Deep Learnable Strategy Templates for Multi-Issue Bilateral Negotiation

Abstract: We study how to exploit the notion of strategy templates to learn strategies for multi-issue bilateral negotiation. Each strategy template consists of a set of interpretable parameterized tactics that are used to decide an optimal action at any time. We use deep reinforcement learning throughout an actor-critic architecture to estimate the tactic parameter values for a threshold utility, when to accept an offer and how to generate a new bid. This contrasts with existing work that only estimates the threshold utility for those tactics. We pre-train the strategy by supervision from the dataset collected using "teacher strategies", thereby decreasing the exploration time required for learning during negotiation. As a result, we build automated agents for multi-issue negotiations that can adapt to different negotiation domains without the need to be pre-programmed. We empirically show that our work outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of the individual as well as social efficiency.