Action decision congruence between human and deep reinforcement learning agents during a coordinated action task

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is capable of training agents that exceed human-levels of performance in multi-agenttasks. However, the behaviors exhibited by these agents are not guaranteed to be human-like or human-compatible. Thisposes a problem if the goal is to design agents capable of collaborating with humans or augmenting human actions in co-operative or team-based tasks. Indeed, recommender systems designed to augment human decision-making need to notonly recommend actions that align with the task goal, but which also maintain coordinative behaviors between agents.The current study simultaneously explored skill learning performance of human learners when working alongside dif-ferent artificial agents (AAs) during a collaborative problem-solving task, as well as evaluated the effectiveness of thesame AAs as action decision recommender systems to aid learning. The action decisions of the AAs were either modelledby a heuristic model based on human performance or by a deep neural network trained by reinforcement learning usingself-play. In addition to evaluating skill learning performance, the current study also tested the congruence betweenthe decisions of the AAs with actual decisions made by humans. Results demonstrate that the performance of humanswas significantly worse when working alongside the DRL AA compared to the heuristic AA. Additionally, the actiondecisions participants made also showed less allignment with the recommendations made by the DRL AA.