Why Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning?

We argue that multi-objective methods are underrepresented in RL research, and present three scenarios to justify the need for explicitly multi-objective approaches. Key to these scenarios is that although the utility the user derives from a policy — which is what we ultimately aim to optimize — is scalar, it is sometimes impossible, undesirable or infeasible to formulate the problem as single-objective at the moment when the policies need to be learned. We also present the case for a utility-based view of multi-objective RL, i.e., that the appropriate multi-objective solution concept should be derived from what we know about the user’s utility function, rather than axiomatically assumed to be the Pareto front.

Authors

• Diederik Roijers
• Shimon Whiteson
• Peter Vamplew Federation University
• Richard Dazeley Deakin University

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