A social learning formalism for learners trying to figure out what a teacher wants them to do

This article presents a theoretical foundation for approaching the problem of how a learner can infer what a teacher wants it to do through strongly ambiguous interaction or observation. The article groups the interpretation of a broad range of information sources under the same theoretical framework. A teacher’s motion demonstration, eye gaze during a reproduction attempt, pushes of “good"/“bad" buttons and speech comment are all treated as specific instances of the same general class of information sources. These sources all provide (partially and ambiguously) information about what the teacher wants the learner to do, and all need to be interpreted concurrently. We introduce a formalism to address this challenge, which allows us to consider various strands of previous research as different related facets of a single generalized problem. In turn, this allows us to identify important new avenues for research. To sketch these new directions, several learning setups are introduced, and algorithmic structures are introduced to illustrate some of the practical problems that must be overcome.