Successful teaching requires an assumption of how the learner learns - how the learner uses experiences from the world to update their internal states. We investigate what expectations people have about a learner when they teach them in an online manner using rewards and punishment. We focus on a common reinforcement learning method, Q-learning, and examine what assumptions people have using a behavioral experiment. To do so, we first establish a normative standard, by formulating the problem as a machine teaching optimization problem. To solve the machine teaching optimization problem, we use a deep learning approximation method which simulates learners in the environment and learns to predict how feedback affects the learner's internal states. What do people assume about a learner's learning and discount rates when they teach them an idealized exploration-exploitation task? In a behavioral experiment, we find that people can teach the task to Q-learners in a relatively efficient and effective manner when the learner uses a small value for its discounting rate and a large value for its learning rate. However, they still are suboptimal. We also find that providing people with real-time updates of how possible feedback would affect the Q-learner's internal states weakly helps them teach. Our results reveal how people teach using evaluative feedback and provide guidance for how engineers should design machine agents in a manner that is intuitive for people.

翻译：成功的教学需要假设学习者如何学习——即学习者如何利用来自世界的经验更新其内部状态。本文探究人们在通过奖励与惩罚进行在线教学时，对学习者存在何种期望。我们聚焦于常见的强化学习方法Q-learning，通过行为实验考察人们的假设。为此，我们首先将问题形式化为机器教学优化问题，建立规范标准。为解决该优化问题，我们采用深度学习方法进行近似，模拟环境中的学习者并学习预测反馈如何影响其内部状态。当人们教授一个理想化的探索-利用任务时，他们对学习者的学习率和折扣率存在何种假设？在行为实验中我们发现，当学习者使用较小的折扣率和较大的学习率时，人们能够相对高效且有效地将任务教授给Q-learning学习者，但其表现仍非最优。此外，为人们提供可能的反馈如何实时影响Q-learning学习者内部状态的信息，对他们的教学帮助不大。我们的结果揭示了人们如何使用评价性反馈进行教学，并为工程师设计符合人类直觉的机器智能体提供了指导。