TLDR: Infra-Bayesianism is a new approach to epistemology / decision theory / reinforcement learning theory, which builds on "imprecise probability" to solve the problem of prior misspecification / grain-of-truth / nonrealizability which plagues Bayesianism and Bayesian reinforcement learning. Infra-Bayesianism also naturally leads to an implementation of UDT, and (more speculatively at this stage) has applications to multi-agent theory, embedded agency and reflection. This post is the first in a sequence which lays down the foundation of the approach.

Prelude:

Diffractor and Vanessa proudly present: The thing we've been working on for the past five months. I initially decided that Vanessa's scattered posts about incomplete models were interesting, and could benefit from being written up in a short centralized post. But as we dug into the mathematical details, it turned out it didn't really work, and then Vanessa ran across the true mathematical thing (which had previous ideas as special cases) and scope creep happened.

This now looks like a new, large, and unusually tractable vein of research. Accordingly, this sequence supersedes all previous posts about incomplete models, and by now we've managed to get quite a few interesting results, and have ideas for several new research directions.

Diffractor typed everything up and fleshed out the proof sketches, Vanessa originated almost all of the ideas and theorems. It was a true joint effort, this sequence would not exist if either of us were absent. Alex Mennen provided feedback on drafts to make it much more comprehensible than it would otherwise be, and Turntrout and John Maxwell also helped a bit in editing.

Be aware this sequence of posts has the math textbook issue where it requires loading a tower of novel concepts that build on each other into your head, and cannot be read in a single sitting. We will be doing a group readthrough on MIRIxDiscord where we can answer questions and hopefully get collaborators, PM me to get a link.

Introduction:

Learning theory traditionally deals with two kinds of setting: "realizable" and "agnostic" or "non-realizable". In realizable settings, we assume that the environment can be described perfectly by a hypothesis inside our hypothesis space. (AIXI is an example of this) We then expect the algorithm to converge to acting as if it already knew the correct hypothesis....