Approximately-Optimal Queries for Planning in Reward-Uncertain Markov Decision Processes

When planning actions to take on behalf of its human operator, a robot might be uncertain about its operator's reward function. We address the problem of how the robot should formulate an (approximately) optimal query to pose to the operator, given how its uncertainty affects which policies it should plan to pursue. We explain how a robot whose queries ask the operator to choose the best from among k choices can, without loss of optimality, restrict consideration to choices only over alternative policies. Further, we present a method for constructing an approximately-optimal policy query that enjoys a performance bound, where the method need not enumerate all policies. Finally, because queries posed to the operator of a robotic system are often expressed in terms of preferences over trajectories rather than policies, we show how our constructed policy query can be projected into the space of trajectory queries. Our empirical results demonstrate that our projection technique can outperform prior techniques for choosing trajectory queries, particularly when the number of trajectories the operator is asked to compare is small

Efficiently Finding Approximately-Optimal Queries for Improving Policies and Guaranteeing Safety

When a computational agent (called the “robot”) takes actions on behalf of a human user, it may be uncertain about the human’s preferences. The human may initially specify her preferences incompletely or inaccurately. In this case, the robot’s performance may be unsatisfactory or even cause negative side effects to the environment. There are approaches in the literature that may solve this problem. For example, the human can provide some demonstrations which clarify the robot’s uncertainty. The human may give real-time feedback to the robot’s behavior, or monitor the robot and stop the robot when it may perform anything dangerous. However, these methods typically require much of the human’s attention. Alternatively, the robot may estimate the human’s true preferences using the specified preferences, but this is error-prone and requires making assumptions on how the human specifies her preferences. In this thesis, I consider a querying approach. Before taking any actions, the robot has a chance to query the human about her preferences. For example, the robot may query the human about which trajectory in a set of trajectories she likes the most, or whether the human cares about some side effects to the domain. After the human responds to the query, the robot expects to improve its performance and/or guarantee that its behavior is considered safe by the human. If we do not impose any constraint on the number of queries the robot can pose, the robot may keep posing queries until it is absolutely certain about the human’s preferences. This may consume too much of the human’s cognitive load. The information obtained in the responses to some of the queries may only marginally improve the robot’s performance, which is not worth the human’s attention at all. So in the problems considered in this thesis, I constrain the number of queries that the robot can pose, or associate each query with a cost. The research question is how to efficiently find the most useful query under such constraints. Finding a provably optimal query can be challenging since it is usually a combinatorial optimization problem. In this thesis, I contribute to providing efficient query selection algorithms under uncertainty. I first formulate the robot’s uncertainty as reward uncertainty and safety-constraint uncertainty. Under only reward uncertainty, I provide a query selection algorithm that finds approximately-optimal k-response queries. Under only safety-constraint uncertainty, I provide a query selection algorithm that finds an optimal k-element query to improve a known safe policy, and an algorithm that uses a set-cover-based query selection strategy to find an initial safe policy. Under both types of uncertainty simultaneously, I provide a batch-query-based querying method that empirically outperforms other baseline querying methods.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163125/1/shunzh_1.pd