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Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Abel, David, Barreto, André, Bowling, Michael, Dabney, Will, Dong, Shi, Hansen, Steven, Harutyunyan, Anna, Khetarpal, Khimya, Lyle, Clare, Pascanu, Razvan, Piliouras, Georgios, Precup, Doina, Richens, Jonathan, Rowland, Mark, Schaul, Tom, Singh, Satinder
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04403
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Inhaltsangabe:
  • Agency is a system's capacity to steer outcomes toward a goal, and is a central topic of study across biology, philosophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Determining if a system exhibits agency is a notoriously difficult question: Dennett (1989), for instance, highlights the puzzle of determining which principles can decide whether a rock, a thermostat, or a robot each possess agency. We here address this puzzle from the viewpoint of reinforcement learning by arguing that agency is fundamentally frame-dependent: Any measurement of a system's agency must be made relative to a reference frame. We support this claim by presenting a philosophical argument that each of the essential properties of agency proposed by Barandiaran et al. (2009) and Moreno (2018) are themselves frame-dependent. We conclude that any basic science of agency requires frame-dependence, and discuss the implications of this claim for reinforcement learning.