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<p>We consider an extended notion of reinforcement learning in which the environment can simulate the agent and base its outputs on the agent’s hypothetical behavior. Since good performance usually requires paying attention to whatever things the environment’s outputs are based on, we argue that for an agent to achieve on-average good performance across many such extended environments, it is necessary for the agent to self-reflect. Thus weighted-average performance over the space of all suitably well-behaved extended environments could be considered a way of measuring how self-reflective an agent is. We give examples of extended environments and introduce a simple transformation which experimentally seems to increase some standard RL agents’ performance in a certain type of extended environment.</p>
</abstract>

We consider an extended notion of reinforcement learning in which the environment can simulate the agent and base its outputs on the agent’s hypothetical behavior. Since good performance usually requires paying attention to whatever things the environment’s outputs are based on, we argue that for an agent to achieve on-average good performance across many such extended environments, it is necessary for the agent to self-reflect. Thus weighted-average performance over the space of all suitably well-behaved extended environments could be considered a way of measuring how self-reflective an agent is. We give examples of extended environments and introduce a simple transformation which experimentally seems to increase some standard RL agents’ performance in a certain type of extended environment.

Extending Environments to Measure Self-reflection in Reinforcement Learning

Journal of Artificial General Intelligence

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

{"article-title":"Extending Environments to Measure Self-reflection in Reinforcement Learning"}

We consider an extended notion of reinforcement learning in which the environment can simulate the agent and base its outputs on the agent’s hypothetical...

Extending Environments to Measure Self-reflection in Reinforcement Learning

Published Online: Nov 03, 2022

Page range: 1 - 24

Received: Jul 21, 2022

Accepted: Oct 28, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jagi-2022-0001

© 2022 Samuel Allen Alexander et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.