Related papers: On the Complexity of Sequential Incentive Design
We consider the expressivity of Markov rewards in sequential decision making under uncertainty. We view reward functions in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) as a means to characterize desired behaviors of agents. Assuming desired behaviors…
Sequential allocation is a simple and widely studied mechanism to allocate indivisible items in turns to agents according to a pre-specified picking sequence of agents. At each turn, the current agent in the picking sequence picks its most…
Reinforcement learning for embodied agents is a challenging problem. The accumulated reward to be optimized is often a very rugged function, and gradient methods are impaired by many local optimizers. We demonstrate, in an experimental…
Motivated by a number of real-world applications from domains like healthcare and sustainable transportation, in this paper we study a scenario of repeated principal-agent games within a multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework, where: the…
This work investigates the challenge of ensuring safety guarantees in the presence of uncontrollable agents, whose behaviors are stochastic and depend on both their own and the system's states. We present a neural model predictive control…
Recently there has been a proliferation of intrinsic motivation (IM) reward-shaping methods to learn in complex and sparse-reward environments. These methods can often inadvertently change the set of optimal policies in an environment,…
Principal-agent problems model scenarios where a principal incentivizes an agent to take costly, unobservable actions through the provision of payments. Such problems are ubiquitous in several real-world applications, ranging from…
Designing incentives for an adapting population is a ubiquitous problem in a wide array of economic applications and beyond. In this work, we study how to design additional rewards to steer multi-agent systems towards desired policies…
In the sequential decision making setting, an agent aims to achieve systematic generalization over a large, possibly infinite, set of environments. Such environments are modeled as discrete Markov decision processes with both states and…
In today's economy, it becomes important for Internet platforms to consider the sequential information design problem to align its long term interest with incentives of the gig service providers. This paper proposes a novel model of…
A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…
Allocating scarce resources among agents to maximize global utility is, in general, computationally challenging. We focus on problems where resources enable agents to execute actions in stochastic environments, modeled as Markov decision…
In many applications, we want to influence the decisions of independent agents by designing incentives for their actions. We revisit a fundamental problem in this area, called GAME IMPLEMENTATION: Given a game in standard form and a set of…
Active inference is a probabilistic framework for modelling the behaviour of biological and artificial agents, which derives from the principle of minimising free energy. In recent years, this framework has successfully been applied to a…
Games are challenging for Reinforcement Learning~(RL) agents due to their reward-sparsity, as rewards are only obtainable after long sequences of deliberate actions. Intrinsic Motivation~(IM) methods -- which introduce exploration rewards…
Federated learning promises significant sample-efficiency gains by pooling data across multiple agents, yet incentive misalignment is an obstacle: each update is costly to the contributor but boosts every participant. We introduce a…
We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…
Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…
Agents are systems that optimize an objective function in an environment. Together, the goal and the environment induce secondary objectives, incentives. Modeling the agent-environment interaction using causal influence diagrams, we can…
Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…