The Problem of Social Cost in Multi-Agent General Reinforcement Learning: Survey and Synthesis

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ng, Kee Siong, Yang-Zhao, Samuel, Cadogan-Cowper, Timothy
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Ng, Kee Siong
Yang-Zhao, Samuel
Cadogan-Cowper, Timothy
author_facet Ng, Kee Siong
Yang-Zhao, Samuel
Cadogan-Cowper, Timothy
contents The AI safety literature is full of examples of powerful AI agents that, in blindly pursuing a specific and usually narrow objective, ends up with unacceptable and even catastrophic collateral damage to others. In this paper, we consider the problem of social harms that can result from actions taken by learning and utility-maximising agents in a multi-agent environment. The problem of measuring social harms or impacts in such multi-agent settings, especially when the agents are artificial generally intelligent (AGI) agents, was listed as an open problem in Everitt et al, 2018. We attempt a partial answer to that open problem in the form of market-based mechanisms to quantify and control the cost of such social harms. The proposed setup captures many well-studied special cases and is more general than existing formulations of multi-agent reinforcement learning with mechanism design in two ways: (i) the underlying environment is a history-based general reinforcement learning environment like in AIXI; (ii) the reinforcement-learning agents participating in the environment can have different learning strategies and planning horizons. To demonstrate the practicality of the proposed setup, we survey some key classes of learning algorithms and present a few applications, including a discussion of the Paperclips problem and pollution control with a cap-and-trade system.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_02091
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Problem of Social Cost in Multi-Agent General Reinforcement Learning: Survey and Synthesis
Ng, Kee Siong
Yang-Zhao, Samuel
Cadogan-Cowper, Timothy
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
I.2.11
The AI safety literature is full of examples of powerful AI agents that, in blindly pursuing a specific and usually narrow objective, ends up with unacceptable and even catastrophic collateral damage to others. In this paper, we consider the problem of social harms that can result from actions taken by learning and utility-maximising agents in a multi-agent environment. The problem of measuring social harms or impacts in such multi-agent settings, especially when the agents are artificial generally intelligent (AGI) agents, was listed as an open problem in Everitt et al, 2018. We attempt a partial answer to that open problem in the form of market-based mechanisms to quantify and control the cost of such social harms. The proposed setup captures many well-studied special cases and is more general than existing formulations of multi-agent reinforcement learning with mechanism design in two ways: (i) the underlying environment is a history-based general reinforcement learning environment like in AIXI; (ii) the reinforcement-learning agents participating in the environment can have different learning strategies and planning horizons. To demonstrate the practicality of the proposed setup, we survey some key classes of learning algorithms and present a few applications, including a discussion of the Paperclips problem and pollution control with a cap-and-trade system.
title The Problem of Social Cost in Multi-Agent General Reinforcement Learning: Survey and Synthesis
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
I.2.11
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02091