arXiv subjects

Dana S. Nau

Publications and source records attributed to Dana S. Nau.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Landmark-Assisted Monte Carlo Planning

Landmarks$\unicode{x2013}$conditions that must be satisfied at some point in every solution plan$\unicode{x2013}$have contributed to major advancements in classical planning, but they have seldom been used in stochastic domains. We formalize probabilistic landmarks and adapt the UCT algorithm to leverage them as subgoals to decompose MDPs; core to the adaptation is balancing between greedy landmark achievement and final goal achievement. Our results in benchmark domains show that well-chosen landmarks can significantly improve the performance of UCT in online probabilistic planning, while the best balance of greedy versus long-term goal achievement is problem-dependent. The results suggest that landmarks can provide helpful guidance for anytime algorithms solving MDPs.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2018

Tipping Points for Norm Change in Human Cultures

Humans interact with each other on a daily basis by developing and maintaining various social norms and it is critical to form a deeper understanding of how such norms develop, how they change, and how fast they change. In this work, we develop an evolutionary game-theoretic model based on research in cultural psychology that shows that humans in various cultures differ in their tendencies to conform with those around them. Using this model, we analyze the evolutionary relationships between the tendency to conform and how quickly a population reacts when conditions make a change in norm desirable. Our analysis identifies conditions when a tipping point is reached in a population, causing norms to change rapidly.

q-bio.PE↗

arXiv2017

Understanding Norm Change: An Evolutionary Game-Theoretic Approach (Extended Version)

Human societies around the world interact with each other by developing and maintaining social norms, and it is critically important to understand how such norms emerge and change. In this work, we define an evolutionary game-theoretic model to study how norms change in a society, based on the idea that different strength of norms in societies translate to different game-theoretic interaction structures and incentives. We use this model to study, both analytically and with extensive agent-based simulations, the evolutionary relationships of the need for coordination in a society (which is related to its norm strength) with two key aspects of norm change: cultural inertia (whether or how quickly the population responds when faced with conditions that make a norm change desirable), and exploration rate (the willingness of agents to try out new strategies). Our results show that a high need for coordination leads to both high cultural inertia and a low exploration rate, while a low need for coordination leads to low cultural inertia and high exploration rate. This is the first work, to our knowledge, on understanding the evolutionary causal relationships among these factors.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2017

Using Game Theory to Study the Evolution of Cultural Norms

We discuss how to use evolutionary game theory (EGT) as a framework for studying how cultural dynamics and structural properties can influence the evolution of norms and behaviors within a society. We provide a brief tutorial on how EGT works, and discuss what kinds of insights it can provide. We then describe three published studies in which we have developed EGT models that help explain how structural and external conditions in a society affect the emergence of social norms.

cs.CY↗