Online Decision Mediation
This addresses the challenge of ethical decision-making in domains like clinical diagnosis by providing an efficient interface between human errors and expert feedback, though it appears incremental in its approach.
The paper tackles the problem of learning a decision support assistant that mediates between expert and human actions by choosing to accept, intervene, or request expert input, aiming to balance prescriptive and descriptive approaches. The result shows consistent gains over benchmarks in mediator policy, learned model, and system performance across various datasets.
Consider learning a decision support assistant to serve as an intermediary between (oracle) expert behavior and (imperfect) human behavior: At each time, the algorithm observes an action chosen by a fallible agent, and decides whether to *accept* that agent's decision, *intervene* with an alternative, or *request* the expert's opinion. For instance, in clinical diagnosis, fully-autonomous machine behavior is often beyond ethical affordances, thus real-world decision support is often limited to monitoring and forecasting. Instead, such an intermediary would strike a prudent balance between the former (purely prescriptive) and latter (purely descriptive) approaches, while providing an efficient interface between human mistakes and expert feedback. In this work, we first formalize the sequential problem of *online decision mediation* -- that is, of simultaneously learning and evaluating mediator policies from scratch with *abstentive feedback*: In each round, deferring to the oracle obviates the risk of error, but incurs an upfront penalty, and reveals the otherwise hidden expert action as a new training data point. Second, we motivate and propose a solution that seeks to trade off (immediate) loss terms against (future) improvements in generalization error; in doing so, we identify why conventional bandit algorithms may fail. Finally, through experiments and sensitivities on a variety of datasets, we illustrate consistent gains over applicable benchmarks on performance measures with respect to the mediator policy, the learned model, and the decision-making system as a whole.