkaways, performs superior to other variants by implicitly learning to generate value for both itself and the negotiation partner. We discuss the implications of our findings for what it means to be a successful negotiation dialogue system and how these systems should be designed in the future.

Kushal Chawla, Gale M. Lucas, Jonathan May et al.

Opponent modeling is the task of inferring another party's mental state within the context of social interactions. In a multi-issue negotiation, it involves inferring the relative importance that the opponent assigns to each issue under discussion, which is crucial for finding high-value deals. A practical model for this task needs to infer these priorities of the opponent on the fly based on partial dialogues as input, without needing additional annotations for training. In this work, we propose a ranker for identifying these priorities from negotiation dialogues. The model takes in a partial dialogue as input and predicts the priority order of the opponent. We further devise ways to adapt related data sources for this task to provide more explicit supervision for incorporating the opponent's preferences and offers, as a proxy to relying on granular utterance-level annotations. We show the utility of our proposed approach through extensive experiments based on two dialogue datasets. We find that the proposed data adaptations lead to strong performance in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Moreover, they allow the model to perform better than baselines while accessing fewer utterances from the opponent. We release our code to support future work in this direction.

Ruying Liu, Wanjing Wu, Burcin Becerik-Gerber et al.

With the alarming rise in active shooter incidents (ASIs) in the United States, enhancing public safety through building design has become a pressing need. This study proposes a reinforcement learning-based simulation approach addressing gaps in existing research that has neglected the dynamic behaviours of shooters. We developed an autonomous agent to simulate an active shooter within a realistic office environment, aiming to offer insights into the interactions between building design parameters and ASI outcomes. A case study is conducted to quantitatively investigate the impact of building exit numbers (total count of accessible exits) and configuration (arrangement of which exits are available or not) on evacuation and harm rates. Findings demonstrate that greater exit availability significantly improves evacuation outcomes and reduces harm. Exits nearer to the shooter's initial position hold greater importance for accessibility than those farther away. By encompassing dynamic shooter behaviours, this study offers preliminary insights into effective building safety design against evolving threats.

Deuksin Kwon, Emily Weiss, Tara Kulshrestha et al.

A successful negotiation requires a range of capabilities, including comprehension of the conversation context, Theory-of-Mind (ToM) skills to infer the partner's motives, strategic reasoning, and effective communication, making it challenging for automated systems. Despite the remarkable performance of LLMs in various NLP tasks, there is no systematic evaluation of their capabilities in negotiation. Such an evaluation is critical for advancing AI negotiation agents and negotiation research, ranging from designing dialogue systems to providing pedagogical feedback and scaling up data collection practices. This work aims to systematically analyze the multifaceted capabilities of LLMs across diverse dialogue scenarios throughout the stages of a typical negotiation interaction. Our analysis highlights GPT-4's superior performance in many tasks while identifying specific challenges, such as making subjective assessments and generating contextually appropriate, strategically advantageous responses.

Yunzhe Wang, Gale M. Lucas, Burcin Becerik-Gerber et al.

Language-driven generative agents have enabled large-scale social simulations with transformative uses, from interpersonal training to aiding global policy-making. However, recent studies indicate that generative agent behaviors often deviate from expert expectations and real-world data--a phenomenon we term the Behavior-Realism Gap. To address this, we introduce a theoretical framework called Persona-Environment Behavioral Alignment (PEBA), formulated as a distribution matching problem grounded in Lewin's behavior equation stating that behavior is a function of the person and their environment. Leveraging PEBA, we propose PersonaEvolve (PEvo), an LLM-based optimization algorithm that iteratively refines agent personas, implicitly aligning their collective behaviors with realistic expert benchmarks within a specified environmental context. We validate PEvo in an active shooter incident simulation we developed, achieving an 84% average reduction in distributional divergence compared to no steering and a 34% improvement over explicit instruction baselines. Results also show PEvo-refined personas generalize to novel, related simulation scenarios. Our method greatly enhances behavioral realism and reliability in high-stakes social simulations. More broadly, the PEBA-PEvo framework provides a principled approach to developing trustworthy LLM-driven social simulations.

Deuksin Kwon, Jiwon Hae, Emma Clift et al.

Negotiation requires dynamically balancing self-interest and cooperation within the flow of conversation to maximize one's own utility. Yet, existing agents struggle due to bounded rationality in human data, low adaptability to counterpart behavior, and limited strategic reasoning. To address this, we introduce principle-driven negotiation agents, powered by ASTRA, a novel framework for turn-level offer optimization grounded in two core principles: opponent modeling and Tit-for-Tat reciprocity. ASTRA operates in three stages: (1) interpreting counterpart behavior, (2) optimizing counteroffers via a tool-integrated action with a linear programming (LP) solver, and (3) selecting offers based on strategy assessment and the partner's acceptance probability. Through simulations and human evaluations, our agent effectively adapts to an opponent's shifting stance and achieves favorable outcomes through enhanced adaptability and strategic reasoning. Beyond enhancing negotiation performance, it also serves as a powerful coaching tool, offering interpretable strategic feedback and optimal offer recommendations beyond human bounded rationality, with its potential further validated through human evaluation.

Ruying Liu, Burçin Becerik-Gerber, Gale M. Lucas

This study bridges the knowledge gap on how personal factors affect building occupants' responses in active shooter situations by applying interpretable machine learning methods to data from 107 participants. The personal factors studied are training methods, prior training experience, sense of direction, and gender. The response performance measurements consist of decisions (run, hide, multiple), vulnerability (corresponding to the time a participant is visible to a shooter), and pre-evacuation time. The results indicate that the propensity to run significantly determines overall response strategies, overshadowing vulnerability, and pre-evacuation time. The training method is a critical factor where VR-based training leads to better responses than video-based training. A better sense of direction and previous training experience are correlated with a greater propensity to run and less vulnerability. Gender slightly influences decisions and vulnerability but significantly impacts pre-evacuation time, with females evacuating slower, potentially due to higher risk perception. This study underscores the importance of personal factors in shaping responses to active shooter incidents.