(Invited Talk) Alex Peysakhovich: Towards cooperative AI

Social dilemmas are situations where individuals face a temptation to increase their payoffs at a cost to total welfare. Importantly, social dilemmas are ubiquitous in real world interactions. We show how to modify modern reinforcement learning methods to construct agents that act in ways that are simple to understand, begin by cooperating, try to avoid being exploited, and forgiving (try to return to mutual cooperation). Such agents can maintain cooperation in Markov social dilemmas with both perfect and imperfect information. Our construction does not require training methods beyond a modification of self-play, thus if an environment is such that good strategies can be constructed in the zero-sum case (eg. Atari) then we can construct agents that solve social dilemmas in this environment.