Learning something from nothing: Leveraging implicit human feedback strategies

In order to be useful in real-world situations, it is critical to allow non-technical users to train robots. Existing work has considered the problem of a robot or virtual agent learning behaviors from evaluative feedback provided by a human trainer. That work, however, has treated feedback as a numeric reward that the agent seeks to maximize, and has assumed that all trainers will provide feedback in the same way when teaching the same behavior. We report the results of a series of user studies that indicate human trainers use a variety of approaches to providing feedback in practice, which we describe as different “training strategies.” For example, users may not always give explicit feedback in response to an action, and may be more likely to provide explicit reward than explicit punishment, or vice versa. If the trainer is consistent in their strategy, then it may be possible to infer knowledge about the desired behavior from cases where no explicit feedback is provided. We discuss a probabilistic model of human-provided feedback that can be used to classify these different training strategies based on when the trainer chooses to provide explicit reward and/or explicit punishment, and when they choose to provide no feedback. Additionally, we investigate how training strategies may change in response to the appearance of the learning agent. Ultimately, based on this work, we argue that learning agents designed to understand and adapt to different users´ training strategies will allow more efficient and intuitive learning experiences.