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Summary of Avoiding Catastrophe in Online Learning by Asking For Help, By Benjamin Plaut et al.


Avoiding Catastrophe in Online Learning by Asking for Help

by Benjamin Plaut, Hanlin Zhu, Stuart Russell

First submitted to arxiv on: 12 Feb 2024

Categories

  • Main: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
  • Secondary: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

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GrooveSquid.com Paper Summaries

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Summary difficulty Written by Summary
High Paper authors High Difficulty Summary
Read the original abstract here
Medium GrooveSquid.com (original content) Medium Difficulty Summary
A novel online learning problem is proposed to minimize the chance of catastrophic mistakes. The approach assumes that each round’s payoff represents the chance of avoiding catastrophe and aims to maximize the product of payoffs while allowing a limited number of queries to a mentor. The authors show that any algorithm either constantly queries the mentor or nearly guarantees catastrophe, but provide an algorithm with approaching 0 regret and query rate as the time horizon grows for learnable policy classes.
Low GrooveSquid.com (original content) Low Difficulty Summary
To avoid catastrophic mistakes in online learning, researchers have created a new problem where the goal is to minimize the chance of these mistakes. This is done by looking at each round’s payoff as the chance of avoiding catastrophe, and trying to get the most overall while only asking for help a few times. The authors found that any algorithm either asks for help all the time or almost always causes a big mistake. However, they were able to create an algorithm that gets better and better at this problem over time.

Keywords

* Artificial intelligence  * Online learning