Title
A Need for Speed: Adapting Agent Action Speed to Improve Task Learning from Non-Expert Humans.
Abstract
As robots become pervasive in human environments, it is important to enable users to effectively convey new skills without programming. Most existing work on Interactive Reinforcement Learning focuses on interpreting and incorporating non-expert human feedback to speed up learning; we aim to design a better representation of the learning agent that is able to elicit more natural and effective communication between the human trainer and the learner, while treating human feedback as discrete communication that depends probabilistically on the traineru0027s target policy. This work entails a user study where participants train a virtual agent to accomplish tasks by giving reward and/or punishment in a variety of simulated environments. We present results from 60 participants to show how a learner can ground natural language commands and adapt its action execution speed to learn more efficiently from human trainers. The agentu0027s action execution speed can be successfully modulated to encourage more explicit feedback from a human trainer in areas of the state space where there is high uncertainty. Our results show that our novel adaptive speed agent dominates different fixed speed agents on several measures of performance. Additionally, we investigate the impact of instructions on user performance and user preference in training conditions.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2016
AAMAS
Learning Sequential Decision Tasks from Humans,Human-Agent Interaction,Crowdsourcing Experiments,Eliciting Human Feedback,Variable Speed Agents
Field
DocType
Citations 
Trainer,Computer science,Virtual agent,Task learning,Natural language,Artificial intelligence,Robot,State space,Machine learning,Speedup,Reinforcement learning
Conference
10
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.60
10
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bei Peng1436.96
James MacGlashan2192.90
Robert T. Loftin3453.89
Michael L. Littman49798961.84
David L. Roberts533837.87
Matthew E. Taylor6135294.88