mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Learning to Assist Agents by Observing Them

arXiv 2110.01311 ↗First posted 4 Oct 2021cs.AI cs.LGcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

The ability of an AI agent to assist other agents, such as humans, is an important and challenging goal, which requires the assisting agent to reason about the behavior and infer the goals of the assisted agent. Training such an ability by using reinforcement learning usually requires large amounts of online training, which is difficult and costly. On the other hand, offline data about the behavior of the assisted agent might be available, but is non-trivial to take advantage of by methods such as offline reinforcement learning. We introduce methods where the capability to create a representation of the behavior is first pre-trained with offline data, after which only a small amount of interaction data is needed to learn an assisting policy. We test the setting in a gridworld where the helper agent has the capability to manipulate the environment of the assisted artificial agents, and introduce three different scenarios where the assistance considerably improves the performance of the assisted agents.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 12 of its 26 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2021.

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12 of 26 references.

References · 12

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  1. 2023Using Offline Data to Speed Up Reinforcement Learning in Procedurally Generated Environments
  2. 2024Learning to Assist Humans without Inferring Rewards
  3. 2020OPAL: Offline Primitive Discovery for Accelerating Offline Reinforcement Learning
  4. 2022Agent-Controller Representations: Principled Offline RL with Rich Exogenous Information
  5. 2022Offline Robot Reinforcement Learning with Uncertainty-Guided Human Expert Sampling
  6. 2023Guiding Online Reinforcement Learning with Action-Free Offline Pretraining
  7. 2025Behavioral Exploration: Learning to Explore via In-Context Adaptation
  8. 2024A Dual Approach to Imitation Learning from Observations with Offline Datasets