Bounded Optimality and Rational Metareasoning

Formal definitions of rationality are instrumental for understanding and designing intelligent systems. By specifying the optimal way to reason under the constraint of limited information, Bayesian rationality has enabled tremendous advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence together with deep insights into human cognition and brain function. Bounded optimality (Horvitz, 1989; Russell, & Wefald, 1991a) extends Bayesian rationality by taking into account two additional constraints: limited time and finite computational resources. Bounded optimality is a practical framework for designing the best AI system possible given the constraints of its limited-performance hardware (Russell & Subramanian, 1995), and provides a way to capture the time and resource-constraints on human cognition. To adaptively allocate their finite computational bounded agents may have to perform rational metareasoning (Russel, & Wefald, 1991b) which corresponds to topics like cognitive control and metacognition studied in cognitive neuroscience and psychology.

Current research in cognitive science is leveraging bounded optimality and rational metareasoning to understand how the human mind can achieve so much with so little computation (Gershman, Horvitz, & Tenenbaum, in press; Vul, Griffiths, Goodman, & Tenenbaum, 2014), to develop and constrain process models of cognition (Griffiths, Lieder, & Goodman, 2015; Lewis, Howes, & Singh, 2014), to reevaluate the evidence for human irrationality, and to rethink heuristics and biases (Lieder, Griffiths, & Goodman, 2013; Lieder, Plunkett, et al. 2015). Rational metareasoning and bounded optimality also have interesting connections to neuroscience including the top-down control of neural information processing (e.g., Shenhav, Botvinick, & Cohen, 2013) and neural coding (Gershman, & Wilson, 2007).

This workshop brings together computer scientists working on bounded optimality and metareasoning with psychologists and neuroscientists reverse-engineering the computational principles that make the human brain incredibly resource-efficient. The goal of this workshop is to synthesize these different perspectives on bounded optimality, to promote interdisciplinary interactions and cross-fertilization, and to identify directions for future research.

References
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