Related papers: Moral reinforcement learning using actual causatio…

In the future, artificial learning agents are likely to become increasingly widespread in our society. They will interact with both other learning agents and humans in a variety of complex settings including social dilemmas. We consider the…

Causal models of agents have been used to analyse the safety aspects of machine learning systems. But identifying agents is non-trivial -- often the causal model is just assumed by the modeler without much justification -- and modelling…

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…

Moral responsibility is a major concern in autonomous systems, with applications ranging from self-driving cars to kidney exchanges. Although there have been recent attempts to formalise responsibility and blame, among similar notions, the…

When designing agents for operation in uncertain environments, designers need tools to automatically reason about what agents ought to do, how that conflicts with what is actually happening, and how a policy might be modified to remove the…

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…

We study a security threat to reinforcement learning where an attacker poisons the learning environment to force the agent into executing a target policy chosen by the attacker. As a victim, we consider RL agents whose objective is to find…

Social dilemmas have been widely studied to explain how humans are able to cooperate in society. Considerable effort has been invested in designing artificial agents for social dilemmas that incorporate explicit agent motivations that are…

Reinforcement learning defines the problem facing agents that learn to make good decisions through action and observation alone. To be effective problem solvers, such agents must efficiently explore vast worlds, assign credit from delayed…

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…

Inferring a person's goal from their behavior is an important problem in applications of AI (e.g. automated assistants, recommender systems). The workhorse model for this task is the rational actor model - this amounts to assuming that…

Designing effective model-based reinforcement learning algorithms is difficult because the ease of data generation must be weighed against the bias of model-generated data. In this paper, we study the role of model usage in policy…

Learning near-optimal behaviour from an expert's demonstrations typically relies on the assumption that the learner knows the features that the true reward function depends on. In this paper, we study the problem of learning from…

Many open problems in machine learning are intrinsically related to causality, however, the use of causal analysis in machine learning is still in its early stage. Within a general reinforcement learning setting, we consider the problem of…

Modeling the purposeful behavior of imperfect agents from a small number of observations is a challenging task. When restricted to the single-agent decision-theoretic setting, inverse optimal control techniques assume that observed behavior…

Reinforcement learning algorithms have had tremendous successes in online learning settings. However, these successes have relied on low-stakes interactions between the algorithmic agent and its environment. In many settings where RL could…

Causal models bring many benefits to decision-making systems (or agents) by making them interpretable, sample-efficient, and robust to changes in the input distribution. However, spurious correlations can lead to wrong causal models and…

Critical sectors of human society are progressing toward the adoption of powerful artificial intelligence (AI) agents, which are trained individually on behalf of self-interested principals but deployed in a shared environment. Short of…

Learning efficiently a causal model of the environment is a key challenge of model-based RL agents operating in POMDPs. We consider here a scenario where the learning agent has the ability to collect online experiences through direct…

We study the problem of learning a good set of policies, so that when combined together, they can solve a wide variety of unseen reinforcement learning tasks with no or very little new data. Specifically, we consider the framework of…