Goals vs. Rewards: Towards a Comparative Study of Objective Specification Mechanisms

In this late-breaking report, we look at two popular objective specification mechanisms for sequential decision-making problems, namely goals and rewards, and investigate how easy it would be for non-AI experts to use them effectively. Specifically, we propose a user study that allows us to test a user's ability to (<tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$a$</tex>) use these mechanisms to direct a robot to generate some desired behavior and (b) predict the behavior resulting from a given objective specification. We conducted a small pilot study to test the study design and report some preliminary observations made regarding the two specification mechanisms.