A Holistic Approach to Undesired Content Detection in the Real World

We present a holistic approach to building a robust and useful natural language classification system for real-world content moderation. The success of such a system relies on a chain of carefully designed and executed steps, including the design of content taxonomies and labeling instructions, data quality control, an active learning pipeline to capture rare events, and a variety of methods to make the model robust and to avoid overfitting. Our moderation system is trained to detect a broad set of categories of undesired content, including sexual content, hateful content, violence, self-harm, and harassment. This approach generalizes to a wide range of different content taxonomies and can be used to create high-quality content classifiers that outperform off-the-shelf models.

Emergent Tool Use From Multi-Agent Autocurricula

Through multi-agent competition, the simple objective of hide-and-seek, and standard reinforcement learning algorithms at scale, we find that agents create a self-supervised autocurriculum inducing multiple distinct rounds of emergent strategy, many of which require sophisticated tool use and coordination. We find clear evidence of six emergent phases in agent strategy in our environment, each of which creates a new pressure for the opposing team to adapt; for instance, agents learn to build multi-object shelters using moveable boxes which in turn leads to agents discovering that they can overcome obstacles using ramps. We further provide evidence that multi-agent competition may scale better with increasing environment complexity and leads to behavior that centers around far more human-relevant skills than other self-supervised reinforcement learning methods such as intrinsic motivation. Finally, we propose transfer and fine-tuning as a way to quantitatively evaluate targeted capabilities, and we compare hide-and-seek agents to both intrinsic motivation and random initialization baselines in a suite of domain-specific intelligence tests.

Best arm identification in multi-armed bandits with delayed feedback

We propose a generalization of the best arm identification problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) to the setting where every pull of an arm is associated with delayed feedback. The delay in feedback increases the effective sample complexity of standard algorithms, but can be offset if we have access to partial feedback received before a pull is completed. We propose a general framework to model the relationship between partial and delayed feedback, and as a special case we introduce efficient algorithms for settings where the partial feedback are biased or unbiased estimators of the delayed feedback. Additionally, we propose a novel extension of the algorithms to the parallel MAB setting where an agent can control a batch of arms. Our experiments in real-world settings, involving policy search and hyperparameter optimization in computational sustainability domains for fast charging of batteries and wildlife corridor construction, demonstrate that exploiting the structure of partial feedback can lead to significant improvements over baselines in both sequential and parallel MAB.