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For social robots to be brought more into widespread use in the fields of companionship, care taking and domestic help, they must be capable of demonstrating social intelligence. In order to be acceptable, they must exhibit socio-communicative skills. Classic approaches to program HRI from observed human-human interactions fails to capture the subtlety of multimodal interactions as well as the key structural differences between robots and humans. The former arises due to a difficulty in quantifying and coding multimodal behaviours, while the latter due to a difference of the degrees of liberty between a robot and a human. However, the notion of reverse engineering from multimodal HRI traces to learn the underlying behavioral blueprint of the robot given multimodal traces seems an option worth exploring. With this spirit, the entire HRI can be seen as a sequence of exchanges of speech acts between the robot and human, each act treated as an action, bearing in mind that the entire sequence is goal-driven. Thus, this entire interaction can be treated as a sequence of actions propelling the interaction from its initial to goal state, also known as a plan in the domain of AI planning. In the same domain, this action sequence that stems from plan execution can be represented as a trace. AI techniques, such as machine learning, can be used to learn behavioral models (also known as symbolic action models in AI), intended to be reusable for AI planning, from the aforementioned multimodal traces. This article reviews recent machine learning techniques for learning planning action models which can be applied to the field of HRI with the intent of rendering robots as socio-communicative.

In this paper, we introduce a new heuristic search algorithm based on mean values for anytime planning, called MHSP. It consists in associating the principles of UCT, a bandit-based algorithm which gave very good results in computer games, and especially in Computer Go, with heuristic search in order to obtain an anytime planner that provides partial plans before finding a solution plan, and furthermore finding an optimal plan. The algorithm is evaluated in different classical planning problems and compared to some major planning algorithms. Finally, our results highlight the capacity of MHSP to return partial plans which tend to an optimal plan over the time.

Abstract.Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a powerful tool in games with a finite branching factor. This paper describes an artificial player playing the Voronoi game, a game with an infinite branching factor. First, this paper shows how to use MCTS on a discretization of the Voronoi game, and the effects of enhancements such as RAVE and Gaussian processes (GP). A first set of experimental results shows that MCTS with UCB+RAVE or with UCB+GP are first good solutions for playing the Voronoi game without domain-dependent knowledge. Second, this paper shows how to greatly improve the playing level by using geometrical knowledge about Voronoi diagrams, the balance of diagrams being the key concept. The second set of experimental results shows that a player using MCTS and geometrical knowledge outperforms the player without knowledge.