Aligning Robots with Human Preferences

Aligning robot objectives with human preferences is a key challenge in robot learning. In this talk, I will start with discussing how active learning of human preferences can effectively query humans with the most informative questions to learn their preference reward functions. I will discuss some of the limitations of prior work, and how approaches such as few-shot learning can be integrated with active preference based learning for the goal of reducing the number of queries to a human expert and allowing for truly bringing in humans in the loop of learning neural reward functions. I will then talk about how we could go beyond active learning from a single human, and tap into large language models (LLMs) as another source of information to capture human preferences that are hard to specify. I will discuss how LLMs can be queried within a reinforcement learning loop and help with reward design. Finally I will discuss how the robot can also provide useful information to the human and be more transparent about its learning process. We demonstrate how the robot’s transparent behavior would guide the human to provide compatible demonstrations that are more useful and informative for learning.