It seems like z* is meant to represent “what the human thinks the task is, based on looking at D”. So why not just try to extract the posterior directly, instead of the prior an the likelihood separately? (And then it seems like this whole thing reduces to “ask a human to specify the task”.)
We’re trying to address cases where the human isn’t actually able to update on all of D and form a posterior based on that. We’re trying to approximate ‘what the human posterior would be if they had been able to look at all of D’. So to do that, we learn the human prior, and we learn the human likelihood, then have the ML do the computationally-intensive part of looking at all of D and updating based on everything in there.
It seems like z* is meant to represent “what the human thinks the task is, based on looking at D”.
So why not just try to extract the posterior directly, instead of the prior an the likelihood separately?
(And then it seems like this whole thing reduces to “ask a human to specify the task”.)
We’re trying to address cases where the human isn’t actually able to update on all of D and form a posterior based on that. We’re trying to approximate ‘what the human posterior would be if they had been able to look at all of D’. So to do that, we learn the human prior, and we learn the human likelihood, then have the ML do the computationally-intensive part of looking at all of D and updating based on everything in there.
Does that make sense?