Exploration and Incentives in Reinforcement Learning
研究如何通过信息不对称激励自私的智能体在强化学习中进行探索，设计了一种能探索马尔可夫决策过程中所有可达状态的算法，并首次将强化学习与激励机制结合。
How do you incentivize self-interested agents to explore when they prefer to exploit? We consider complex exploration problems, where each agent faces the same (but unknown) Markov decision process (MDP). In contrast with traditional formulations of reinforcement learning (RL), agents control the choice of policies, whereas an algorithm can only issue recommendations. However, the algorithm controls the flow of information, and can incentivize the agents to explore via information asymmetry. We design an algorithm which explores all reachable states in the MDP. We achieve provable guarantees similar to those for incentivizing exploration in static, stateless exploration problems studied previously. From the RL perspective, we design RL mechanisms, that is, RL algorithms that interact with self-interested agents and are compatible with their incentives. This is the first paper on RL mechanisms, that is, the first paper on any scenario that combines RL and incentives, to the best of our knowledge.