Interaction Algorithm Effect on Human Experience with Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

A goal of interactive machine learning (IML) is to enable people with no specialized training to intuitively teach intelligent agents how to perform tasks. Toward achieving that goal, we are studying how the design of the interaction method for a Bayesian Q-Learning algorithm impacts aspects of the human’s experience of teaching the agent using human-centric metrics such as frustration in addition to traditional ML performance metrics. This study investigated two methods of natural language instruction: critique and action advice. We conducted a human-in-the-loop experiment in which people trained two agents with different teaching methods but, unknown to each participant, the same underlying reinforcement learning algorithm. The results show an agent that learns from action advice creates a better user experience compared to an agent that learns from binary critique in terms of frustration, perceived performance, transparency, immediacy, and perceived intelligence. We identified nine main characteristics of an IML algorithm’s design that impact the human’s experience with the agent, including using human instructions about the future, compliance with input, empowerment, transparency, immediacy, a deterministic interaction, the complexity of the instructions, accuracy of the speech recognition software, and the robust and flexible nature of the interaction algorithm.