Information digital twin—enabling agents to anticipate changes in their tasks

Abstract

Agents are designed to perform specific tasks. The agent developers define the agent’s environment, the task states, the possible actions to navigate the different states, and the sensors and effectors necessary for it to perform its task. Once trained and deployed, the agent is monitored to ensure that it performs as designed. During operations, some changes that were not foreseen in the task design might negatively impact the agent performance. In this case, the agent operator would capture the performance drop, identify possible causes, and work with the agent developer to update the agent design. This model works well in centralized environments. However, agents are increasingly deployed in decentralized, dynamic environments, where changes are not centrally coordinated. In this case, updating agent task design to accommodate unforeseen changes might require a considerable effort from the agent operators. The paper suggests an approach to enable agents to anticipate and identify deviations in their performance on their own, thus improving the process of adapting to changes. The approach introduces an additional machine learning-based component—we call information digital twin (IDT)—dedicated to predicting task changes. That is, an agent would then have two components: the original component, which focuses on finding the best actions to achieve the agent task, and the IDT, dedicated to detecting changes impacting the agent task. Considering general artificial intelligence agents—where an agent might manage different tasks in various domains—the proposed IDT might be a component that enables AGI agents to ensure their performance against changes.