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Learning Social Welfare Functions

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arxiv 2405.17700 v2 pith:FMPAM3ZK submitted 2024-05-27 cs.GT cs.LG

classification cs.GTcs.LG
keywords functionssocialwelfarelearningpolicyassociatedcomparisonsinput
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Is it possible to understand or imitate a policy maker's rationale by looking at past decisions they made? We formalize this question as the problem of learning social welfare functions belonging to the well-studied family of power mean functions. We focus on two learning tasks; in the first, the input is vectors of utilities of an action (decision or policy) for individuals in a group and their associated social welfare as judged by a policy maker, whereas in the second, the input is pairwise comparisons between the welfares associated with a given pair of utility vectors. We show that power mean functions are learnable with polynomial sample complexity in both cases, even if the comparisons are social welfare information is noisy. Finally, we design practical algorithms for these tasks and evaluate their performance.

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Cited by 1 Pith paper

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  1. Utility-inspired Reward Transformations Improve Reinforcement Learning Training of Language Models

    cs.LG 2025-01 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Applying a utility-inspired, threshold-based transformation to individual rewards before summing them improved the harmlessness of an RLHF-trained 2B language model without reducing helpfulness.

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