Learning Preferences for Interactive Autonomy

Dr. Erdem Bıyık
Postdoctoral Researcher Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, UC, Berkeley, CA

Cerent Engineering Science Complex, Salazar Hall 2009A
4:00 PM

Abstract: In human-robot interaction or more generally multi-agent systems, we often have decentralized agents that need to perform a task together. In such settings, it is crucial to have the ability to anticipate the actions of other agents. Without this ability, the agents are often doomed to perform very poorly. Humans are usually good at this, and it is mostly because we can have good estimates of what other agents are trying to do. We want to give such an ability to robots through reward learning and partner modeling. In this talk, I am going to talk about active learning approaches to this problem and how we can leverage preference data to learn objectives. I am going to show how preferences can help reward learning in the settings where demonstration data may fail, and how partner-modeling enables decentralized agents to cooperate efficiently.

Bio: Dr. Erdem Bıyık is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence at University of California, Berkeley. He has received his B.Sc. degree from Bilkent University, Turkey, in 2017; and Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 2022. His research interests lie in the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and game theory. He is interested in enabling robots to actively learn from various forms of human feedback and designing robot policies to improve the efficiency of multi-agent systems both in cooperative and competitive settings. He also worked at Google as a research intern in 2021 where he adapted his active robot learning algorithms to recommender systems. He will join the University of Southern California as an assistant professor in 2023.