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 rationality



Occam's razor is insufficient to infer the preferences of irrational agents

Neural Information Processing Systems

Since human planning systematically deviates from rationality, several approaches have been tried to account for specific human shortcomings. However, the general problem of inferring the reward function of an agent of unknown rationality has received little attention. Unlike the well-known ambiguity problems in IRL, this one is practically relevant but cannot be resolved by observing the agent's policy in enough environments. This paper shows (1) that a No Free Lunch result implies it is impossible to uniquely decompose a policy into a planning algorithm and reward function, and (2) that even with a reasonable simplicity prior/Occam's razor on the set of decompositions, we cannot distinguish between the true decomposition and others that lead to high regret. To address this, we need simple `normative' assumptions, which cannot be deduced exclusively from observations.


Bounded rationality in structured density estimation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Learning to accurately represent environmental uncertainty is crucial for adaptive and optimal behaviors in various cognitive tasks. However, it remains unclear how the human brain, constrained by finite cognitive resources, constructs an internal model from an infinite space of probability distributions. In this study, we explore how these learned distributions deviate from the ground truth, resulting in observable inconsistency in a novel structured density estimation task. During each trial, human participants were asked to form and report the latent probability distribution functions underlying sequentially presented independent observations. As the number of observations increased, the reported predictive density became closer to the ground truth. Nevertheless, we observed an intriguing inconsistency in human structure estimation, specifically a large error in the number of reported clusters.


Are generative AI text annotations systematically biased?

Stolwijk, Sjoerd B., Boukes, Mark, Trilling, Damian

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper investigates bias in GLLM annotations by conceptually replicating manual annotations of Boukes (2024). Using various GLLMs (Llama3.1:8b, Llama3.3:70b, GPT4o, Qwen2.5:72b) in combination with five different prompts for five concepts (political content, interactivity, rationality, incivility, and ideology). We find GLLMs perform adequate in terms of F1 scores, but differ from manual annotations in terms of prevalence, yield substantively different downstream results, and display systematic bias in that they overlap more with each other than with manual annotations. Differences in F1 scores fail to account for the degree of bias.


Human Decision-Making under Limited Time

Neural Information Processing Systems

Subjective expected utility theory assumes that decision-makers possess unlimited computational resources to reason about their choices; however, virtually all decisions in everyday life are made under resource constraints---i.e.



Occam's razor is insufficient to infer the preferences of irrational agents

Neural Information Processing Systems

Since human planning systematically deviates from rationality, several approaches have been tried to account for specific human shortcomings. However, the general problem of inferring the reward function of an agent of unknown rationality has received little attention. Unlike the well-known ambiguity problems in IRL, this one is practically relevant but cannot be resolved by observing the agent's policy in enough environments. This paper shows (1) that a No Free Lunch result implies it is impossible to uniquely decompose a policy into a planning algorithm and reward function, and (2) that even with a reasonable simplicity prior/Occam's razor on the set of decompositions, we cannot distinguish between the true decomposition and others that lead to high regret. To address this, we need simple `normative' assumptions, which cannot be deduced exclusively from observations.



Developing a Grounded View of AI

Mao, Bifei, Hong, Lanqing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As a capability coming from computation, how does AI differ fundamentally from the capabilities delivered by rule-based software program? The paper examines the behavior of artificial intelligence (AI) from engineering points of view to clarify its nature and limits. The paper argues that the rationality underlying humanity's impulse to pursue, articulate, and adhere to rules deserves to be valued and preserved. Identifying where rule-based practical rationality ends is the beginning of making it aware until action. Although the rules of AI behaviors are still hidden or only weakly observable, the paper has proposed a methodology to make a sense of discrimination possible and practical to identify the distinctions of the behavior of AI models with three types of decisions. It is a prerequisite for human responsibilities with alternative possibilities, considering how and when to use AI. It would be a solid start for people to ensure AI system soundness for the well-being of humans, society, and the environment.