Using Reinforcement Learning to Optimize the Policies of an Intelligent Tutoring System for Interpersonal Skills Training

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been applied successfully to Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) in a limited set of well-defined domains such as mathematics and physics. This work is unique in using a large state space and for applying RL to tutoring interpersonal skills. Interpersonal skills are increasingly recognized as critical to both social and economic development. In particular, this work enhances an ITS designed to teach basic counseling skills that can be applied to challenging issues such as sexual harassment and workplace conflict. An initial data collection was used to train RL policies for the ITS, and an evaluation with human participants compared a hand-crafted ITS which had been used for years with students (control) versus the new ITS guided by RL policies. The RL condition differed from the control condition most notably in the strikingly large quantity of guidance it provided to learners. Both systems were effective and there was an overall significant increase from pre- to post-test scores. Although learning gains did not differ significantly between conditions, learners had a significantly higher self-rating of confidence in the RL condition. Confidence and learning gains were both part of the reward function used to train the RL policies, and it could be the case that there was the most room for improvement in confidence, an important learner emotion. Thus, RL was successful in improving an ITS for teaching interpersonal skills without the need to prune the state space (as previously done).