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Assessing the systemic effects of uncertainty that arises from agents' partial observation of the true states of the world is critical for understanding a wide range of scenarios. Yet, previous modeling work on agent learning and…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2022-04-15 Wolfram Barfuss , Richard P. Mann

Robust Optimization has traditionally taken a pessimistic, or worst-case viewpoint of uncertainty which is motivated by a desire to find sets of optimal policies that maintain feasibility under a variety of operating conditions. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-22 Matthew Norton , Akiko Takeda , Alexander Mafusalov

Giving autonomous agents the ability to forecast their own outcomes and uncertainty will allow them to communicate their competencies and be used more safely. We accomplish this by using a learned world model of the agent system to forecast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-20 Aastha Acharya , Rebecca Russell , Nisar R. Ahmed

This paper develops a model of reference-dependent assessment of subjective beliefs in which loss-averse people optimally choose the expectation as the reference point to balance the current felicity from the optimistic anticipation and the…

General Finance · Quantitative Finance 2013-10-14 Si Chen

We consider a task of scheduling with a common deadline on a single machine. Every player reports to a scheduler the length of his job and the scheduler needs to finish as many jobs as possible by the deadline. For this simple problem,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2011-03-15 Uriel Feige , Moshe Tennenholtz

Human feedback is widely used to train agents in many domains. However, previous works rarely consider the uncertainty when humans provide feedback, especially in cases that the optimal actions are not obvious to the trainers. For example,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Xu He , Haipeng Chen , Bo An

Can AI agents predict whether they will succeed at a task? We study agentic uncertainty by eliciting success probability estimates before, during, and after task execution. All results exhibit agentic overconfidence: some agents that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Jean Kaddour , Srijan Patel , Gbètondji Dovonon , Leo Richter , Pasquale Minervini , Matt J. Kusner

We investigate how the choice of decision makers can be varied under the presence of risk and uncertainty. Our analysis is based on the approach we have previously applied to individual decision makers, which we now generalize to the case…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-09-03 V. I. Yukalov , D. Sornette

In imitation learning, an agent learns how to behave in an environment with an unknown cost function by mimicking expert demonstrations. Existing imitation learning algorithms typically involve solving a sequence of planning or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-17 Jonathan Ho , Jayesh K. Gupta , Stefano Ermon

Deciding whether an agent possesses a model of its surrounding world is a fundamental step toward understanding its capabilities and limitations. In [10], it was shown that, within a particular framework, every almost optimal and general…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Santiago Cifuentes

Continual learning is often motivated by the idea, known as the big world hypothesis, that "the world is bigger" than the agent. Recent problem formulations capture this idea by explicitly constraining an agent relative to the environment.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Alex Lewandowski , Adtiya A. Ramesh , Edan Meyer , Dale Schuurmans , Marlos C. Machado

Most work in mechanism design assumes that buyers are risk neutral; some considers risk aversion arising due to a non-linear utility for money. Yet behavioral studies have established that real agents exhibit risk attitudes which cannot be…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-03-13 Shuchi Chawla , Kira Goldner , J. Benjamin Miller , Emmanouil Pountourakis

We consider a class of reinforcement-learning systems in which the agent follows a behavior policy to explore a discrete state-action space to find an optimal policy while adhering to some restriction on its behavior. Such restriction may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-07 Peter C. Y. Chen

An agent with an inaccurate model of its environment faces a difficult choice: it can ignore the errors in its model and act in the real world in whatever way it determines is optimal with respect to its model. Alternatively, it can take a…

Agents that learn to select optimal actions represent a prominent focus of the sequential decision-making literature. In the face of a complex environment or constraints on time and resources, however, aiming to synthesize such an optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Dilip Arumugam , Benjamin Van Roy

Safe reinforcement learning is a promising path toward applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems, where suboptimal behaviors may lead to actual negative consequences. In this work, we focus on the setting where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Garrett Thomas , Yuping Luo , Tengyu Ma

Bayesian optimization is a coherent, ubiquitous approach to decision-making under uncertainty, with applications including multi-arm bandits, active learning, and black-box optimization. Bayesian optimization selects decisions (i.e.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Samuel Stanton , Wesley Maddox , Andrew Gordon Wilson

The Bayesian persuasion paradigm of strategic communication models interaction between a privately-informed agent, called the sender, and an ignorant but rational agent, called the receiver. The goal is typically to design a (near-)optimal…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Ronen Gradwohl , Niklas Hahn , Martin Hoefer , Rann Smorodinsky

When developing reinforcement learning agents, the standard approach is to train an agent to converge to a fixed policy that is as close to optimal as possible for a single fixed reward function. If different agent behaviour is required in…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-01-29 David O'Callaghan , Patrick Mannion

In real-world scenarios, datasets collected from randomized experiments are often constrained by size, due to limitations in time and budget. As a result, leveraging large observational datasets becomes a more attractive option for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-19 Danyang Wang , Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo , Will Wei Sun