Human-Interactive Robot Learning: Definition, Challenges, and Recommendations

Robot learning from humans has been proposed and researched for several decades as a means to enable robots to learn new skills or adapt existing ones to new situations. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, including learning approaches like reinforcement learning and architectures like transformers and foundation models, combined with access to massive datasets, has created attractive opportunities to apply those data-hungry techniques to this problem. We argue that the focus on massive amounts of pre-collected data, and the resulting learning paradigm, where humans demonstrate and robots learn in isolation, is overshadowing a specialized area of work we term Human-Interactive-Robot-Learning (HIRL). This paradigm, wherein robots and humans interact during the learning process, is at the intersection of multiple fields (artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer interaction, design and others) and holds unique promise. Using HIRL, robots can achieve greater sample efficiency (as humans can provide task knowledge through interaction), align with human preferences (as humans can guide the robot behavior towards their expectations), and explore more meaningfully and safely (as humans can utilize domain knowledge to guide learning and prevent catastrophic failures). This can result in robotic systems that can more quickly and easily adapt to new tasks in human environments. The objective of this paper is to provide a broad and consistent overview of HIRL research and to guide researchers toward understanding the scope of HIRL, and current open or underexplored challenges related to four themes — namely, human, robot learning, interaction, and broader context. The paper includes concrete use cases to illustrate the interaction between these challenges and inspire further research according to broad recommendations and a call for action for the growing HIRL community