Related papers: When Empowerment Disempowers
Assistive agents should not only take actions on behalf of a human, but also step out of the way and cede control when there are important decisions to be made. However, current methods for building assistive agents, whether via mimicking…
Although AI assistants are now deeply embedded in society, there has been limited empirical study of how their usage affects human empowerment. We present the first large-scale empirical analysis of disempowerment patterns in real-world AI…
One difficulty in using artificial agents for human-assistive applications lies in the challenge of accurately assisting with a person's goal(s). Existing methods tend to rely on inferring the human's goal, which is challenging when there…
Power is a key concept in AI safety: power-seeking as an instrumental goal, sudden or gradual disempowerment of humans, power balance in human-AI interaction and international AI governance. At the same time, power as the ability to pursue…
This paper develops generalizations of empowerment to continuous states. Empowerment is a recently introduced information-theoretic quantity motivated by hypotheses about the efficiency of the sensorimotor loop in biological organisms, but…
Empowerment, an information-theoretic measure of an agent's potential influence on its environment, has emerged as a powerful intrinsic motivation and exploration framework for reinforcement learning (RL). Besides for unsupervised RL and…
Recent research in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown success in learning social behavior and cooperation. Social dilemmas between agents in mixed-sum settings have been studied extensively, but there is little research…
Empowerment quantifies the influence an agent has on its environment. This is formally achieved by the maximum of the expected KL-divergence between the distribution of the successor state conditioned on a specific action and a distribution…
Assistive agents should make humans' lives easier. Classically, such assistance is studied through the lens of inverse reinforcement learning, where an assistive agent (e.g., a chatbot, a robot) infers a human's intention and then selects…
AI companies are attempting to create AI systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. Current AI models are already automating away the livelihoods of some artists, actors, and writers. But there is infighting between…
This paper examines the systemic risks posed by incremental advancements in artificial intelligence, developing the concept of `gradual disempowerment', in contrast to the abrupt takeover scenarios commonly discussed in AI safety. We…
Learning to control an environment without hand-crafted rewards or expert data remains challenging and is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. We present an unsupervised learning algorithm to train agents to achieve…
One aspect of intelligence is the ability to restructure your own environment so that the world you live in becomes more beneficial to you. In this paper we investigate how the information-theoretic measure of agent empowerment can provide…
Collaboration with artificial intelligence (AI) has improved human decision-making across various domains by leveraging the complementary capabilities of humans and AI. Yet, humans systematically overrely on AI advice, even when their…
We introduce a methodology for efficiently computing a lower bound to empowerment, allowing it to be used as an unsupervised cost function for policy learning in real-time control. Empowerment, being the channel capacity between actions 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…
The pursuit of general intelligence has traditionally centered on external objectives: an agent's control over its environments or mastery of specific tasks. This external focus, however, can produce specialized agents that lack…
We study agency under partial observability in deterministic physical or simulated worlds, where apparent randomness arises from uncertainty over initial conditions, fixed law bits, and unrolled exogenous noise. We model sensing and…
Many challenges remain before AI agents can be deployed in real-world environments. However, one virtue of such environments is that they are inherently multi-agent and contain human experts. Using advanced social intelligence in such an…
Human behaviors are regularized by a variety of norms or regulations, either to maintain orders or to enhance social welfare. If artificially intelligent (AI) agents make decisions on behalf of human beings, we would hope they can also…