Learning Personalized Decision Support Policies

Abstract

Individual human decision-makers may benefit from different forms of support to improve decision outcomes, but when will each form of support yield better outcomes? In this work, we posit that personalizing access to decision support tools can be an effective mechanism for instantiating the appropriate use of AI assistance. Specifically, we propose the general problem of learning a decision support policy that, for a given input, chooses which form of support to provide to decision-makers for whom we initially have no prior information. We develop Modiste, an interactive tool to learn personalized decision support policies. Modiste leverages stochastic contextual bandit techniques to personalize a decision support policy for each decision-maker. In our computational experiments, we characterize the expertise profiles of decision-makers for whom personalized policies will outperform offline policies, including population-wide baselines. Our experiments include realistic forms of support (e.g., expert consensus and predictions from a large language model) on vision and language tasks. Our human subject experiments add nuance to and bolster our computational experiments, demonstrating the practical utility of personalized policies when real users benefit from accessing support across tasks.