CHARM: Considering Human Attributes for Reinforcement Modeling

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback has recently achieved significant success in various fields, and its performance is highly related to feedback quality. While much prior work acknowledged that human teachers' characteristics would affect human feedback patterns, there is little work that has closely investigated the actual effects. In this work, we designed an exploratory study investigating how human feedback patterns are associated with human characteristics. We conducted a public space study with two long horizon tasks and 46 participants. We found that feedback patterns are not only correlated with task statistics, such as rewards, but also correlated with participants' characteristics, especially robot experience and educational background. Additionally, we demonstrated that human feedback value can be more accurately predicted with human characteristics compared to only using task statistics. All human feedback and characteristics we collected, and codes for our data collection and predicting more accurate human feedback are available at https://github.com/AABL-Lab/CHARM

On the Effect of Robot Errors on Human Teaching Dynamics

Human-in-the-loop learning is gaining popularity, particularly in the field of robotics, because it leverages human knowledge about real-world tasks to facilitate agent learning. When people instruct robots, they naturally adapt their teaching behavior in response to changes in robot performance. While current research predominantly focuses on integrating human teaching dynamics from an algorithmic perspective, understanding these dynamics from a human-centered standpoint is an under-explored, yet fundamental problem. Addressing this issue will enhance both robot learning and user experience. Therefore, this paper explores one potential factor contributing to the dynamic nature of human teaching: robot errors. We conducted a user study to investigate how the presence and severity of robot errors affect three dimensions of human teaching dynamics: feedback granularity, feedback richness, and teaching time, in both forced-choice and open-ended teaching contexts. The results show that people tend to spend more time teaching robots with errors, provide more detailed feedback over specific segments of a robot's trajectory, and that robot error can influence a teacher's choice of feedback modality. Our findings offer valuable insights for designing effective interfaces for interactive learning and optimizing algorithms to better understand human intentions.

Reconstructing Sinus Anatomy from Endoscopic Video -- Towards a Radiation-free Approach for Quantitative Longitudinal Assessment

Reconstructing accurate 3D surface models of sinus anatomy directly from an endoscopic video is a promising avenue for cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis to better understand the relationship between sinus anatomy and surgical outcomes. We present a patient-specific, learning-based method for 3D reconstruction of sinus surface anatomy directly and only from endoscopic videos. We demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of our method on in and ex vivo data where we compare to sparse reconstructions from Structure from Motion, dense reconstruction from COLMAP, and ground truth anatomy from CT. Our textured reconstructions are watertight and enable measurement of clinically relevant parameters in good agreement with CT. The source code will be made publicly available upon publication.