OpenAI

Gathering human feedback

Brief

RL-Teacher is an OpenAI open-source toolkit (published 2017-08-03) that trains reinforcement-learning agents using occasional human feedback by learning a reward predictor that estimates which actions humans would approve. It ships with a plug-in reward predictor, example agents (three algorithms including OpenAI Baselines PPO), and a web app for collecting labels; the system is under 1,000 Python lines and available on GitHub.

Source evidence

title: Gathering human feedback
contenttype: article
publication: OpenAI
published: 2017-08-03T00:00:00
source
url: https://openai.com/index/gathering-human-feedback

word_count: 226

RL-Teacher is an open-source implementation of our interface to train AIs via occasional human feedback rather than hand-crafted reward functions. The underlying technique was developed as a step towards safe AI systems, but also applies to reinforcement learning problems with rewards that are hard to specify.

The release contains three main components:

The entire system consists of less than 1,000 lines of Python code (excluding the agents). After you’ve set up your web server you can launch an experiment by running:

Humans can give feedback via a simple web interface (shown above), which can be run locally (not recommended) or on a separate machine. Full documentation is available on the project’s GitHub repository(opens in a new window). We’re excited to see what AI researchers and engineers do with this technology—please get in touch with any experimental results!

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