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On Designing Socially Acceptable Reward Shaping

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Social Robotics (ICSR 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9979))

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Abstract

For social robots, learning from an ordinary user should be socially appealing. Unfortunately, machine learning demands an enormous amount of human data, and a prolonged interactive teaching session becomes anti-social. We have addressed this problem in the context of reward shaping for reinforcement learning. For efficient reward shaping, a continuous stream of rewards is expected from the teacher. We present a simple framework which seeks rewards for a small number of steps from each of a large number of human teachers. Therefore, it simplifies the job of an individual teacher. The framework was tested with online crowd workers on a transport puzzle. We thoroughly analyzed the quality of the learned policies and crowd’s teaching behavior. Our results showed that nearly perfect policies can be learned using this framework. The framework was generally acceptable in the crowd’s opinion.

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Correspondence to Syed Ali Raza .

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG

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Raza, S.A., Clark, J., Williams, MA. (2016). On Designing Socially Acceptable Reward Shaping. In: Agah, A., Cabibihan, JJ., Howard, A., Salichs, M., He, H. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9979. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47437-3_84

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47437-3_84

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47436-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47437-3

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