teaching robots

This paper addresses the problem of training a robot to carry out temporal tasks of arbitrary complexity via evaluative human feedback that can be inaccurate. A key idea explored in our work is a kind of curriculum learning—training the robot to master simple tasks and then building up to more complex tasks. We show how a training procedure, using knowledge of the formal task representation, can decompose and train any task efficiently in the size of its representation. We further provide a set of experiments that support the claim that non-expert human trainers can decompose tasks in a way that is consistent with our theoretical results, with more than half of participants successfully training all of our experimental missions. We compared our algorithm with existing approaches and our experimental results suggest that our method outperforms alternatives, especially when feedback contains mistakes.

G. Wang, C. Trimbach, J. K. Lee, M. K. Ho, M. L. Littman (2020), “Teaching a robot tasks of arbitrary complexity via human feedback,” Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on HumanRobot Interaction.