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AI-enabled agents designed to assist humans are gaining traction in a variety of domains such as healthcare and disaster response. It is evident that, as we move forward, these agents will play increasingly vital roles in our lives. To realize this future successfully and mitigate its unintended consequences, it is imperative that humans have a clear understanding of the agents that they work with. Policy summarization methods help facilitate this understanding by showcasing key examples of agent behaviors to their human users. Yet, existing methods produce “one-size-fits-all” summaries for a generic audience ahead of time. Drawing inspiration from research in pedagogy, we posit that personalized policy summaries can more effectively enhance user understanding. To evaluate this hypothesis, this paper presents and benchmarks a novel technique: Personalized Policy Summarization (PPS). PPS discerns a user’s mental model of the agent through a series of algorithmically generated questions and crafts customized policy summaries to enhance user understanding. Unlike existing methods, PPS actively engages with users to gauge their comprehension of the agent behavior, subsequently generating tailored explanations on the fly. Through a combination of numerical and human subject experiments, we confirm the utility of this personalized approach to explainable AI.
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Interactively Explaining Robot Policies to Humans in Integrated Virtual and Physical Training Environments
Policy summarization is a computational paradigm for explaining the behavior and decision-making processes of autonomous robots to humans. It summarizes robot policies via exemplary demonstrations, aiming to improve human understanding of robotic behaviors. This understanding is crucial, especially since users often make critical decisions about robot deployment in the real world. Previous research in policy summarization has predominantly focused on simulated robots and environments, overlooking its application to physically embodied robots. Our work fills this gap by combining current policy summarization methods with a novel, interactive user interface that involves physical interaction with robots. We conduct human-subject experiments to assess our explanation system, focusing on the impact of different explanation modalities in policy summarization. Our findings underscore the unique advantages of combining virtual and physical training environments to effectively communicate robot behavior to human users.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2222876
- PAR ID:
- 10517599
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Companion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
- ISBN:
- 9798400703232
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 847 to 851
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Robotics Explainable AI Value Alignment AI-Assisted Human Training
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Boulder CO USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3610978.3640656
