Training Socially Engaging Robots: Modeling Backchannel Behaviors with Batch Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

A key aspect of social human-robot interaction is natural non-verbal communication. In this work, we train an agent with batch reinforcement learning to generate nods and smiles as backchannels in order to increase the naturalness of the interaction and to engage humans. We introduce the Sequential Random Deep Q-Network (SRDQN) method to learn a policy for backchannel generation, that explicitly maximizes user engagement. The proposed SRDQN method outperforms the existing vanilla Q-learning methods when evaluated using off-policy policy evaluation techniques. Furthermore, to verify the effectiveness of SRDQN, a human-robot experiment has been designed and conducted with an expressive 3d robot head. The experiment is based on a story-shaping game designed to create an interactive social activity with the robot. The engagement of the participants during the interaction is computed from user's social signals like backchannels, mutual gaze and adjacency pair. The subjective feedback from participants and the engagement values strongly indicate that our framework is a step forward towards the autonomous learning of a socially acceptable backchanneling behavior.

Generative Expressive Robot Behaviors using Large Language Models

“…Other methods train on hand-crafted examples through generative models [28,42]. For instance, predicting when to use backchanneling behaviors (i.e., providing feedback during conversation such as by nodding) has been learned through batch reinforcement learning [17] and recurrent neural networks [31]. Lastly, recent work has investigated how to learn cost functions for a target emotion from user feedback [49], or even learn an emotive latent space to model many emotions [40].…”

Implications of Robot Backchannelling in Cognitive Therapy

“…Ding et al [10] describes how an agent can be endowed to elicit conversations with older adults for delivering cognitive training. Similarly, Hussain et al [14] presented a method that learnt to produce non-verbal backchannels, and demonstrated how such feedback had an impact on participants' engagement. Inden et al [16] modelled five different strategies for feedback behaviour in a conversational agent and evaluated their effectiveness in a user study, showing that when the robot took into account the interlocutor's utterance and pauses, participants rated that strategy as more adequate than the others.…”