Autonomous Assessment of Demonstration Sufficiency via Bayesian Inverse Reinforcement Learning

16 Jan 2024

Paper titled Autonomous Assessment of Demonstration Sufficiency via Bayesian Inverse Reinforcement Learning was selected for the upcoming 19th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2024) that will be held from March 11-15, 2024 in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

In their paper, revised on 1/2/2024, the authors Tu Trinh, Haoyu Chen, and Daniel S. Brown evaluate their approach in simulation for both discrete and continuous state-space domains and illustrate the feasibility of developing a robotic system that can accurately evaluate demonstration sufficiency.


Abstract:

The authors of this paper examine the problem of determining demonstration sufficiency: how can a robot self-assess whether it has received enough demonstrations from an expert to ensure a desired level of performance? To address this, they propose a novel self-assessment approach based on Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning and high-confidence value-at-risk bounds on two definitions of sufficiency: (1) normalized expected value difference and (2) percent improvement over a baseline policy. Through simulation and user study, the authors show that using their approach a robot can accurately evaluate demonstration sufficiency and perform exactly as intended, without needing too many or perfectly optimal demonstrations, helping reduce human burden in such collaborative learning settings.