Related papers: 'Indifference' methods for managing agent rewards
Autonomous agents optimize the reward function we give them. What they don't know is how hard it is for us to design a reward function that actually captures what we want. When designing the reward, we might think of some specific training…
We introduce three concepts that describe an agent's incentives: response incentives indicate which variables in the environment, such as sensitive demographic information, affect the decision under the optimal policy. Instrumental control…
Learning to control an environment without hand-crafted rewards or expert data remains challenging and is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. We present an unsupervised learning algorithm to train agents to achieve…
To learn directed behaviors in complex environments, intelligent agents need to optimize objective functions. Various objectives are known for designing artificial agents, including task rewards and intrinsic motivation. However, it is…
We consider the design of experiments to evaluate treatments that are administered by self-interested agents, each seeking to achieve the highest evaluation and win the experiment. For example, in an advertising experiment, a company wishes…
Human interactions are influenced by emotions, temperament, and affection, often conflicting with individuals' underlying preferences. Without explicit knowledge of those preferences, judging whether behaviour is appropriate becomes…
Difference-in-differences is one of the most used identification strategies in empirical work in economics. This chapter reviews a number of important, recent developments related to difference-in-differences. First, this chapter reviews…
Non-uniform goal selection has the potential to improve the reinforcement learning (RL) of skills over uniform-random selection. In this paper, we introduce a method for learning a goal-selection policy in intrinsically-motivated…
Motivated by the control theoretic distinction between controllable and uncontrollable events, we distinguish between two types of agents within a multi-agent system: controllable agents, which are directly controlled by the system's…
Designing reward functions is difficult: the designer has to specify what to do (what it means to complete the task) as well as what not to do (side effects that should be avoided while completing the task). To alleviate the burden on the…
In competitive games, it is common to assign each player a real number rating signifying their skill level. A rating system is a procedure by which player ratings are adjusted upwards each time they win, or downwards each time they lose.…
Preserving the privacy of preferences (or rewards) of a sequential decision-making agent when decisions are observable is crucial in many physical and cybersecurity domains. For instance, in wildlife monitoring, agents must allocate…
Our goal is for agents to optimize the right reward function, despite how difficult it is for us to specify what that is. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) enables us to infer reward functions from demonstrations, but it usually assumes…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning in mixed-motive settings presents a fundamental challenge: agents must balance individual interests with collective goals, which are neither fully aligned nor strictly opposed. To address this, reward…
When allocating indivisible items, there are various ways to use monetary transfers for eliminating envy. Particularly, one can apply a balanced vector of transfer payments, or charge each agent a positive amount, or -- contrarily -- give…
In complex tasks where the reward function is not straightforward and consists of a set of objectives, multiple reinforcement learning (RL) policies that perform task adequately, but employ different strategies can be trained by adjusting…
How do incentive levels affect strategic behaviour? We address this with an experiment that separately identifies own- and opponent-incentive effects in two dominance-solvable games that differ in strategic complexity. Higher own incentives…
We study the design of effort-maximizing grading schemes between agents with private abilities. Assuming agents derive value from the information their grade reveals about their ability, we find that more informative grading schemes induce…
Incentives play an important role in (security and IT) risk management of a large-scale organization with multiple autonomous divisions. This paper presents an incentive mechanism design framework for risk management based on a…
Policy gradient methods have become one of the most popular classes of algorithms for multi-agent reinforcement learning. A key challenge, however, that is not addressed by many of these methods is multi-agent credit assignment: assessing…