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Robots can use auditory, visual, or haptic interfaces to convey information to human users. The way these interfaces select signals is typically pre-defined by the designer: for instance, a haptic wristband might vibrate when the robot is moving and squeeze when the robot stops. But different people interpret the same signals in different ways, so that what makes sense to one person might be confusing or unintuitive to another. In this paper we introduce a unified algorithmic formalism for learningco-adaptiveinterfaces fromscratch. Our method does not need to know the human’s task (i.e., what the human is using these signals for). Instead, our insight is that interpretable interfaces should select signals that maximizecorrelationbetween the human’s actions and the information the interface is trying to convey. Applying this insight we develop LIMIT: Learning Interfaces to Maximize Information Transfer. LIMIT optimizes a tractable, real-time proxy of information gain in continuous spaces. The first time a person works with our system the signals may appear random; but over repeated interactions the interface learns a one-to-one mapping between displayed signals and human responses. Our resulting approach is both personalized to the current user and not tied to any specific interface modality. We compare LIMIT to state-of-the-art baselines across controlled simulations, an online survey, and an in-person user study with auditory, visual, and haptic interfaces. Overall, our results suggest that LIMIT learns interfaces that enable users to complete the task more quickly and efficiently, and users subjectively prefer LIMIT to the alternatives. See videos here:https://youtu.be/IvQ3TM1_2fA.
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This content will become publicly available on December 31, 2026
PECAN: Personalizing Robot Behaviors through a Learned Canonical Space
Robots should personalize how they perform tasks to match the needs of individual human users. Today’s robots achieve this personalization by asking for the human’s feedback in the task space. For example, an autonomous car might show the human two different ways to decelerate at stoplights, and ask the human which of these motions they prefer. This current approach to personalization isindirect: Based on the behaviors the human selects (e.g., decelerating slowly), the robot tries to infer their underlying preference (e.g., defensive driving). By contrast, our article develops a learning and interface-based approach that enables humans todirectlyindicate their desired style. We do this by learning an abstract, low-dimensional, and continuous canonical space from human demonstration data. Each point in the canonical space corresponds to a different style (e.g., defensive or aggressive driving), and users can directly personalize the robot’s behavior by simply clicking on a point. Given the human’s selection, the robot then decodes this canonical style across each task in the dataset—e.g., if the human selects a defensive style, the autonomous car personalizes its behavior to drive defensively when decelerating, passing other cars, or merging onto highways. We refer to our resulting approach as PECAN:Personalizing Robot Behaviors through a LearnedCanonical Space. Our simulations and user studies suggest that humans prefer using PECAN to directly personalize robot behavior (particularly when those users become familiar with PECAN), and that users find the learned canonical space to be intuitive and consistent. See videos here:https://youtu.be/wRJpyr23PKI.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2246446
- PAR ID:
- 10631122
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2573-9522
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 33
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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