Collaborating with Humans without Human Data

Collaborating with humans requires rapidly adapting to their individual strengths, weaknesses, and preferences. Unfortunately, most standard multi-agent reinforcement learning techniques, such as self-play (SP) or population play (PP), produce agents that overfit to their training partners and do not generalize well to humans. Alternatively, researchers can collect human data, train a human model using behavioral cloning, and then use that model to train human-aware agents (behavioral cloning play, or BCP). While such an approach can improve the generalization of agents to new human co-players, it involves the onerous and expensive step of collecting large amounts of human data first. Here, we study the problem of how to train agents that collaborate well with human partners without using human data.