Christian Arzate Cruz

Interactive reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully used in various applications in different fields, which has also motivated HCI researchers to contribute in this area. In this paper, we survey interactive RL to empower human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers with the technical background in RL needed to design new interaction techniques and propose new applications. We elucidate the roles played by HCI researchers in interactive RL, identifying ideas and promising research dire

Player-centered approaches that aim to maximize player enjoyment have been steady, but with poor heuristics that do not rely on any particular theory of entertainment. Certainly, the Theory of Flow is the most referred in the game AI area and, still, it is unclear how to effectively design and implement adaptive game modules or understanding which game features drive players to a flow state. Therefore, in this document we perform a systematic analysis of literature aimed to enhance our knowledge

The creation of believable behaviors for Non-Player Characters (NPCs) is key to improve the players’ experience while playing a game. To achieve this objective, we need to design NPCs that appear to be controlled by a human player. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for believable bots (HRLB⌃2). This novel approach has been designed so it can overcome two main challenges currently faced in the creation of human-like NPCs. The first difficulty is exploring d

Interactive reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully used in various applications in different fields, which has also motivated HCI researchers to contribute in this area. In this paper, we survey interactive RL to empower human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers with the technical background in RL needed to design new interaction techniques and propose new applications. We elucidate the roles played by HCI researchers in interactive RL, identifying ideas and promising research dire

Empathy is a vital part of human social interaction. It mediates emotional interaction and allows for increased rapport between individuals. We explore combining multi-modal empathy classifiers and empathetic text generation in a human-robot interaction setting. In particular, we designed a demo that uses the Haru social robot to engage in empathetic conversations with a human. We use our classifier to assess the empathy level of the user and the robot. The user's score is a metric for their exp

Reinforcement learning techniques successfully generate convincing agent behaviors, but it is still difficult to tailor the behavior to align with a user's specific preferences. What is missing is a communication method for the system to explain the behavior and for the user to repair it. In this paper, we present a novel interaction method that uses interactive explanations using templates of natural language as a communication method. The main advantage of this interaction method is that it en

In this paper, we propose a generic framework that enables game developers without knowledge of machine learning to create bot behaviors with playstyles that align with their preferences. Our framework is based on interactive reinforcement learning (RL), and we used it to create a behavior authoring tool called MarioMix. This tool enables non-experts to create bots with varied playstyles for the game titled Super Mario Bros. The main interaction procedure of MarioMix consists of presenting short

Humans use multiple communication channels to interact with each other. For instance, body gestures or facial expressions are commonly used to convey an intent. The use of such non-verbal cues has motivated the development of prediction models. One such approach is predicting arousal and valence (AV) from facial expressions. However, making these models accurate for human-robot interaction (HRI) settings is challenging as it requires handling multiple subjects, challenging conditions, and a wide

Reinforcement learning techniques successfully generate convincing agent behaviors, but it is still difficult to tailor the behavior to align with a user's specific preferences. What is missing is a communication method for the system to explain the behavior and for the user to repair it. In this paper, we present a novel interaction method that uses interactive explanations using templates of natural language as a communication method. The main advantage of this interaction method is that it en

Incorporating empathetic behavior into robots can improve their social effectiveness and interaction quality. In this paper, we present whEE (when and how to express empathy), a framework that enables social robots to detect when empathy is needed and generate appropriate responses. Using large language models, whEE identifies key behavioral empathy cues in human interactions. We evaluate it in human-robot interaction scenarios with our social robot, Haru. Results show that whEE effectively iden

In this poster, we present user-defined sequential eyelid gestures to control UIs in VR. Previous works have proposed sequential eyelid gestures for VR interaction. However, they do not include squint or wide-open eyelid states. In contrast, we consider those eyelid states too, and we encouraged users to prioritize how well the gestures fitted the commands. To validate that the user-defined gestures are effective, we tested them in a user study (N = 17) with five different UI commands for VR int

In this paper, we propose a generic framework that enables game developers without knowledge of machine learning to create bot behaviors with playstyles that align with their preferences. Our framework is based on interactive reinforcement learning (RL), and we used it to create a behavior authoring tool called MarioMix. This tool enables non-experts to create bots with varied playstyles for the game titled Super Mario Bros. The main interaction procedure of MarioMix consists of presenting short

Humans use multiple communication channels to interact with each other. For instance, body gestures or facial expressions are commonly used to convey an intent. The use of such non-verbal cues has motivated the development of prediction models. One such approach is predicting arousal and valence (AV) from facial expressions. However, making these models accurate for human-robot interaction (HRI) settings is challenging as it requires handling multiple subjects, challenging conditions, and a wide