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arXiv · 2502.04403

Agency Is Frame-Dependent

David Abel·André Barreto·Michael Bowling·Will Dabney·Shi Dong·Steven Hansen·Anna Harutyunyan·Khimya Khetarpal·Clare Lyle·Razvan Pascanu·Georgios Piliouras·Doina Precup·Jonathan Richens·Mark Rowland·Tom Schaul·Satinder Singh
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Abstract

Agency is a system's capacity to steer outcomes toward a goal, and is a central topic of study across biology, philosophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Determining if a system exhibits agency is a notoriously difficult question: Dennett (1989), for instance, highlights the puzzle of determining which principles can decide whether a rock, a thermostat, or a robot each possess agency. We here address this puzzle from the viewpoint of reinforcement learning by arguing that agency is fundamentally frame-dependent: Any measurement of a system's agency must be made relative to a reference frame. We support this claim by presenting a philosophical argument that each of the essential properties of agency proposed by Barandiaran et al. (2009) and Moreno (2018) are themselves frame-dependent. We conclude that any basic science of agency requires frame-dependence, and discuss the implications of this claim for reinforcement learning.

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David Abel, André Barreto, Michael Bowling, Will Dabney, Shi Dong, Steven Hansen, Anna Harutyunyan, Khimya Khetarpal, Clare Lyle, Razvan Pascanu, Georgios Piliouras, Doina Precup, Jonathan Richens, Mark Rowland, Tom Schaul, Satinder Singh. 2025-02-06. Agency Is Frame-Dependent. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04403

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