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Side effects penalties

Side effects are unnecessary disruptions to the agent's environment while completing a task. Instead of trying to explicitly penalize all possible side effects, we give the agent a general penalty for impacting the environment, defined as a deviation from some baseline state. For example, a reversibility penalty measures unreachability (deviation) of the starting state (baseline). This code implements a tabular Q-learning agent with different impact penalties. Each penalty consists of a deviation measure (none, unreachability, relative reachability, or attainable utility), a baseline (starting state, inaction, or stepwise inaction), and some other design choices. This is the code for the paper Penalizing side effects using stepwise relative reachability by Krakovna et al (2019).

In our latest paper "Avoiding Side Effects By Considering Future Tasks" by Krakovna et al (NeurIPS 2020), the agent receives an auxiliary reward for preserving the ability to perform future tasks. This approach is equivalent to relative reachability with an inaction baseline in deterministic environments. The UVFA approximation for the auxiliary reward is included as an option for the deviation measure.

Instructions

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/deepmind/deepmind-research/side_effects_penalties.git

Running an agent with a side effects penalty

Run the agent with a given penalty on an AI Safety Gridworlds environment:

python -m side_effects_penalties.run_experiment -baseline <X> -dev_measure <Y> -env_name <Z> -suffix <S>

The following settings can be specified for the side effects penalty:

  • Baseline state (-baseline): starting state (start), inaction (inaction), stepwise inaction with rollouts (stepwise), stepwise inaction without rollouts (step_noroll)
  • Deviation measure (-dev_measure): none (none), unreachability (reach), relative reachability (rel_reach), attainable utility (att_util), UVFA approximation of relative reachability (uvfa_rel_reach)
  • Summary function to apply to the relative reachability or attainable utility deviation measure (-dev_fun): max (0, x) (truncation) or |x| (absolute)
  • Discount factor for rewards (discount). We use discount=0.95 for the UVFA approximation of relative reachability.
  • Discount factor for the deviation measure value function (-value_discount). Should be the same as discount unless using an undiscounted reachability measure.
  • Weight for the side effects penalty relative to the reward (-beta)
  • Penalty for nonterminal states relative to terminal states (-nonterminal'): 1 (full) is used in the stepwise relative reachability paper, while (1-discount) (disc`) is used in the future tasks paper.

Other settings include:

  • Number of episodes (-num_episodes)
  • AI Safety Gridworlds environment name (-env_name)
  • Filename suffix for saving result files (-suffix)

Plotting the results

Make a summary data frame from the result files generated by run_experiment:

python -m side_effects_penalties.results_summary -compare_penalties -input_suffix <S>

Arguments:

  • -bar_plot: make a data frame for a bar plot (True) or learning curve plot (False)
  • -compare_penalties: compare different penalties using the best beta value for each penalty (True), or compare different beta values for a given penalty (False)
  • If compare_penalties=False, specify the penalty parameters (-dev_measure, -dev_fun and -value_discount)
  • Environment name (-env_name)
  • Filename suffix for loading result files (-input_suffix)
  • Filename suffix for the summary data frame (-output_suffix)

Import the summary data frame into plot_results.ipynb and make a bar plot or learning curve plot.

Dependencies

  • Python 2.7 or 3 (tested with Python 2.7.15 and 3.6.7)
  • AI Safety Gridworlds suite of safety environments
  • Abseil Python common libraries
  • Numpy
  • Tensorflow 1
  • Sonnet
  • Pandas
  • Six
  • Matplotlib
  • Seaborn

Citing this work

If you use this code in your work, please cite one of the accompanying papers:

@article{srr2019, title = {Penalizing Side Effects using Stepwise Relative Reachability}, author = {Victoria Krakovna and Laurent Orseau and Ramana Kumar and Miljan Martic and Shane Legg}, journal = {CoRR}, volume = {abs/1806.01186}, year = {2019} }

@inproceedings{ft2020, title = {Avoiding Side Effects By Considering Future Tasks}, author = {Victoria Krakovna and Laurent Orseau and Richard Ngo and Miljan Martic and Shane Legg}, booktitle = {Neural Information Processing Systems}, year = {2020} }