Collaborative Concept Learning: Non Individualistic vs Individualistic Agents

This article addresses collaborative learning in a multi-agent system: each agent revises incrementally its beliefs B (a concept representation) to keep it consistent with the whole set of information K (the examples) that he has received from the environment or other agents. In SMILE this notion of consistency was extended to a group of agents and a unique consistent concept representation was so maintained inside the group. In the present paper, we present iSMILE in which the agents still provide examples to other agents but keep their own concept representation. We will see that iSMILE is more time consuming and loses part of its learning ability, but that when agents cooperate at classification time, the group benefits from the advantages of ensemble learning.