Reut Apel

Eilam Shapira, Omer Madmon, Reut Apel et al.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have spurred interest in designing LLM-based agents for tasks that involve interaction with human and artificial agents. This paper addresses a key aspect in the design of such agents: predicting human decisions in off-policy evaluation (OPE). We focus on language-based persuasion games, where an expert aims to influence the decision-maker through verbal messages. In our OPE framework, the prediction model is trained on human interaction data collected from encounters with one set of expert agents, and its performance is evaluated on interactions with a different set of experts. Using a dedicated application, we collected a dataset of 87K decisions from humans playing a repeated decision-making game with artificial agents. To enhance off-policy performance, we propose a simulation technique involving interactions across the entire agent space and simulated decision-makers. Our learning strategy yields significant OPE gains, e.g., improving prediction accuracy in the top 15% challenging cases by 7.1%. Our code and the large dataset we collected and generated are submitted as supplementary material and publicly available in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/eilamshapira/HumanChoicePrediction

Reut Apel, Tom Braude, Amir Kantor et al.

We present MeeQA, a dataset for natural-language question answering over meeting transcripts. It includes real questions asked during meetings by its participants. The dataset contains 48K question-answer pairs, extracted from 422 meeting transcripts, spanning multiple domains. Questions in transcripts pose a special challenge as they are not always clear, and considerable context may be required in order to provide an answer. Further, many questions asked during meetings are left unanswered. To improve baseline model performance on this type of questions, we also propose a novel loss function, \emph{Flat Hierarchical Loss}, designed to enhance performance over questions with no answer in the text. Our experiments demonstrate the advantage of using our approach over standard QA models.

Maya Raifer, Guy Rotman, Reut Apel et al.

Persuasion games are fundamental in economics and AI research and serve as the basis for important applications. However, work on this setup assumes communication with stylized messages that do not consist of rich human language. In this paper we consider a repeated sender (expert) -- receiver (decision maker) game, where the sender is fully informed about the state of the world and aims to persuade the receiver to accept a deal by sending one of several possible natural language reviews. We design an automatic expert that plays this repeated game, aiming to achieve the maximal payoff. Our expert is implemented within the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm, with deep learning models that exploit behavioral and linguistic signals in order to predict the next action of the decision maker, and the future payoff of the expert given the state of the game and a candidate review. We demonstrate the superiority of our expert over strong baselines, its adaptability to different decision makers, and that its selected reviews are nicely adapted to the proposed deal.

Reut Apel, Ido Erev, Roi Reichart et al.

Sender-receiver interactions, and specifically persuasion games, are widely researched in economic modeling and artificial intelligence. However, in the classic persuasion games setting, the messages sent from the expert to the decision-maker (DM) are abstract or well-structured signals rather than natural language messages. This paper addresses the use of natural language in persuasion games. For this purpose, we conduct an online repeated interaction experiment. At each trial of the interaction, an informed expert aims to sell an uninformed decision-maker a vacation in a hotel, by sending her a review that describes the hotel. While the expert is exposed to several scored reviews, the decision-maker observes only the single review sent by the expert, and her payoff in case she chooses to take the hotel is a random draw from the review score distribution available to the expert only. We also compare the behavioral patterns in this experiment to the equivalent patterns in similar experiments where the communication is based on the numerical values of the reviews rather than the reviews' text, and observe substantial differences which can be explained through an equilibrium analysis of the game. We consider a number of modeling approaches for our verbal communication setup, differing from each other in the model type (deep neural network vs. linear classifier), the type of features used by the model (textual, behavioral or both) and the source of the textual features (DNN-based vs. hand-crafted). Our results demonstrate that given a prefix of the interaction sequence, our models can predict the future decisions of the decision-maker, particularly when a sequential modeling approach and hand-crafted textual features are applied. Further analysis of the hand-crafted textual features allows us to make initial observations about the aspects of text that drive decision making in our setup

Ori Plonsky, Reut Apel, Eyal Ert et al.

Predicting human decisions under risk and uncertainty remains a fundamental challenge across disciplines. Existing models often struggle even in highly stylized tasks like choice between lotteries. We introduce BEAST Gradient Boosting (BEAST-GB), a hybrid model integrating behavioral theory (BEAST) with machine learning. We first present CPC18, a competition for predicting risky choice, in which BEAST-GB won. Then, using two large datasets, we demonstrate BEAST-GB predicts more accurately than neural networks trained on extensive data and dozens of existing behavioral models. BEAST-GB also generalizes robustly across unseen experimental contexts, surpassing direct empirical generalization, and helps refine and improve the behavioral theory itself. Our analyses highlight the potential of anchoring predictions on behavioral theory even in data-rich settings and even when the theory alone falters. Our results underscore how integrating machine learning with theoretical frameworks, especially those-like BEAST-designed for prediction, can improve our ability to predict and understand human behavior.