Rationality Enhancement Conference Paper 2018

Learning to Select Computations

The efficient use of limited computational resources is an essential ingredient of intelligence. Selecting computations optimally according to rational metareasoning would achieve this, but this is computationally intractable. Inspired by psychology and neuroscience, we propose the first concrete and domain-general learning algorithm for approximating the optimal selection of computations: Bayesian metalevel policy search (BMPS). We derive this general, sample-efficient search algorithm for a computation-selecting metalevel policy based on the insight that the value of information lies between the myopic value of information and the value of perfect information. We evaluate BMPS on three increasingly difficult metareasoning problems: when to terminate computation, how to allocate computation between competing options, and planning. Across all three domains, BMPS achieved near-optimal performance and compared favorably to previously proposed metareasoning heuristics. Finally, we demonstrate the practical utility of BMPS in an emergency management scenario, even accounting for the overhead of metareasoning.

Author(s): Frederick Callaway and Sayan Gul and Paul M. Krueger and Thomas L. Griffiths and Falk Lieder
Book Title: Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence: Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Conference
Year: 2018
Month: August
Project(s):
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)
State: Published
URL: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.06892.pdf
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive
Note: Frederick Callaway and Sayan Gul and Falk Lieder contributed equally to this publication.
Attachments:

BibTex

@inproceedings{Callaway2018Learning,
  title = {Learning to Select Computations},
  booktitle = {{Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence: Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Conference}},
  abstract = {The efficient use of limited computational resources is an essential ingredient of intelligence. Selecting computations optimally according to rational metareasoning would achieve this, but this is computationally intractable. Inspired by psychology and neuroscience, we propose the first concrete and domain-general learning algorithm for approximating the optimal selection of computations: Bayesian metalevel policy search (BMPS). We derive this general, sample-efficient search algorithm for a computation-selecting metalevel policy based on the insight that the value of information lies between the myopic value of information and the value of perfect information. We evaluate BMPS on three increasingly difficult metareasoning problems: when to terminate computation, how to allocate computation between competing options, and planning. Across all three domains, BMPS achieved near-optimal performance and compared favorably to previously proposed metareasoning heuristics. Finally, we demonstrate the practical utility of BMPS in an emergency management scenario, even accounting for the overhead of metareasoning.},
  month = aug,
  year = {2018},
  note = {Frederick Callaway and Sayan Gul  and Falk Lieder contributed equally to this publication.},
  slug = {callaway2018learning},
  author = {Callaway, Frederick and Gul, Sayan and Krueger, Paul M. and Griffiths, Thomas L. and Lieder, Falk},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.06892.pdf},
  month_numeric = {8}
}