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Title: Irrationality can help reward inference

Paper content:
Specifying reward functions is difficult, which motivates the area of reward inference: learning rewards from human behavior.
The starting assumption in the area is that human behavior is optimal given the desired reward function, but in reality people have many different forms of irrationality, from noise to myopia to risk aversion and beyond.
This fact seems like it will be strictly harmful to reward inference: it is already hard to infer the reward from rational behavior, and noise and systematic biases make actions have less direct of a relationship to the reward.
Our insight in this work is that, contrary to expectations, irrationality can actually help rather than hinder reward inference.
For some types and amounts of irrationality, the expert now produces more varied policies compared to rational behavior, which help disambiguate among different reward parameters -- those that otherwise correspond to the same rational behavior.
We put this to the test in a systematic analysis of the effect of irrationality on reward inference.
We start by covering the space of irrationalities as deviations from the Bellman update, simulate expert behavior, and measure the accuracy of inference to contrast the different types and study the gains and losses.
We provide a mutual information-based analysis of our findings, and wrap up by discussing the need to accurately model irrationality, as well as to what extent we might expect (or be able to train) real people to exhibit helpful irrationalities when teaching rewards to learners.
The application of reinforcement learning (RL) in increasingly complex environments has been most successful for problems that are already represented by a specified reward function (Lillicrap et al., 2015; Mnih et al., 2015; .
Unfortunately, not only do real-world tasks usually lack an explicit exogenously-specified reward function, but attempting to specify one tends to lead to unexpected side-effects as the agent is faced with new situations (Lehman et al., 2018) .
This has motivated the area of reward inference: the process of estimating a reward function from human inputs.
The inputs are traditionally demonstrations, leading to inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) (Ng et al., 2000; Abbeel & Ng, 2004) or inverse optimal control (IOC) (Kalman, 1964; Jameson & Kreindler, 1973; Mombaur et al., 2010; Finn et al., 2016) .
Recent work has expanded the range of inputs significantly,to comparisons (Wirth et al., 2017; Sadigh et al., 2017; Christiano et al., 2017) , natural language instructions (MacGlashan et al., 2015; Fu et al., 2019) , physical corrections (Jain et al., 2015; Bajcsy et al., 2017) , proxy rewards Ratner et al., 2018) , or scalar reward values (Griffith et al., 2013; Loftin et al., 2014) .
The central assumption behind these methods is that human behavior is rational, i.e. optimal with respect to the desired reward (cumulative, in expectation).
Unfortunately, decades of research in behavioral economics and cognitive science Chipman (2014) has unearthed a deluge of irrationalities, i.e. of ways in which people deviate from optimal decision making: hyperbolic discounting, scope insensitivity, optimism bias, decision noise, certainty effects, loss aversion, status quo bias, etc.
Work on reward inference has predominantly used one model of irrationality: decision-making noise, where the probability of an action relates to the value that action has.
The most widely used model by far is a Bolzmann distribution stemming from the Luce-Sherpard rule (Luce, 1959; Shepard, 1957; Lucas et al., 2009 ) and the principle of maximum (causal) entropy in (Ziebart et al., 2008; , which we will refer to as Bolzmann-rationality (Fisac et al., 2017) .
Recent work has started to incorporate systematic biases though, like risk-aversion (Singh et al., 2017) , having the wrong dynamics belief (Reddy et al., 2018) , and myopia and hyperbolic discounting (Evans & Goodman, 2015; Evans et al., 2016) .
Learning from irrational experts feels like daunting task: reward inference is already hard with rational behavior, but now a learner needs to make sense of behavior that is noisy or systematically biased.
Our goal in this work is to characterize just how muddied the waters are -how (and how much) do different irrationalities affect reward inference?
Our insight is that, contrary to expectations, irrationality can actually help, rather than hinder, reward inference.
Our explanation is that how good reward inference is depends on the mutual information between the policies produced by the expert and the reward parameters to be inferred.
While it is often possible for two reward parameters to produce the same rational behavior, irrationalities can sometimes produce different behaviors that disambiguate between those same two reward parameters.
For instance, noise can help when it is related to the value function, as Boltzmann noise is, because it distinguishes the difference in values even when the optimal action stays the same.
Optimism can be helpful because the expert takes fewer risk-avoiding actions and acts more directly on their goal.
Overall, we contribute
1) an analysis and comparison of the effects of different biases on reward inference testing our insight,
2) a way to systematically formalize and cover the space of irrationalities in order to conduct such an analysis, and
3) evidence for the importance of assuming the right type of irrationality during inference.
Our good news is that irrationalities can indeed be an ally for inference.
Of course, this is not always true -the details of which irrationality type and how much of it also matter.
We see these results as opening the door to a better understanding of reward inference, as well as to practical ways of making inference easier by asking for the right kind of expert demonstrations -after all, in some cases it might be easier for people to act optimistically or myopically than to act rationally.
Our results reinforce that optimal teaching is different from optimal doing, but point out that some forms of teaching might actually be easier than doing.

assistant: text: We find that irrationality from an expert demonstrator can help a learner infer their preferences.