Explaining Reward Functions to Humans for Better Human-Robot Collaboration

Abstract: Explainable AI techniques that describe agent reward functions can enhance human-robot collaboration in a variety of settings. One context where human understanding of agent reward functions is particularly beneficial is in the value alignment setting. In the value alignment context, an agent aims to infer a human's reward function through interaction so that it can assist the human with their tasks. If the human can understand where gaps exist in the agent's reward understanding, they will be able to teach more efficiently and effectively, leading to quicker human-agent team performance improvements. In order to support human collaborators in the value alignment setting and similar contexts, it is first important to understand the effectiveness of different reward explanation techniques in a variety of domains. In this paper, we introduce a categorization of information modalities for reward explanation techniques, suggest a suite of assessment techniques for human reward understanding, and introduce four axes of domain complexity. We then propose an experiment to study the relative efficacy of a broad set of reward explanation techniques covering multiple modalities of information in a set of domains of varying complexity.