When I use the term “RL agent,” I always mean an agent trained via RL. The other usage just seems confused to me in that it seems to be assuming that if you use RL you’ll get an agent which is “trying” to maximize its reward, which is not necessarily the case. “Reward-maximizer” seems like a much better term to describe that situation.
When I use the term “RL agent,” I always mean an agent trained via RL.
I think the problem with this usage is that “RL agent” originally meant something like “an agent designed to solve a RL problem” where “RL problem” is something like “a class of problems with the central example being MDP”. I think it’s just not a well-defined term at this point, and if you Google it, you get plenty of results that say things like “the goal of our RL agent is to maximize the expected cumulative reward”, or “AIXI is a reinforcement learning agent”. I guess this is fine for AI capabilities work but really confusing for AI safety work.
So, consider switching to “RL-trained agent” for greater clarity (unless someone has a better suggestion)? ETA: Maybe “reinforcement trained agent”?
When I use the term “RL agent,” I always mean an agent trained via RL. The other usage just seems confused to me in that it seems to be assuming that if you use RL you’ll get an agent which is “trying” to maximize its reward, which is not necessarily the case. “Reward-maximizer” seems like a much better term to describe that situation.
I think the problem with this usage is that “RL agent” originally meant something like “an agent designed to solve a RL problem” where “RL problem” is something like “a class of problems with the central example being MDP”. I think it’s just not a well-defined term at this point, and if you Google it, you get plenty of results that say things like “the goal of our RL agent is to maximize the expected cumulative reward”, or “AIXI is a reinforcement learning agent”. I guess this is fine for AI capabilities work but really confusing for AI safety work.
So, consider switching to “RL-trained agent” for greater clarity (unless someone has a better suggestion)? ETA: Maybe “reinforcement trained agent”?