Emotion & Reinforcement : Affective Facial Expressions Facilitate Robot Learning

Computer models can be used to investigate the role of emotion in learning. Here we present EARL, our framework for the systematic study of the relation between emotion, adaptation and reinforcement learning (RL). EARL enables the study of, among other things, communicated affect as reinforcement to the robot; the focus of this paper. In humans, emotions are crucial to learning. For example , a parent—observing a child—uses emotional expression to encourage or discourage specific behaviors. Emotional expression can therefore be a reinforcement signal to a child. We hypothesize that affective facial expressions facilitate robot learning, and compare a social setting with a non-social one to test this. The non-social setting consists of a simulated robot that learns to solve a typical RL task in a continuous grid-world environment. The social setting additionally consists of a human (parent) observing the simulated robot (child). The human's emotional expressions are analyzed in real time and converted to an additional reinforcement signal used by the robot; positive expressions result in reward, negative expressions in punishment. We quantitatively show that the " social robot " indeed learns to solve its task significantly faster than its " non-social sibling ". We conclude that this presents strong evidence for the potential benefit of affective communication with humans in the reinforcement learning loop.