Related papers: Choice Set Misspecification in Reward Inference
Inferring reward functions from human behavior is at the center of value alignment - aligning AI objectives with what we, humans, actually want. But doing so relies on models of how humans behave given their objectives. After decades of…
It is incredibly easy for a system designer to misspecify the objective for an autonomous system ("robot''), thus motivating the desire to have the robot learn the objective from human behavior instead. Recent work has suggested that people…
Learning policies via preference-based reward learning is an increasingly popular method for customizing agent behavior, but has been shown anecdotally to be prone to spurious correlations and reward hacking behaviors. While much prior work…
Assistive robots have the potential to help people perform everyday tasks. However, these robots first need to learn what it is their user wants them to do. Teaching assistive robots is hard for inexperienced users, elderly users, and users…
When robots enter everyday human environments, they need to understand their tasks and how they should perform those tasks. To encode these, reward functions, which specify the objective of a robot, are employed. However, designing reward…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to infer an agent's preferences (represented as a reward function $R$) from their behaviour (represented as a policy $\pi$). To do this, we need a behavioural model of how $\pi$ relates to $R$. In…
Assuming humans are (approximately) rational enables robots to infer reward functions by observing human behavior. But people exhibit a wide array of irrationalities, and our goal with this work is to better understand the effect they can…
It is often difficult to hand-specify what the correct reward function is for a task, so researchers have instead aimed to learn reward functions from human behavior or feedback. The types of behavior interpreted as evidence of the reward…
Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…
Human input has enabled autonomous systems to improve their capabilities and achieve complex behaviors that are otherwise challenging to generate automatically. Recent work focuses on how robots can use such input - like demonstrations or…
A well-defined reward function is crucial for successful training of an reinforcement learning (RL) agent. However, defining a suitable reward function is a notoriously challenging task, especially in complex, multi-objective environments.…
Corrections offer a natural modality for people to provide feedback to a robot, by (i) intervening in the robot's behavior when they believe the robot is failing (or will fail) the task objectives and (ii) modifying the robot's behavior to…
Real-world robotic tasks require complex reward functions. When we define the problem the robot needs to solve, we pretend that a designer specifies this complex reward exactly, and it is set in stone from then on. In practice, however,…
The aim of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is to infer a reward function $R$ from a policy $\pi$. To do this, we need a model of how $\pi$ relates to $R$. In the current literature, the most common models are optimality, Boltzmann…
This paper examines the effect of real-time, personalized alignment of a robot's reward function to the human's values on trust and team performance. We present and compare three distinct robot interaction strategies: a non-learner strategy…
We consider the problem of imitation learning under misspecification: settings where the learner is fundamentally unable to replicate expert behavior everywhere. This is often true in practice due to differences in observation space and…
Learning robot objective functions from human input has become increasingly important, but state-of-the-art techniques assume that the human's desired objective lies within the robot's hypothesis space. When this is not true, even methods…
Learning reward functions from demonstrations assumes that demonstrations provide adequate supervision over all features -- or task-relevant aspects of behavior. In practice, demonstrations are often imperfect: humans may under-emphasize…
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…
Detecting and handling misspecified objectives, such as reward functions, has been widely recognized as one of the central challenges within the domain of Artificial Intelligence (AI) safety research. However, even with the recognition of…