David Abel: Three Dogmas of Reinforcement Learning

Modern reinforcement learning has been in large part shaped by three dogmas. The first is what I call the environment spotlight, which refers to our focus on environments rather than agents. The second is our implicit treatment of learning as finding a solution, rather than endless adaptation. The last is the reward hypothesis, which states that all goals and purposes can be well thought of as maximization of a reward signal. In this talk I discuss how these dogmas have shaped our views on learning. I argue that, when agents learn from human feedback, we ought to dispense entirely with the first two dogmas, while we must recognize and embrace the nuance implicit in the third.