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Training Value-Aligned Reinforcement Learning Agents Using a Normative Prior

2021/04/19 by Nahian, Md Sultan Al, Frazier, Spencer, Harrison, Brent +1
#Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) #Machine Learning (cs.LG)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2104.09469

Abstract

As more machine learning agents interact with humans, it is increasingly a prospect that an agent trained to perform a task optimally, using only a measure of task performance as feedback, can violate societal norms for acceptable behavior or cause harm. Value alignment is a property of intelligent agents wherein they solely pursue non-harmful behaviors or human-beneficial goals. We introduce an approach to value-aligned reinforcement learning, in which we train an agent with two reward signals: a standard task performance reward, plus a normative behavior reward. The normative behavior reward is derived from a value-aligned prior model previously shown to classify text as normative or non-normative. We show how variations on a policy shaping technique can balance these two sources of reward and produce policies that are both effective and perceived as being more normative. We test our value-alignment technique on three interactive text-based worlds; each world is designed specifically to challenge agents with a task as well as provide opportunities to deviate from the task to engage in normative and/or altruistic behavior.

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