Proactive-DIEL in Evolving Referral Networks.

Distributed learning in expert referral networks is a new Active Learning paradigm where experts humans or automated agents-solve problems if they can or refer said problems to others with more appropriate expertise. Recent work augmented the basic learningto-refer method with proactive skill posting, where experts may report their top skills to their colleagues, and proposed a modified algorithm, proactive-DIEL (Distributed Interval Estimation Learning), that takes advantage of such one-time posting instead of using an uninformed prior. This work extends the method in three main directions: (1) Proactive-DIEL is shown to work on a referral network of automated agents, namely SAT solvers, (2) Proactive-DIEL's reward mechanism is extended to another referral-learning algorithm, epsilon-Greedy, with some appropriate modifications. (3) The method is shown robust with respect to evolving networks where experts join or drop off, requiring the learning method to recover referral expertise. In all cases the proposed method exhibits superiority to the state of the art.