Related papers: Penalizing side effects using stepwise relative re…

Reward hacking -- where RL agents exploit gaps in misspecified reward functions -- has been widely observed, but not yet systematically studied. To understand how reward hacking arises, we construct four RL environments with misspecified…

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

In this thesis I will give a formal definition of side effects. I will do so by modifying a system for modelling program instructions and program states, Quantified Dynamic Logic, to a system called DLAf (for Dynamic Logic with Assignments…

Spline basis exploration via Bayesian model selection is a widely employed strategy for determining the optimal set of basis terms in nonparametric regression. However, despite its widespread use, this approach often encounters performance…

Intelligent systems have the ability to improve their behaviour over time taking observations, experiences or explicit feedback into account. Traditional approaches separate the learning problem and make isolated use of techniques from…

Exploration is a crucial and distinctive aspect of reinforcement learning (RL) that remains a fundamental open problem. Several methods have been proposed to tackle this challenge. Commonly used methods inject random noise directly into the…

Unambiguous identification of the rewards driving behaviours of entities operating in complex open-ended real-world environments is difficult, partly because goals and associated behaviours emerge endogenously and are dynamically updated as…

This paper presents an interpretable reward design framework for reinforcement learning based constrained optimal control problems with state and terminal constraints. The problem is formalized within a standard partially observable Markov…

Reinforcement learning has been shown to perform a range of complex tasks through interaction with an environment or collected leveraging experience. However, many of these approaches presume optimal or near optimal experiences or the…

The rise in machine learning-assisted decision-making has led to concerns about the fairness of the decisions and techniques to mitigate problems of discrimination. If a negative decision is made about an individual (denying a loan,…

Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning agents can develop policies that exploit spurious correlations between rewards and observations. This phenomenon, known as policy confounding, arises because the agent's policy influences…

Adversarial training aims to defend against adversaries: malicious opponents whose sole aim is to harm predictive performance in any way possible. This presents a rather harsh perspective, which we assert results in unnecessarily…

In sequential decision-making problems involving sensitive attributes like race and gender, reinforcement learning (RL) agents must carefully consider long-term fairness while maximizing returns. Recent works have proposed many different…

We propose an incentive scheme based on intervention to sustain cooperation among self-interested users. In the proposed scheme, an intervention device collects imperfect signals about the actions of the users for a test period, and then…

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going through a period of great expectations, introducing a certain level of anxiety in research, business and also policy. This anxiety is further energised by an AI race narrative that makes…

Agent decision making using Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on either a model or simulator of the environment (e.g., moving in an 8x8 maze with three rooms, playing Chess on an 8x8 board). Due to this dependence, small changes in…

In addition to reproducing discriminatory relationships in the training data, machine learning systems can also introduce or amplify discriminatory effects. We refer to this as introduced unfairness, and investigate the conditions under…

Traditional imitation learning provides a set of methods and algorithms to learn a reward function or policy from expert demonstrations. Learning from demonstration has been shown to be advantageous for navigation tasks as it allows for…

Penalization schemes like Lasso or ridge regression are routinely used to regress a response of interest on a high-dimensional set of potential predictors. Despite being decisive, the question of the relative strength of penalization is…

In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…