Human-AI Shared Control via Policy Dissection

Neural Information Processing Systems 

Human-AI shared control allows human to interact and collaborate with autonomous agents to accomplish control tasks in complex environments. Previous Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods attempted goal-conditioned designs to achieve human-controllable policies at the cost of redesigning the reward function and training paradigm. Inspired by the neuroscience approach to investigate the motor cortex in primates, we develop a simple yet effective frequency-based approach called Policy Dissection to align the intermediate representation of the learned neural controller with the kinematic attributes of the agent behavior. Without modifying the neural controller or retraining the model, the proposed approach can convert a given RL-trained policy into a human-controllable policy. We evaluate the proposed approach on many RL tasks such as autonomous driving and locomotion.