Cognitive Models as Simulators: Using Cognitive Models to Tap into Implicit Human Feedback

In this work, we substantiate the idea of $\textit{cognitive models as simulators}$, which is to have AI systems interact with, and collect feedback from, cognitive models instead of humans, thereby making the training process safer, cheaper, and faster. We leverage this idea in the context of learning a fair behavior toward a counterpart exhibiting various emotional states — as implicit human feedback. As a case study, we adopt the Ultimatum game (UG), a canonical task in behavioral and brain sciences for studying fairness. We show that our reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn to exhibit differential, rationally-justified behaviors under various emotional states of their UG counterpart. We discuss the implications of our work for AI and cognitive science research, and its potential for interactive learning with implicit human feedback.