Tom Weber

Jakob Ambsdorf, Alina Munir, Yiyao Wei et al.

Recent developments in explainable artificial intelligence promise the potential to transform human-robot interaction: Explanations of robot decisions could affect user perceptions, justify their reliability, and increase trust. However, the effects on human perceptions of robots that explain their decisions have not been studied thoroughly. To analyze the effect of explainable robots, we conduct a study in which two simulated robots play a competitive board game. While one robot explains its moves, the other robot only announces them. Providing explanations for its actions was not sufficient to change the perceived competence, intelligence, likeability or safety ratings of the robot. However, the results show that the robot that explains its moves is perceived as more lively and human-like. This study demonstrates the need for and potential of explainable human-robot interaction and the wider assessment of its effects as a novel research direction.

Fares Abawi, Tom Weber, Stefan Wermter

Saliency prediction refers to the computational task of modeling overt attention. Social cues greatly influence our attention, consequently altering our eye movements and behavior. To emphasize the efficacy of such features, we present a neural model for integrating social cues and weighting their influences. Our model consists of two stages. During the first stage, we detect two social cues by following gaze, estimating gaze direction, and recognizing affect. These features are then transformed into spatiotemporal maps through image processing operations. The transformed representations are propagated to the second stage (GASP) where we explore various techniques of late fusion for integrating social cues and introduce two sub-networks for directing attention to relevant stimuli. Our experiments indicate that fusion approaches achieve better results for static integration methods, whereas non-fusion approaches for which the influence of each modality is unknown, result in better outcomes when coupled with recurrent models for dynamic saliency prediction. We show that gaze direction and affective representations contribute a prediction to ground-truth correspondence improvement of at least 5% compared to dynamic saliency models without social cues. Furthermore, affective representations improve GASP, supporting the necessity of considering affect-biased attention in predicting saliency.

Tom Weber, Stefan Wermter

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) can help foster trust in and acceptance of intelligent and autonomous systems. Moreover, understanding the motivation for an agent's behavior results in better and more successful collaborations between robots and humans. However, not only can humans benefit from a robot's explanation but the robot itself can also benefit from explanations given to him. Currently, most attention is paid to explaining deep neural networks and black-box models. However, a lot of these approaches are not applicable to humanoid robots. Therefore, in this position paper, current problems with adapting XAI methods to explainable neurorobotics are described. Furthermore, NICO, an open-source humanoid robot platform, is introduced and how the interaction of intrinsic explanations by the robot itself and extrinsic explanations provided by the environment enable efficient robotic behavior.

Muhammad Burhan Hafez, Tilman Immisch, Tom Weber et al.

Deep Reinforcement Learning agents often suffer from catastrophic forgetting, forgetting previously found solutions in parts of the input space when training on new data. Replay Memories are a common solution to the problem, decorrelating and shuffling old and new training samples. They naively store state transitions as they come in, without regard for redundancy. We introduce a novel cognitive-inspired replay memory approach based on the Grow-When-Required (GWR) self-organizing network, which resembles a map-based mental model of the world. Our approach organizes stored transitions into a concise environment-model-like network of state-nodes and transition-edges, merging similar samples to reduce the memory size and increase pair-wise distance among samples, which increases the relevancy of each sample. Overall, our paper shows that map-based experience replay allows for significant memory reduction with only small performance decreases.