Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning with Simultaneous Human Control and Feedback

By Kory Wallace Mathewson, Patrick M. Pilarski. 2017

9 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper contributes a first study into how different human users deliver simultaneous control and feedback signals during human-robot interaction. As part of this work, we formalize and present a general interactive learning framework for online cooperation between humans and reinforcement learning agents. In many human-machine interaction settings, there is a growing gap between the degrees-of-freedom of complex semi-autonomous systems and the number of human control channels. Simple human control and feedback mechanisms are required to close this gap and allow for better collaboration between humans and machines on complex tasks. To better inform the design of concurrent control and feedback interfaces, we present experimental results from a human-robot collaborative domain wherein the human must simultaneously deliver both control and feedback signals to interactively train an actor-critic reinforcement learning robot. We compare three experimental conditions: 1) human delivered control signals, 2) reward-shaping feedback signals, and 3) simultaneous control and feedback. Our results suggest that subjects provide less feedback when simultaneously delivering feedback and control signals and that control signal quality is not significantly diminished. Our data suggest that subjects may also modify when and how they provide feedback. Through algorithmic development and tuning informed by this study, we expect semi-autonomous actions of robotic agents can be better shaped by human feedback, allowing for seamless collaboration and improved performance in difficult interactive domains.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Control and Systems Engineering, Reinforcement Learning

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Citations in the corpus

Reward learning from human preferences and demonstrations in Atari (2018, background): “…learning from human ratings or rankings (Wirth et al., 2017): Knox and Stone (2009), Pilarski et al. (2011), Akrour et al. (2012), Wilson et al. (2012), Wirth and Fürnkranz (2013), Daniel et al. (2015), El Asri et al. (2016), Wirth et al. (2016), Mathewson and Pilarski (2017), and others.”