Papers › Interleaving Fast and Slow Decision Making
Interleaving Fast and Slow Decision Making
Aditya Gulati, Sarthak Soni, Shrisha Rao
The "Thinking, Fast and Slow" paradigm of Kahneman proposes that we use two different styles of thinking -- a fast and intuitive System 1 for certain tasks, along with a slower but more analytical System 2 for others. While the idea of using this two-system style of thinking is gaining popularity in AI and robotics, our work considers how to interleave the two styles of decision-making, i.e., how System 1 and System 2 should be used together. For this, we propose a novel and general framework which includes a new System 0 to oversee Systems 1 and 2. At every point when a decision needs to be made, System 0 evaluates the situation and quickly hands over the decision-making process to either System 1 or System 2. We evaluate such a framework on a modified version of the classic Pac-Man game, with an already-trained RL algorithm for System 1, a Monte-Carlo tree search for System 2, and several different possible strategies for System 0. As expected, arbitrary switches between Systems 1 and 2 do not work, but certain strategies do well. With System 0, an agent is able to perform better than one that uses only System 1 or System 2.
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