Interactive Learning with Implicit Human Feedback

Systems that can learn interactively from their end-users are quickly becoming widespread in real-world applications. Typically humans provide tagged rewards or scalar feedback for such interactive learning systems. However, humans offer a wealth of implicit information (such as multimodal cues in the form of natural language, speech, eye movements, facial expressions, gestures etc.) which interactive learning algorithms can leverage during the process of human-machine interaction to create a grounding for human intent, and thereby better assist end-users. A closed-loop sequential decision-making domain offers unique challenges when learning from humans -– (1) the data distribution may be influenced by the choices of the algorithm itself, and thus interactive ML algorithms need to adaptively learn from human feedback, (2) the nature of the environment itself changes rapidly, (3) humans may express their intent in various forms of feedback amenable to naturalistic real-world settings, going beyond tagged rewards or demonstrations. By organizing this workshop, we attempt to bring together interdisciplinary experts in interactive machine learning, reinforcement learning, human-computer interaction, cognitive science, and robotics to explore and foster discussions on such challenges. We envision that this exchange of ideas within and across disciplines can build new bridges, address some of the most valuable challenges in interactive learning with implicit human feedback, and also provide guidance to young researchers interested in growing their careers in this space.