A graph-theoretical perspective on law design for multiagent systems

Shi, Qi and Naumov, Pavel (2025) A graph-theoretical perspective on law design for multiagent systems. In Proceedings of the 40th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26). vol. 40, AAAI Press. 9 pp . (In Press)

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

A law in a multiagent system is a set of constraints imposed on agents' behaviours to avoid undesirable outcomes. The paper considers two types of laws: useful laws that, if followed, completely eliminate the undesirable outcomes and gap-free laws that guarantee that at least one agent can be held responsible each time an undesirable outcome occurs.

In both cases, we study the problem of finding a law that achieves the desired result by imposing the minimum restrictions.

We prove that, for both types of laws, the minimisation problem is NP-hard even in the simple case of one-shot concurrent interactions. We also show that the approximation algorithm for the vertex cover problem in hypergraphs could be used to efficiently approximate the minimum laws in both cases.

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naumov-A Graph-Theoretical Perspective on Law Design for Multiagent Systems - Accepted Manuscript

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