Mitigating Negative Side Effects via Environment Shaping

Agents operating in the open world often produce negative side effects (NSE), which are difficult to identify at design time. We examine how a human can assist an agent, beyond providing feedback, and exploit their broader scope of knowledge to mitigate the impacts of NSE. We formulate this problem as a human-agent team with decoupled objectives. The agent optimizes its assigned task, during which its actions may produce NSE. The human shapes the environment through minor reconfiguration actions so as to mitigate the impacts of agent's side effects, without significantly degrading agent performance. We present an algorithm to solve this problem. Empirical evaluation shows that the proposed framework can successfully mitigate NSE, without affecting the agent's ability to complete its assigned task.