Bridging adaptive management and reinforcement learning for more robust decisions

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chapman, Melissa, Xu, Lily, Lapeyrolerie, Marcus, Boettiger, Carl
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Chapman, Melissa
Xu, Lily
Lapeyrolerie, Marcus
Boettiger, Carl
author_facet Chapman, Melissa
Xu, Lily
Lapeyrolerie, Marcus
Boettiger, Carl
contents From out-competing grandmasters in chess to informing high-stakes healthcare decisions, emerging methods from artificial intelligence are increasingly capable of making complex and strategic decisions in diverse, high-dimensional, and uncertain situations. But can these methods help us devise robust strategies for managing environmental systems under great uncertainty? Here we explore how reinforcement learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence, approaches decision problems through a lens similar to adaptive environmental management: learning through experience to gradually improve decisions with updated knowledge. We review where reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise for improving evidence-informed adaptive management decisions even when classical optimization methods are intractable. For example, model-free deep RL might help identify quantitative decision strategies even when models are nonidentifiable. Finally, we discuss technical and social issues that arise when applying reinforcement learning to adaptive management problems in the environmental domain. Our synthesis suggests that environmental management and computer science can learn from one another about the practices, promises, and perils of experience-based decision-making.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2303_08731
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bridging adaptive management and reinforcement learning for more robust decisions
Chapman, Melissa
Xu, Lily
Lapeyrolerie, Marcus
Boettiger, Carl
Computers and Society
From out-competing grandmasters in chess to informing high-stakes healthcare decisions, emerging methods from artificial intelligence are increasingly capable of making complex and strategic decisions in diverse, high-dimensional, and uncertain situations. But can these methods help us devise robust strategies for managing environmental systems under great uncertainty? Here we explore how reinforcement learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence, approaches decision problems through a lens similar to adaptive environmental management: learning through experience to gradually improve decisions with updated knowledge. We review where reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise for improving evidence-informed adaptive management decisions even when classical optimization methods are intractable. For example, model-free deep RL might help identify quantitative decision strategies even when models are nonidentifiable. Finally, we discuss technical and social issues that arise when applying reinforcement learning to adaptive management problems in the environmental domain. Our synthesis suggests that environmental management and computer science can learn from one another about the practices, promises, and perils of experience-based decision-making.
title Bridging adaptive management and reinforcement learning for more robust decisions
topic Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08731