A General-Purpose Protocol for Multi-Agent based Explanations

by Giovanni Ciatto, Matteo Magnini, Berk Buzcu, Reyhan Aydoğan, and Andrea Omicini

Building on prior works on explanation negotiation protocols, this paper proposes a general-purpose protocol for multi-agent systems where recommender agents may need to provide explanations for their recommendations. The protocol specifies the roles and responsibilities of the explainee and the explainer agent and the types of information that should be exchanged between them to ensure a clear and effective explanation. However, it does not prescribe any particular sort of recommendation or explanation, hence remaining agnostic w.r.t. such notions. Novelty lays in the extended support for both ordinary and contrastive explanations, as well as for the situation where no explanation is needed as none is requested by the explainee. Accordingly, we formally present and analyse the protocol, motivating its design and discussing its generality. We also discuss the reification of the protocol into a re-usable software library, namely PyXMas, which is meant to support developers willing to build explainable MAS leveraging our protocol. Finally, we discuss how custom notions of recommendation and explanation can be easily plugged into PyXMas.

• DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40878-6_3

@incollection{explanationprotocol-extraamas2023,
    author = {Ciatto, Giovanni and Magnini, Matteo and Bezcu, Berk and Aydoǧan, Reyhan and Omicini, Andrea},
    booktitle = {Explainable and Transparent {AI} and Multi-Agent Systems},
    chapter = 3,
    dblp = {conf/extraamas/CiattoMBAO23},
    doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-40878-6_3},
    editor = {Calvaresi, Davide and Najjar, Amro and Omicini, Andrea and Aydoǧan, Reyhan and Carli, Rachele and Ciatto, Giovanni and Mualla, Yazan and Främling, Kary},
    iris = {11585/940656},
    isbn = {978-3-031-40878-6},
    issn = {0302-9743},
    keywords = {XAI, Recommender Systems, Multi-agent systems, Explanation protocols},
    month = sep,
    numpages = 22,
    pages = {38--58},
    publisher = {Springer},
    scholar = {5371175139312621961},
    scopus = {2-s2.0-85172214167},
    series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
    subseries = {Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence},
    title = {A General-Purpose Protocol for Multi-Agent based Explanations},
    url = {http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-031-40878-6_3},
    volume = 14127,
    year = 2023
}