A General, Evolution-Inspired Reward Function for Social Robotics

Abstract: The field of social robotics will likely need to depart from a paradigm of designed behaviours and imitation learning and adopt modern reinforcement learning (RL) methods to enable robots to interact fluidly and efficaciously with humans. In this paper, we present the Social Reward Function as a mechanism to provide (1) a real-time, dense reward function necessary for the deployment of RL agents in social robotics, and (2) a standardised objective metric for comparing the efficacy of different social robots. The Social Reward Function is designed to closely mimic those genetically endowed social perception capabilities of humans in an effort to provide a simple, stable and culture-agnostic reward function. Presently, datasets used in social robotics are either small or significantly out-of-domain with respect to social robotics. The use of the Social Reward Function will allow larger in-domain datasets to be collected close to the behaviour policy of social robots, which will allow both further improvements to reward functions and to the behaviour policies of social robots. We believe this will be the key enabler to developing efficacious social robots in the future.