Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022) Main Conference Track
Tengyang Xie, Akanksha Saran, Dylan J Foster, Lekan Molu, Ida Momennejad, Nan Jiang, Paul Mineiro, John Langford
Consider the problem setting of Interaction-Grounded Learning (IGL), in which a learner's goal is to optimally interact with the environment with no explicit reward to ground its policies. The agent observes a context vector, takes an action, and receives a feedback vector, using this information to effectively optimize a policy with respect to a latent reward function. Prior analyzed approaches fail when the feedback vector contains the action, which significantly limits IGL’s success in many potential scenarios such as Brain-computer interface (BCI) or Human-computer interface (HCI) applications. We address this by creating an algorithm and analysis which allows IGL to work even when the feedback vector contains the action, encoded in any fashion. We provide theoretical guarantees and large-scale experiments based on supervised datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new approach.