RI: Small: Collaborative Research: Speeding Up Learning through Modeling the Pragmatics of Training

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Years of effort to develop algorithms capable of learning from reward signals have resulted in a plethora of techniques that can leverage numerical signals that vary in value based on performance. Recent efforts to use these techniques to learn from humans providing rewards have been slower to progress, in part, because humans give feedback discretely rather than numerically. This project contributes new learning algorithms designed specifically to leverage the information contained in the choices humans make to provide such discrete feedbacks. The algorithms are inspired by the human-canine partnership, and the incredible things that humans are able to teach dogs using only discrete feedback and carefully constructed sequences of tasks. The Bayesian learning framework being developed in this project will leverage the pragmatic implicatures contained in the feedbacks and tasks sequences to learn more quickly from human feedback. The ultimate goal of this work is to provide a more natural paradigm for humans to tell computers what they would like for them to do. To that end, project efforts will result in a teaching module for Brown University?s Learning Exchange (LE). The LE involves undergraduates working with underserved minority middle school students to engage them in STEM. They are a perfect audience to demonstrate the broader impacts of this work. LE participants learn to instruct computers using a combination of programming with the Scratch environment and the feedback paradigm, which shows how powerful the algorithms are.