Agency Is Frame-Dependent
Authors: name: David Abel; name: André Barreto; name: Michael Bowling; name: Will Dabney; name: Shi Dong; name: Steven Hansen; name: Anna Harutyunyan; name: Khimya Khetarpal; name: Clare Lyle; name: Razvan Pascanu; name: Georgios Piliouras; name: Doina Precup; name: Jonathan Richens; name: Mark Rowland; name: Tom Schaul; name: Satinder Singh
Published: 2025-02-06 08:34:57

Abstract: 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.