# Bayesian Active Learning for Collaborative Task Specification Using Equivalence Regions

## TL;DR

This paper presents a Bayesian active learning framework that enables non-expert users to specify complex robot behaviors through iterative preference queries, ensuring optimal task performance in industrial settings.

## Contribution

It introduces a discrete Bayesian learning model and a greedy algorithm based on equivalence regions to efficiently learn user preferences for task specifications.

## Key findings

- The proposed method converges to user preferences in simulations.
- The approach is robust to different user preference variations.
- It effectively reduces the number of interactions needed for specification.

## Abstract

Specifying complex task behaviours while ensuring good robot performance may be difficult for untrained users. We study a framework for users to specify rules for acceptable behaviour in a shared environment such as industrial facilities. As non-expert users might have little intuition about how their specification impacts the robot's performance, we design a learning system that interacts with the user to find an optimal solution. Using active preference learning, we iteratively show alternative paths that the robot could take on an interface. From the user feedback ranking the alternatives, we learn about the weights that users place on each part of their specification. We extend the user model from our previous work to a discrete Bayesian learning model and introduce a greedy algorithm for proposing alternative that operates on the notion of equivalence regions of user weights. We prove that with this algorithm the revision active learning process converges on the user-optimal path. In simulations on realistic industrial environments, we demonstrate the convergence and robustness of our approach.