human-to-robot policy learning

Beginner Explanation

Imagine you have a new puppy, and you want to teach it to sit. Instead of just telling it what to do, you show it by gently pushing its bottom down while saying ‘sit.’ After a few times, the puppy learns by watching you and mimicking your actions. Human-to-robot policy learning is like that, but with robots. We show robots how to do tasks by demonstrating them, and the robots learn to copy our actions to perform those tasks themselves.

Technical Explanation

Human-to-robot policy learning involves algorithms that enable robots to learn from human demonstrations. This can be achieved through techniques like imitation learning, where the robot observes human actions and learns a policy that maps states to actions. A common approach is to use a neural network to approximate the policy. For example, using Python and TensorFlow, we can train a model on a dataset of human demonstrations. The robot then uses this model to predict actions in real-time. Code example: “`python import tensorflow as tf # Define a simple neural network model model = tf.keras.Sequential([ tf.keras.layers.Dense(64, activation=’relu’, input_shape=(input_shape,)), tf.keras.layers.Dense(64, activation=’relu’), tf.keras.layers.Dense(num_actions, activation=’softmax’) ]) # Compile and train the model on human demonstration data model.compile(optimizer=’adam’, loss=’categorical_crossentropy’) model.fit(demonstration_data, labels) “` This allows the robot to generalize from the demonstrations and perform tasks independently.

Academic Context

Human-to-robot policy learning is grounded in concepts from reinforcement learning and supervised learning. The theoretical underpinnings are often derived from the framework of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL). Key papers include ‘Learning from Demonstration’ by Argall et al. (2009) and ‘Apprenticeship Learning via Inverse Reinforcement Learning’ by Abbeel and Ng (2004). These works explore how robots can infer the underlying reward structures from human demonstrations, enabling them to learn effective policies for complex tasks.

Code Examples

Example 1:

import tensorflow as tf

# Define a simple neural network model
model = tf.keras.Sequential([
    tf.keras.layers.Dense(64, activation='relu', input_shape=(input_shape,)),
    tf.keras.layers.Dense(64, activation='relu'),
    tf.keras.layers.Dense(num_actions, activation='softmax')
])

# Compile and train the model on human demonstration data
model.compile(optimizer='adam', loss='categorical_crossentropy')
model.fit(demonstration_data, labels)

Example 2:

tf.keras.layers.Dense(64, activation='relu', input_shape=(input_shape,)),
    tf.keras.layers.Dense(64, activation='relu'),
    tf.keras.layers.Dense(num_actions, activation='softmax')

Example 3:

import tensorflow as tf

# Define a simple neural network model
model = tf.keras.Sequential([
    tf.keras.layers.Dense(64, activation='relu', input_shape=(input_shape,)),

View Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16661v1