MIND MELD: Personalized Meta-Learning for Robot-Centric Imitation Learning

Learning from demonstration (LfD) techniques seek to enable users without computer programming experience to teach robots novel tasks. There are generally two types of LfD: human- and robot-centric. While human-centric learning is intuitive, human centric learning suffers from performance degradation due to covariate shift. Robot-centric approaches, such as Dataset Aggregation (DAgger), address covariate shift, but can struggle to learn from suboptimal human teachers. To create a more human-aware version of robot-centric LfD, we present Mutual Information-driven Meta-learning from Demonstration (MIND MELD). MIND MELD meta-learns a mapping from suboptimal and heterogeneous human feedback to optimal labels, thereby improving the learning signal for robot-centric LfD. The key to our approach is learning an informative personalized embedding using mutual information maximization via variational inference. The embedding then informs a mapping from human provided labels to optimal labels. We evaluate our framework in a human-subjects experiment, demonstrating that our approach improves corrective labels provided by human demonstrators. Our framework outperforms baselines in terms of ability to reach the goal (p < .001), average distance from the goal (p = .006), and various subjective ratings (p = .008).