Political Economy of Reinforcement Learning (PERLS) Workshop

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)

December, 2021

The NeurIPS 2021 PERLS Workshop is on Tuesday, December 14th, time zone: New York (USA).

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Workshop schedule - Tuesday, December 14th
Time (ET) Event
7:00am Pre-show meet and greet
8:00am Welcome
8:20am [Plenary] Culturing PERLS (Mark Nitzberg)
Chairperson: Aaron Snoswell
8:55am 5 minute break
9:00am

Theme 1:

Vagueness & Specification

 Theme Summary: How should RL systems be designed in the face of difficult specification problems and normative indeterminacies? How do these problems change in particular domains or as RL systems become more capable?
Chairperson: Michael Dennis
[Presentations]
  • Stuart Russell
  • Mireille Hildebrandt
[Panel discussion]
  • Stuart Russell
  • Mireille Hildebrandt
  • Salomé Viljoen
  • Natasha Jaques
10:40am 10 minute break
10:50am

Theme 2:

Legitimacy, Accountability,
& Feedback

 Theme Summary: To what extent does RL automate many feedback mechanisms for oversight and control that social institutions (e.g. governments) presently enforce or take for granted? How can stakeholders acquire a voice in system evaluation?
Chairperson: Aaron Snoswell
[Presentations]
  • "Legitimacy" in the Computational Elicitation of Preferences in Mechanism Design (Jake Goldenfein)
  • The Role of Explanation in RL Legitimacy, Accountability, and Feedback (Finale Doshi-Velez)
  • Evaluating Reinforcement Learners (Michael Littman)
[Panel discussion]
  • Jake Goldenfein
  • Finale Doshi-Velez
  • Evi Micha
  • Ivana Dusparic
  • Jonathan Stray
12:15 Noon 45 minute lunch break
1:00pm Poster session on Gather Town - for accepted papers, please see here.
2:55pm 5 minute break
3:00pm

Theme 3:

Tools for democratization

 Theme Summary: What new policy tools (technical or otherwise) could be used to achieve democratic control and oversight of RL systems? What organizational theories are needed to inform or shape how democratization should proceed?
Chairperson: Thomas Gilbert
[Presentations]
  • Antimonopoly as a Tool for Democratization? (Ayse Yasar)
  • Reinforcement of What? Shaping the Digitization of Judgement by Reinforcement Learning (Frank Pasquale)
  • Metrics are Tricky (Rachel Thomas)
[Panel discussion]
  • Ayse Yasar
  • Frank Pasquale
  • Rachel Thomas
  • Mason Kortz
  • Jessica Forde
4:30pm Closing remarks