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Researcher profile

Reid Simmons

Reid Simmons contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Artificial IntelligenceHuman-Computer InteractionRoboticsComputation and Language

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Published work

8 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Older Adults' Preferences for Feedback Cadence from an Exercise Coach Robot

People can respond to feedback and guidance in different ways, and it is important for robots to personalize their interactions and utilize verbal and nonverbal communication cues. We aim to understand how older adults respond to different cadences of verbal and nonverbal feedback of a robot exercise coach. We conducted an online study of older adults, where participants evaluated videos of the robot giving feedback at different cadences for each modality. The results indicate that changing the cadence of one modality affects the perception of both it and the other modality. We can use the results from this study to better design the frequency of the robot coach's feedback during an exercise session with this population.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

What Do You Think I Think? Accounting for Human Beliefs Using Second-Order Theory of Mind

Discrepancies between an agent's actual knowledge and what a person thinks the agent knows can hinder interactions. If an agent could detect such discrepancies, it could provide feedback to account for them and improve current and future interactions. Using the I-POMDP as a framework for a second-order Theory of Mind (ToM-2), this work endows an agent with the ability to model the evolution of a person's erroneous beliefs about an agent and the cognitive biases and heuristics (CBH) from which they arise. In doing so, the agent can detect when CBH might be at play during an interaction and adaptively generate feedback that accounts for them. An in-person user study shows how a ToM-2 learner can account for the effects of a teacher's CBH to significantly improve the informativeness of teacher actions, and subjective results suggest people find the ToM-2 learner's feedback more useful.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Reasoning about Counterfactuals to Improve Human Inverse Reinforcement Learning

To collaborate well with robots, we must be able to understand their decision making. Humans naturally infer other agents' beliefs and desires by reasoning about their observable behavior in a way that resembles inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). Thus, robots can convey their beliefs and desires by providing demonstrations that are informative for a human learner's IRL. An informative demonstration is one that differs strongly from the learner's expectations of what the robot will do given their current understanding of the robot's decision making. However, standard IRL does not model the learner's existing expectations, and thus cannot do this counterfactual reasoning. We propose to incorporate the learner's current understanding of the robot's decision making into our model of human IRL, so that a robot can select demonstrations that maximize the human's understanding. We also propose a novel measure for estimating the difficulty for a human to predict instances of a robot's behavior in unseen environments. A user study finds that our test difficulty measure correlates well with human performance and confidence. Interestingly, considering human beliefs and counterfactuals when selecting demonstrations decreases human performance on easy tests, but increases performance on difficult tests, providing insight on how to best utilize such models.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Tradeoff-Focused Contrastive Explanation for MDP Planning

End-users' trust in automated agents is important as automated decision-making and planning is increasingly used in many aspects of people's lives. In real-world applications of planning, multiple optimization objectives are often involved. Thus, planning agents' decisions can involve complex tradeoffs among competing objectives. It can be difficult for the end-users to understand why an agent decides on a particular planning solution on the basis of its objective values. As a result, the users may not know whether the agent is making the right decisions, and may lack trust in it. In this work, we contribute an approach, based on contrastive explanation, that enables a multi-objective MDP planning agent to explain its decisions in a way that communicates its tradeoff rationale in terms of the domain-level concepts. We conduct a human subjects experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of our explanation approach in a mobile robot navigation domain. The results show that our approach significantly improves the users' understanding, and confidence in their understanding, of the tradeoff rationale of the planning agent.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2012arXiv

A Cross-cultural Corpus of Annotated Verbal and Nonverbal Behaviors in Receptionist Encounters

We present the first annotated corpus of nonverbal behaviors in receptionist interactions, and the first nonverbal corpus (excluding the original video and audio data) of service encounters freely available online. Native speakers of American English and Arabic participated in a naturalistic role play at reception desks of university buildings in Doha, Qatar and Pittsburgh, USA. Their manually annotated nonverbal behaviors include gaze direction, hand and head gestures, torso positions, and facial expressions. We discuss possible uses of the corpus and envision it to become a useful tool for the human-robot interaction community.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2012arXiv

Heuristic Search Value Iteration for POMDPs

We present a novel POMDP planning algorithm called heuristic search value iteration (HSVI).HSVI is an anytime algorithm that returns a policy and a provable bound on its regret with respect to the optimal policy. HSVI gets its power by combining two well-known techniques: attention-focusing search heuristics and piecewise linear convex representations of the value function. HSVI's soundness and convergence have been proven. On some benchmark problems from the literature, HSVI displays speedups of greater than 100 with respect to other state-of-the-art POMDP value iteration algorithms. We also apply HSVI to a new rover exploration problem 10 times larger than most POMDP problems in the literature.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2012arXiv

Point-Based POMDP Algorithms: Improved Analysis and Implementation

Existing complexity bounds for point-based POMDP value iteration algorithms focus either on the curse of dimensionality or the curse of history. We derive a new bound that relies on both and uses the concept of discounted reachability; our conclusions may help guide future algorithm design. We also discuss recent improvements to our (point-based) heuristic search value iteration algorithm. Our new implementation calculates tighter initial bounds, avoids solving linear programs, and makes more effective use of sparsity.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2011arXiv

Perception of Personality and Naturalness through Dialogues by Native Speakers of American English and Arabic

Linguistic markers of personality traits have been studied extensively, but few cross-cultural studies exist. In this paper, we evaluate how native speakers of American English and Arabic perceive personality traits and naturalness of English utterances that vary along the dimensions of verbosity, hedging, lexical and syntactic alignment, and formality. The utterances are the turns within dialogue fragments that are presented as text transcripts to the workers of Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The results of the study suggest that all four dimensions can be used as linguistic markers of all personality traits by both language communities. A further comparative analysis shows cross-cultural differences for some combinations of measures of personality traits and naturalness, the dimensions of linguistic variability and dialogue acts.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access