No Arabic abstract
Exploration has been one of the greatest challenges in reinforcement learning (RL), which is a large obstacle in the application of RL to robotics. Even with state-of-the-art RL algorithms, building a well-learned agent often requires too many trials, mainly due to the difficulty of matching its actions with rewards in the distant future. A remedy for this is to train an agent with real-time feedback from a human observer who immediately gives rewards for some actions. This study tackles a series of challenges for introducing such a human-in-the-loop RL scheme. The first contribution of this work is our experiments with a precisely modeled human observer: binary, delay, stochasticity, unsustainability, and natural reaction. We also propose an RL method called DQN-TAMER, which efficiently uses both human feedback and distant rewards. We find that DQN-TAMER agents outperform their baselines in Maze and Taxi simulated environments. Furthermore, we demonstrate a real-world human-in-the-loop RL application where a camera automatically recognizes a users facial expressions as feedback to the agent while the agent explores a maze.
Providing reinforcement learning agents with informationally rich human knowledge can dramatically improve various aspects of learning. Prior work has developed different kinds of shaping methods that enable agents to learn efficiently in complex environments. All these methods, however, tailor human guidance to agents in specialized shaping procedures, thus embodying various characteristics and advantages in different domains. In this paper, we investigate the interplay between different shaping methods for more robust learning performance. We propose an adaptive shaping algorithm which is capable of learning the most suitable shaping method in an on-line manner. Results in two classic domains verify its effectiveness from both simulated and real human studies, shedding some light on the role and impact of human factors in human-robot collaborative learning.
We present the Battlesnake Challenge, a framework for multi-agent reinforcement learning with Human-In-the-Loop Learning (HILL). It is developed upon Battlesnake, a multiplayer extension of the traditional Snake game in which 2 or more snakes compete for the final survival. The Battlesnake Challenge consists of an offline module for model training and an online module for live competitions. We develop a simulated game environment for the offline multi-agent model training and identify a set of baseline heuristics that can be instilled to improve learning. Our framework is agent-agnostic and heuristics-agnostic such that researchers can design their own algorithms, train their models, and demonstrate in the online Battlesnake competition. We validate the framework and baseline heuristics with our preliminary experiments. Our results show that agents with the proposed HILL methods consistently outperform agents without HILL. Besides, heuristics of reward manipulation had the best performance in the online competition. We open source our framework at https://github.com/awslabs/sagemaker-battlesnake-ai.
Providing Reinforcement Learning agents with expert advice can dramatically improve various aspects of learning. Prior work has developed teaching protocols that enable agents to learn efficiently in complex environments; many of these methods tailor the teachers guidance to agents with a particular representation or underlying learning scheme, offering effective but specialized teaching procedures. In this work, we explore protocol programs, an agent-agnostic schema for Human-in-the-Loop Reinforcement Learning. Our goal is to incorporate the beneficial properties of a human teacher into Reinforcement Learning without making strong assumptions about the inner workings of the agent. We show how to represent existing approaches such as action pruning, reward shaping, and training in simulation as special cases of our schema and conduct preliminary experiments on simple domains.
Existing prescriptive compression strategies used in hearing aid fitting are designed based on gain averages from a group of users which are not necessarily optimal for a specific user. Nearly half of hearing aid users prefer settings that differ from the commonly prescribed settings. This paper presents a human-in-loop deep reinforcement learning approach that personalizes hearing aid compression to achieve improved hearing perception. The developed approach is designed to learn a specific users hearing preferences in order to optimize compression based on the users feedbacks. Both simulation and subject testing results are reported which demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed personalized compression.
The interpretation of deep neural networks (DNNs) has become a key topic as more and more people apply them to solve various problems and making critical decisions. Concept-based explanations have recently become a popular approach for post-hoc interpretation of DNNs. However, identifying human-understandable visual concepts that affect model decisions is a challenging task that is not easily addressed with automatic approaches. We present a novel human-in-the-loop approach to generate user-defined concepts for model interpretation and diagnostics. Central to our proposal is the use of active learning, where human knowledge and feedback are combined to train a concept extractor with very little human labeling effort. We integrate this process into an interactive system, ConceptExtract. Through two case studies, we show how our approach helps analyze model behavior and extract human-friendly concepts for different machine learning tasks and datasets and how to use these concepts to understand the predictions, compare model performance and make suggestions for model refinement. Quantitative experiments show that our active learning approach can accurately extract meaningful visual concepts. More importantly, by identifying visual concepts that negatively affect model performance, we develop the corresponding data augmentation strategy that consistently improves model performance.