Optimality of Human Teachers for Robot Learners

Abstract

In this paper we address the question of how closely everyday human teachers match a theoretically optimal teacher. We present two experiments in which subjects teach a concept to our robot in a supervised fashion. In the first experiment we give subjects no instructions on teaching and observe how they teach naturally as compared to an optimal strategy. We find that people are suboptimal in several dimensions. In the second experiment we try to elicit the optimal teaching strategy. People can teach much faster using the optimal teaching strategy, however certain parts of the strategy are more intuitive than others.