Benefits of Assistance over Reward Learning

Much recent work has focused on how an agent can learn what to do from human feedback, leading to two major paradigms. The first paradigm is reward learning, in which the agent learns a reward model through human feedback that is provided externally from the environment. The second is assistance, in which the human is modeled as a part of the environment, and the true reward function is modeled as a latent variable in the environment that the agent may make inferences about. The key difference between the two paradigms is that in the reward learning paradigm, by construction there is a separation between reward learning and control using the learned reward. In contrast, in assistance these functions are performed as needed by a single policy. By merging reward learning and control, assistive agents can reason about the impact of control actions on reward learning, leading to several advantages over agents based on reward learning. We illustrate these advantages in simple environments by showing desirable qualitative behaviors of assistive agents that cannot be found by agents based on reward learning.