Learning to Steer Markovian Agents under Model Uncertainty

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Huang, Jiawei, Thoma, Vinzenz, Shen, Zebang, Nax, Heinrich H., He, Niao
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Huang, Jiawei
Thoma, Vinzenz
Shen, Zebang
Nax, Heinrich H.
He, Niao
author_facet Huang, Jiawei
Thoma, Vinzenz
Shen, Zebang
Nax, Heinrich H.
He, Niao
contents Designing incentives for an adapting population is a ubiquitous problem in a wide array of economic applications and beyond. In this work, we study how to design additional rewards to steer multi-agent systems towards desired policies \emph{without} prior knowledge of the agents' underlying learning dynamics. Motivated by the limitation of existing works, we consider a new and general category of learning dynamics called \emph{Markovian agents}. We introduce a model-based non-episodic Reinforcement Learning (RL) formulation for our steering problem. Importantly, we focus on learning a \emph{history-dependent} steering strategy to handle the inherent model uncertainty about the agents' learning dynamics. We introduce a novel objective function to encode the desiderata of achieving a good steering outcome with reasonable cost. Theoretically, we identify conditions for the existence of steering strategies to guide agents to the desired policies. Complementing our theoretical contributions, we provide empirical algorithms to approximately solve our objective, which effectively tackles the challenge in learning history-dependent strategies. We demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithms through empirical evaluations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_10207
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Steer Markovian Agents under Model Uncertainty
Huang, Jiawei
Thoma, Vinzenz
Shen, Zebang
Nax, Heinrich H.
He, Niao
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Multiagent Systems
Designing incentives for an adapting population is a ubiquitous problem in a wide array of economic applications and beyond. In this work, we study how to design additional rewards to steer multi-agent systems towards desired policies \emph{without} prior knowledge of the agents' underlying learning dynamics. Motivated by the limitation of existing works, we consider a new and general category of learning dynamics called \emph{Markovian agents}. We introduce a model-based non-episodic Reinforcement Learning (RL) formulation for our steering problem. Importantly, we focus on learning a \emph{history-dependent} steering strategy to handle the inherent model uncertainty about the agents' learning dynamics. We introduce a novel objective function to encode the desiderata of achieving a good steering outcome with reasonable cost. Theoretically, we identify conditions for the existence of steering strategies to guide agents to the desired policies. Complementing our theoretical contributions, we provide empirical algorithms to approximately solve our objective, which effectively tackles the challenge in learning history-dependent strategies. We demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithms through empirical evaluations.
title Learning to Steer Markovian Agents under Model Uncertainty
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10207