Rationality Enhancement Conference Paper 2020

Leveraging Machine Learning to Automatically Derive Robust Planning Strategies from Biased Models of the Environment

Teaching clever heuristics is a promising approach to improve decision-making. We can leverage machine learning to discover clever strategies automatically. Current methods require an accurate model of the decision problems people face in real life. But most models are misspecified because of limited information and cognitive biases. To address this problem we develop strategy discovery methods that are robust to model misspecification. Robustness is achieved by model-ing model-misspecification and handling uncertainty about the real-world according to Bayesian inference. We translate our methods into an intelligent tutor that automatically discovers and teaches robust planning strategies. Our robust cognitive tutor significantly improved human decision-making when the model was so biased that conventional cognitive tutors were no longer effective. These findings highlight that our robust strategy discovery methods are a significant step towards leveraging artificial intelligence to improve human decision-making in the real world.

Author(s): Anirudha Kemtur and Yash Raj Jain and Aashay Mehta and Frederick Callaway and Saksham Consul and Jugoslav Stojcheski and Falk Lieder
Book Title: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Year: 2020
Month: July
Publisher: Cognitive Science Society
Project(s):
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (conference)
Event Name: CogSci 2020
State: Published
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive
Language: English
Note: Anirudha Kemtur and Yash Raj Jain contributed equally to this publication.
Attachments:

BibTex

@conference{Kemtur2020CogSci,
  title = {Leveraging Machine Learning to Automatically Derive Robust Planning Strategies from Biased Models of the Environment},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society},
  abstract = {Teaching clever heuristics is a promising approach to improve decision-making. We can leverage machine learning to discover clever strategies automatically. Current methods require an accurate model  of the decision problems people face in real life. But most models are misspecified because of limited information and cognitive biases. To address this problem we develop strategy discovery methods that are robust to model misspecification. Robustness is achieved by model-ing model-misspecification and handling uncertainty about the real-world according to Bayesian inference.  We translate our methods into an intelligent tutor that automatically discovers and teaches robust planning strategies.   Our robust cognitive tutor significantly improved human decision-making when the model was so biased that conventional cognitive tutors were no longer effective. These findings highlight that our robust strategy discovery methods are a significant step towards leveraging artificial intelligence to improve human decision-making in the real world.},
  publisher = {Cognitive Science Society},
  month = jul,
  year = {2020},
  note = {Anirudha Kemtur and Yash Raj Jain contributed equally to this publication.},
  slug = {kemtur-a-jain-y-r-mehta-a-callaway-f-consul-s-stojcheski-j-lieder-f},
  author = {Kemtur, Anirudha and Jain, Yash Raj and Mehta, Aashay and Callaway, Frederick and Consul, Saksham and Stojcheski, Jugoslav and Lieder, Falk},
  month_numeric = {7}
}