Decentralized reinforcement learning: global decision-making via local economic transactions

Many neural network architectures that underlie various artificial intelligence systems today bear an interesting similarity to the early computers a century ago. Just as early computers were specialized circuits for specific purposes like solving linear systems or cryptanalysis, so too does the trained neural network generally function as a specialized circuit for performing a specific task, with all parameters coupled together in the same global scope. One might naturally wonder what it might take for learning systems to scale in complexity in the same way as programmed systems have. And if the history of how abstraction enabled computer science to scale gives any indication, one possible place to start would be to consider what it means to build complex learning systems at multiple levels of abstraction, where each level of learning is the emergent consequence of learning from the layer below. This post discusses our recent paper that introduces a framework for societal decision-making, a perspective on reinforcement learning through the lens of a self-organizing society of primitive agents.