A Systematic Approach to Design Real-World Human-in-the-Loop Deep Reinforcement Learning: Salient Features, Challenges and Trade-offs

With the growing popularity of deep reinforcement learning (DRL), human-in-the-loop (HITL) approach has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach decision-making problems and create new opportunities for human-AI collaboration. In this article, we introduce a novel multi-layered hierarchical HITL DRL algorithm that comprises three types of learning: self learning, imitation learning and transfer learning. In addition, we consider three forms of human inputs: reward, action and demonstration. Furthermore, we discuss main challenges, trade-offs and advantages of HITL in solving complex problems and how human information can be integrated in the AI solution systematically. To verify our technical results, we present a real-world unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) problem wherein a number of enemy drones attack a restricted area. The objective is to design a scalable HITL DRL algorithm for ally drones to neutralize the enemy drones before they reach the area. To this end, we first implement our solution using an award-winning open-source HITL software called Cogment. We then demonstrate several interesting results such as (a) HITL leads to faster training and higher performance, (b) advice acts as a guiding direction for gradient methods and lowers variance, and (c) the amount of advice should neither be too large nor too small to avoid over-training and under-training. Finally, we illustrate the role of human-AI cooperation in solving two real-world complex scenarios, i.e., overloaded and decoy attacks.

@article{arabneydi2025_2504.17006,
  title={ A Systematic Approach to Design Real-World Human-in-the-Loop Deep Reinforcement Learning: Salient Features, Challenges and Trade-offs },
  author={ Jalal Arabneydi and Saiful Islam and Srijita Das and Sai Krishna Gottipati and William Duguay and Cloderic Mars and Matthew E. Taylor and Matthew Guzdial and Antoine Fagette and Younes Zerouali },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.17006},
  year={ 2025 }
}