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 minimax robust approach


A Minimax Robust Approach for Learning to Assist Users with Pointing Tasks

Behpour, Sima (University of Illinois at Chicago) | Ziebart, Brian ( University of Illinois at Chicago )

AAAI Conferences

Learning to provide appropriate assistance to people indifferent situations is an extremely important, but insufficientlyinvestigated machine learning task. Applications includehuman-robot and human-computer interactions settings to maximizing the benefits of assistive technologies. Three key challenges must be overcome to appropriately address this task: Complexity: the space of possible assistive policies can be very large, making many existing methods (e.g., fromreinforcement learning) too data inefficient to be practical. Noise and misspecification: observed human behavior is often noisy and parametric formulations that reduce complexity will typically suffer from model misspecification,leading to unboundedly sub-optimal assistance. Biasedness: data available for learning a model is biased by previously provided assistive actions, violating the typical assumptions of supervised learning. We develop a general framework for learning to assist in single intervention settings. The framework narrows the search for effective assistance by viewing previous behavior under assistance through a restricted set of statistics. Assistive policies for the worst-case context-assistance-outcome relationships satisfying these statistics are obtained. We embed the problem of learning how to assist users in cursor based target pointing tasks into this framework and outline its usage.