English

A Socially Aware Reinforcement Learning Agent for The Single Track Road Problem

Artificial Intelligence 2021-11-04 v3 Computer Science and Game Theory Human-Computer Interaction Robotics

Abstract

We present the single track road problem. In this problem two agents face each-other at opposite positions of a road that can only have one agent pass at a time. We focus on the scenario in which one agent is human, while the other is an autonomous agent. We run experiments with human subjects in a simple grid domain, which simulates the single track road problem. We show that when data is limited, building an accurate human model is very challenging, and that a reinforcement learning agent, which is based on this data, does not perform well in practice. However, we show that an agent that tries to maximize a linear combination of the human's utility and its own utility, achieves a high score, and significantly outperforms other baselines, including an agent that tries to maximize only its own utility.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.05486,
  title  = {A Socially Aware Reinforcement Learning Agent for The Single Track Road Problem},
  author = {Ido Shapira and Amos Azaria},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.05486},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T05:53:32.458Z