When robots enter everyday human environments, they need to understand their tasks and how they should perform those tasks. To encode these, reward functions, which specify the objective of a robot, are employed. However, designing reward functions can be extremely challenging for complex tasks and environments. A promising approach is to learn reward functions from humans. Recently, several robot learning works embrace this approach and leverage human demonstrations to learn the reward functions. Known as inverse reinforcement learning, this approach relies on a fundamental assumption: humans can provide near-optimal demonstrations to the robot. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case: human demonstrations to the robot are often suboptimal due to various reasons, e.g., difficulty of teleoperation, robot having high degrees of freedom, or humans' cognitive limitations. This thesis is an attempt towards learning reward functions from human users by using other, more reliable data modalities. Specifically, we study how reward functions can be learned using comparative feedback, in which the human user compares multiple robot trajectories instead of (or in addition to) providing demonstrations. To this end, we first propose various forms of comparative feedback, e.g., pairwise comparisons, best-of-many choices, rankings, scaled comparisons; and describe how a robot can use these various forms of human feedback to infer a reward function, which may be parametric or non-parametric. Next, we propose active learning techniques to enable the robot to ask for comparison feedback that optimizes for the expected information that will be gained from that user feedback. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of our methods in a wide variety of domains, ranging from autonomous driving simulations to home robotics, from standard reinforcement learning benchmarks to lower-body exoskeletons.

研究人机交互中智能机器人的学习奖励功能从而完成任务，探讨通过对多种机器人轨迹的比较反馈方式学习机器的奖励功能，包括两两比较、评分、最佳选择等，并提出主动学习技术，以优化从用户反馈中获得的期望信息，进而在自主驾驶模拟、家庭机器人、标准强化学习等领域展示了这种方法的适用性。

交互自主学习偏好