Dynamic Teaching in Sequential Decision Making Environments

Abstract: We describe theoretical bounds and a practical algorithm for teaching a model by demonstration in a sequential decision making environment. Unlike previous efforts that have optimized learners that watch a teacher demonstrate a static policy, we focus on the teacher as a decision maker who can dynamically choose different policies to teach different parts of the environment. We develop several teaching frameworks based on previously defined supervised protocols, such as Teaching Dimension, extending them to handle noise and sequences of inputs encountered in an MDP.We provide theoretical bounds on the learnability of several important model classes in this setting and suggest a practical algorithm for dynamic teaching.