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Record W4410893076 · doi:10.1145/3737892

How Can Everyday Users Efficiently Teach Robots by Demonstration?

2025· article· en· W4410893076 on OpenAlexafffund
Maram Sakr, Zhikai Zhang, Benjamin Li, Haomiao Zhang, H. F. Machiel Van der Loos, Dana Kulić, Elizabeth A. Croft

Bibliographic record

VenueACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicRobot Manipulation and Learning
Canadian institutionsUniversity of VictoriaUniversity of British Columbia
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsRobotComputer scienceHuman–computer interactionArtificial intelligence

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a framework that allows lay users to easily program robots. However, the efficiency of robot learning and the robot’s ability to generalize to task variations hinge upon the quality and quantity of the provided demonstrations. Our objective is to guide human teachers to provide more effective demonstrations, thus facilitating efficient robot learning. To achieve this, we propose to use a measure of uncertainty, namely task-related information entropy , as a criterion for suggesting informative demonstration examples to human teachers to improve their teaching skills. This approach seeks to minimize the requisite number of demonstrations by enhancing their distribution throughout the workspace. In a conducted experiment \((N = 24)\) , an augmented reality (AR)-based guidance system was employed to train novice users to produce additional demonstrations from areas with the highest entropy within the workspace. These novice users were trained for a few trials to teach the robot a generalizable task using a limited number of demonstrations. Subsequently, the users’ performance after training was assessed first on the same task (retention) and then on a new task (transfer) without guidance. The results indicate a substantial improvement in robot learning efficiency from the teacher’s demonstrations, with an improvement of up to 198% observed on the novel task. Furthermore, the proposed approach was compared to a state-of-the-art heuristic rule and found to improve robot learning efficiency by 210% compared to the heuristic rule. The scripts used in this article are available on GitHub .

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.021
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.005
Threshold uncertainty score0.018

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.021
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0020.005
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0020.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.004

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.033
GPT teacher head0.298
Teacher spread0.265 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designBench or experimental
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations5
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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