2018

Scalable Agent Alignment via Reward Modeling: A Research Direction

Jan Leike, David Krueger, Tom Everitt, Miljan Martic, Vishal Maini, Shane Legg

citations

Cite Score

27

AI summary

This paper outlines a research direction for solving the agent alignment problem by learning a reward function from user interaction and optimizing it with reinforcement learning, discussing challenges and mitigation strategies to build trust in resulting agents.

Main Contributions

  • Proposes reward modeling as a solution to the agent alignment problem, separating learning 'what to achieve' from 'how to achieve it'.
  • Introduces recursive reward modeling to scale evaluation to complex domains by having agents assist users in feedback.
  • Discusses challenges in scaling reward modeling: amount of feedback, feedback distribution, reward hacking, unacceptable outcomes, and reward-result gap.
  • Outlines approaches to mitigate challenges including online feedback, off-policy feedback, leveraging existing data, hierarchical feedback, natural language, model-based RL, side-constraints, adversarial training, uncertainty estimates, and inductive bias.
  • Proposes methods for establishing trust in aligned agents through design choices, testing, interpretability, formal verification, and theoretical guarantees.

Abstract

One obstacle to applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems is the lack of suitable reward functions. Designing such reward functions is difficult in part because the user only has an implicit understanding of the task objective. This gives rise to the agent alignment problem: how do we create agents that behave in accordance with the user's intentions? We outline a high-level research direction to solve the agent alignment problem centered around reward modeling: learning a reward function from interaction with the user and optimizing the learned reward function with reinforcement learning. We discuss the key challenges we expect to face when scaling reward modeling to complex and general domains, concrete approaches to mitigate these challenges, and ways to establish trust in the resulting agents.

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