On agent incentives to manipulate human feedback in multi-agent reward learning scenarios

In settings without well-defined goals, methods for reward learning allow reinforcement learning agents to infer goals from human feedback. Existing work has discussed the problem that such agents may manipulate humans, or the reward learning process, in order to gain higher reward. We introduce the neglected problem that, in multi-agent settings, agents may have incentives to manipulate one another’s reward functions in order to change each other’s behav- ioral policies. We focus on the setting with humans acting alongside assistive (artificial) agents who must learn the reward function by interacting with these humans. We propose a possible solution to manipulation of human feedback in this setting: the Shared Value Prior (SVP). The SVP equips agents with an assumption that the reward functions of all humans are similar. Given this assumption, the actions of any human provide information to an agent about its reward, and so the agent is incentivised to observe these actions rather than to manipulate them. We present an expository example in which the SVP prevents manipulation