Quantifying Assistive Robustness Via the Natural-Adversarial Frontier
Jerry Zhi-Yang He Zackory Erickson Daniel S. Brown Anca D. Dragan
Our ultimate goal is to build robust policies for robots that assist people.
What makes this hard is that people can behave unexpectedly at test time,
potentially interacting with the robot outside its training distribution and
leading to failures. Even just measuring robustness is a challenge. Adversarial
perturbations are the default, but they can paint the wrong picture: they can
correspond to human motions that are unlikely to occur during natural
interactions with people. A robot policy might fail under small adversarial
perturbations but work under large natural perturbations. We propose that
capturing robustness in these interactive settings requires constructing and
analyzing the entire natural-adversarial frontier: the Pareto-frontier of human
policies that are the best trade-offs between naturalness and low robot
performance. We introduce RIGID, a method for constructing this frontier by
training adversarial human policies that trade off between minimizing robot
reward and acting human-like (as measured by a discriminator). On an Assistive
Gym task, we use RIGID to analyze the performance of standard collaborative
Reinforcement Learning, as well as the performance of existing methods meant to
increase robustness. We also compare the frontier RIGID identifies with the
failures identified in expert adversarial interaction, and with
naturally-occurring failures during user interaction. Overall, we find evidence
that RIGID can provide a meaningful measure of robustness predictive of
deployment performance, and uncover failure cases in human-robot interaction
that are difficult to find manually. https://ood-human.github.io.