Policy Optimization under Imperfect Human Interactions with Agent-Gated Shared Autonomy

We introduce AGSA, an Agent-Gated Shared Autonomy framework that learns from high-level human feedback to tackle the challenges of reward-free training, safe exploration, and imperfect low-level human control. Recent human-in-the loop learning methods enable human participants to intervene a learning agent’s control and provide online demonstrations. Nonetheless, these methods rely heavily on perfect human interactions, including accurate human-monitored intervention decisions and near-optimal human demonstrations. AGSA employs a dedicated gating agent to determine when to switch control, thereby reducing the need of constant human monitoring. To obtain a precise and foreseeable gating agent, AGSA trains a long-term gating value function from human evaluative feedback on the gating agent’s intervention requests and preference feedback on pairs of human intervention trajectories. Instead of relying on potentially suboptimal human demonstrations, the learning agent is trained using control-switching signals from the gating agent. We provide theoretical insights on performance bounds that respectively describe the ability of the two agents. Experiments are conducted with both simulated and real human participants at different skill levels in challenging continuous control environments. Comparative results highlight that AGSA achieves significant improvements over previous human-in-the-loop learning methods in terms of training safety, policy performance, and user-friendliness.