End-to-end Optimization of Belief and Policy Learning in Shared Autonomy Paradigms
This work addresses the fundamental challenge in shared autonomy of enhancing task success while preserving user autonomy by efficiently inferring user intent and dynamically adjusting assistance levels. The authors propose BRACE, a novel framework that achieves, for the first time, end-to-end joint optimization of Bayesian intention inference and context-adaptive assistance policies, conditioning the policy on both environmental context and the full belief distribution over goals. Theoretical analysis reveals that optimal assistance levels should decrease with reduced goal uncertainty and increase under stronger environmental constraints, and that incorporating belief information yields a quadratic reduction in expected regret. Empirical evaluations across three task domains demonstrate BRACE’s superiority over state-of-the-art methods, improving task success rates by 6.3% and path efficiency by 41% compared to IDA and DQN, respectively, and achieving gains of 36.3% in success rate and 87% in path efficiency over unassisted control.