Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, enabling simultaneous collaboration across a shared codebase. This frequent integration and automated building process in CI helps to detect and resolve conflicts or errors early in development. However, in large-scale systems, the build process can be costly. Each build incurs expenses, while skipping builds can increase the risk of undetected failures. Accurate predictions can help to identify builds that can be safely skipped to reduce CI costs. This paper presents an empirical study within an industrial setting, investigating the use of machine learning techniques to predict build failures after a set of collective changes. Unlike many existing works that apply random data splitting, our results show that chronological (time-based) splitting offers a more realistic and reliable assessment of model performance in CI environments. We evaluate various models and feature combinations on a dataset derived from real-world industrial projects. We observe high precision but low recall in predicting failed builds, allowing hundreds of successful builds to be correctly skipped, with around a dozen failures potentially being missed. Our analysis shows that this yields substantial time savings of approximately 2.5 h per build on average, while missed failures necessarily result in delayed failure detection, whose practical impact depends on application criticality and operational context.

As data privacy regulations, such as the EU AI Act and EU Data Act, become increasingly stringent, processing real user data for AI models like movie recommendation systems has grown more challenging. Moreover, the human-centric data collection and evaluation of Explainable AI (XAI) systems are often costly and time-consuming; making it hard to sustain. Hence, this study adopts the Synthetic Behavior Generation (SBG) approach, leveraging large language models (LLMs) to evaluate AI explanations while ensuring compliance with regulations and providing cost-effective solutions for human feedback. To assess the quality of these explanations, we utilize three different LLMs, which are fed synthetically generated user behaviors to evaluate explanations of an AI system as if they were real users. The evaluation focuses on key criteria such as convincingness, clarity, accuracy, and the impact on decision-making, facilitating a thorough assessment of explanation effectiveness. The results indicated that LLMs can deliver structured and consistent evaluations based on the provided synthetic user behavior.

This paper introduces a novel Dynamic and Partially Observable Multiagent Path-Finding (DPO-MAPF) problem and presents a multitier solution approach accordingly. Unlike traditional MAPF problems with static obstacles, DPO-MAPF involves dynamically moving obstacles that are partially observable and exhibit unpredictable behavior. Our multitier solution approach combines centralized planning with decentralized execution. In the first tier, we apply state-of-the-art centralized and offline path planning techniques to navigate around static, known obstacles (e.g., walls, buildings, mountains). In the second tier, we propose a decentralized and online conflict resolution mechanism to handle the uncertainties introduced by partially observable and dynamically moving obstacles (e.g., humans, vehicles, animals, and so on). This resolution employs a metaheuristic-based revision process guided by a consensus protocol to ensure fair and efficient path allocation among agents. Extensive simulations validate the proposed framework, demonstrating its effectiveness in finding valid solutions while ensuring fairness and adaptability in dynamic and uncertain environments.

The lack of confirmed negative interactions poses a major challenge to the prediction of protein-protein interactions. The reliable selection of these negative samples within a dataset is crucial for a better understanding of the underlying patterns and dynamics. The random sampling method is the most widely used negative sampling method, where negative pairs are randomly selected from unlabelled samples (i.e., samples not experimentally confirmed as positive interactions). However, they tend to introduce inaccurately labelled negative samples, resulting in less reliable predictions, which may affect the efficiency of the learning process. Our study aims to assess the reliability of clustering-based negative sampling methods and highlight their fundamental differences from the widely used random sampling method. To achieve this goal, we propose a hierarchical clustering-based algorithm that uses different mechanisms to select negative instances from unlabelled instances. We investigated the effectiveness of our proposed approach compared to existing clustering-based negative sampling methods and random sampling on four different datasets. The results indicate that clustering-based methods surpass the commonly used random sampling method.

Negotiation is pivotal for conflict resolution in human-agent interactions, where emotional and behavioral dynamics can significantly shape the outcomes. However, many existing strategies prioritize time- or behavior-based tactics and overlook the dynamic role of emotional awareness. This paper presents the Solver Agent, which integrates real-time facial expression recognition into a hybrid strategy incorporating time- and behavior-based approaches. It is deployed on a humanoid robot with multimodal interaction capabilities (speech, gestures, facial expression analysis) to dynamically refine its bidding and concession strategies based on an opponent's emotional cues and negotiation patterns. In user studies with 28 participants, the Solver Agent achieved higher agent scores, improved social welfare, and faster agreements than a baseline hybrid strategy without compromising participant satisfaction. Participants also viewed the Solver Agent as more attuned to their preferences and goals. These findings highlight that embodied emotion-aware negotiation can foster equitable and efficient collaboration, pointing to new opportunities in human-agent interaction research.

In an age where data is a pivotal asset for businesses, the ethical acquisition and use of personal information has become increasingly more significant. Empowering data providers with greater autonomy over their personal data is more important than ever. To address this, we propose a novel negotiation-based information-sharing framework that empowers individuals to actively negotiate the terms of their data sharing, addressing privacy concerns and ethical data usage. The framework enables users to determine what personal information they share and under what conditions, fostering a more balanced and transparent data exchange process. Our system allows data consumer agents to negotiate with their human users and can operate fully automatically, with agents representing data providers negotiating based on elicited preferences and needs. We propose novel preference modeling approaches and a negotiation framework to facilitate the bilateral sharing of information and incentives between data consumers and providers. User experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our negotiation approach and the effectiveness of the proposed preference models. Empirical results validate the benefits of the proposed framework.

Theory-of-Mind (ToM), the ability to infer the mental states, goals, and preferences of others - is a core component of human social intelligence. In this work, we investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit ToM capabilities in the context of strategic interaction. We frame opponent modeling in negotiation as a grounded and interpretable ToM task, where a model must infer an agent's preferences by observing offer exchanges during the negotiation. We guide LLMs to interpret offer histories and infer latent utility representations, including issue and value weights. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs across multiple negotiation domains. Our results show that LLMs can successfully recover opponents unknown preferences and in some cases even outperform classical opponent modeling baselines, even without task-specific training. These findings offer new evidence of LLMs' emerging capacity for social reasoning and position opponent modeling as a practical benchmark for evaluating Theory-of-Mind in foundation models.

The vast range of possible fully autonomous multiunmanned aerial vehicle (multi-UAV) operations is creating a new and expanding market where technological advances are happening at a breakneck pace. The integration of UAVs in airspaces (not just for military purposes but also for civil, commercial, and leisure use) is essential in realizing the potential of this growing industry. Furthermore, with the advent of 6G, such integration will be cost-effective and more flexible. However, to reach widespread adoption, new models focusing on the safety, efficiency, reliability, and privacy of fully autonomous multi-UAV operations, ensuring that the operation history is trustworthy and can be audited by the relevant stakeholders, need to be developed. Accordingly, this work presents a research guideline for fully autonomous trustworthy UAV teamwork through layer 2 blockchains that provide efficient, privacy-preserving, reliable, and secure multi-UAV service delivery. We show the implications of this approach for an aerial surveillance use case.

Existing agent-based chatbot frameworks need seamless mechanisms to include explainable dialogic engines within the contextual flow. To this end, this paper presents a set of novel modules within the EREBOTS agent-based framework for chatbot development, including dialog-based plug-and-play custom algorithms, agnostic back/front ends, and embedded interactive explainable engines that can manage human feedback at run time. The framework has been employed to implement an explainable agent-based interactive food recommender system. The latter has been tested with 44 participants, who followed a nutrition recommendation interaction series, generating explained recommendations and suggestions, which were, in general, well received. Additionally, the participants provided important insights to be included in future work.

The complexity of automated negotiation research calls for dedicated, user-friendly research frameworks that facilitate advanced analytics, comprehensive loggers, visualization tools, and auto-generated domains and preference profiles. This paper introduces NegoLog, a platform that provides advanced and customizable analysis modules to agent developers for exhaustive performance evaluation. NegoLog introduces an automated scenario and tournament generation tool in its Web-based user interface so that the agent developers can adjust the competitiveness and complexity of the negotiations. One of the key novelties of the NegoLog is an individual assessment of preference estimation models independent of the strategies.

The awareness about healthy lifestyles is increasing, opening to personalized intelligent health coaching applications. A demand for more than mere suggestions and mechanistic interactions has driven attention to nutrition virtual coaching systems (NVC) as a bridge between human–machine interaction and recommender, informative, persuasive, and argumentation systems. NVC can rely on data-driven opaque mechanisms. Therefore, it is crucial to enable NVC to explain their doing (i.e., engaging the user in discussions (via arguments) about dietary solutions/alternatives). By doing so, transparency, user acceptance, and engagement are expected to be boosted. This study focuses on NVC agents generating personalized food recommendations based on user-specific factors such as allergies, eating habits, lifestyles, and ingredient preferences. In particular, we propose a user-agent negotiation process entailing run-time feedback mechanisms to react to both recommendations and related explanations. Lastly, the study presents the findings obtained by the experiments conducted with multi-background participants to evaluate the acceptability and effectiveness of the proposed system. The results indicate that most participants value the opportunity to provide feedback and receive explanations for recommendations. Additionally, the users are fond of receiving information tailored to their needs. Furthermore, our interactive recommendation system performed better than the corresponding traditional recommendation system in terms of effectiveness regarding the number of agreements and rounds.

As recommendation systems become increasingly prevalent in numerous fields, the need for clear and persuasive interactions with users is rising. Integrating explainability into these systems is emerging as an effective approach to enhance user trust and sociability. This research focuses on recommendation systems that utilize a range of explainability techniques to foster trust by providing understandable personalized explanations for the recommendations made. In line with this, we study three distinct explanation methods that correspond with three basic recommendation strategies and assess their efficacy through user experiments. The findings from the experiments indicate that the majority of participants value the suggested explanation styles and favor straightforward, concise explanations over comparative ones.

The paper introduces a comprehensive human-agent negotiation framework designed to facilitate the development and evaluation of research studies on human-agent negotiation without building each component from scratch. Leveraging the interoperability and reusability of its components, this framework offers various functionalities, including speech-to-text conversion, emotion recognition, a repository of negotiation strategies, and an interaction manager capable of managing gestures designed for Nao, Pepper, and QT, and coordinating message exchanges in a turn-taking fashion. This framework aims to lower the entry barrier for researchers in human-agent negotiation by providing a versatile platform that supports a wide range of research directions, including affective computing, natural language processing, decision-making, and non-verbal communication.

This paper introduces a negotiation framework to solve the Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) Problem for self-interested agents in a decentralized fashion. The framework aims to achieve a good trade-off between the privacy of the agents and the effectiveness of solutions. Accordingly, a token-based bilateral negotiation protocol and two negotiation strategies are presented. The experimental results over four different settings of the MAPF problem show that the proposed approach could find conflict-free path solutions albeit suboptimally, especially when the search space is large and high-density. In contrast, Explicit Estimation Conflict-Based Search (EECBS) struggles to find optimal solutions. Besides, deploying a sophisticated negotiation strategy that utilizes information about local density for generating alternative paths can yield remarkably better solution performance in this negotiation framework.

By examining the patterns of solutions obtained for various instances, one can gain insights into the structure and behavior of combinatorial optimization (CO) problems and develop efficient algorithms for solving them. Machine learning techniques, especially Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), have shown promise in parametrizing and automating this laborious design process. The inductive bias of GNNs allows for learning solutions to mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulations of constrained CO problems with a relational representation of decision variables and constraints. The trained GNNs can be leveraged with primal heuristics to construct high-quality feasible solutions to CO problems quickly. However, current GNN-based end-to-end learning approaches have limitations for scalable training and generalization on larger-scale instances; therefore, they have been mostly evaluated over small-scale instances. Addressing this issue, our study builds on supervised learning of optimal solutions to the downscaled instances of given large-scale CO problems. We introduce several improvements on a recent GNN model for CO to generalize on instances of a larger scale than those used in training. We also propose a two-stage primal heuristic strategy based on uncertainty-quantification to automatically configure how solution search relies on the predicted decision values. Our models can generalize on 16x upscaled instances of commonly benchmarked five CO problems. Unlike the regressive performance of existing GNN-based CO approaches as the scale of problems increases, the CO pipelines using our models offer an incremental performance improvement relative to CPLEX. The proposed uncertainty-based primal heuristics provide 6-75% better optimality gap values and 45-99% better primal gap values for the 16x upscaled instances and brings immense speedup to obtain high-quality solutions. All these gains are achieved through a computationally efficient modeling approach without sacrificing solution quality.

Day by day, human-agent negotiation becomes more and more vital to reach a socially beneficial agreement when stakeholders need to make a joint decision together. Developing agents who understand not only human preferences but also attitudes is a significant prerequisite for this kind of interaction. Studies on opponent modeling are predominantly based on automated negotiation and may yield good predictions after exchanging hundreds of offers. However, this is not the case in human-agent negotiation in which the total number of rounds does not usually exceed tens. For this reason, an opponent model technique is needed to extract the maximum information gained with limited interaction. This study presents a conflict-based opponent modeling technique and compares its prediction performance with the well-known approaches in human-agent and automated negotiation experimental settings. According to the results of human-agent studies, the proposed model outpr erforms them despite the diversity of participants’ negotiation behaviors. Besides, the conflict-based opponent model estimates the entire bid space much more successfully than its competitors in automated negotiation sessions when a small portion of the outcome space was explored. This study may contribute to developing agents that can perceive their human counterparts’ preferences and behaviors more accurately, acting cooperatively and reaching an admissible settlement for joint interests.