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arXiv · 2509.24651

"Stop replacing salt with sugar!'': Towards Intuitive Human-Agent Teaching

Nikolaos Kondylidis·Andrea Rafanelli·Ilaria Tiddi·Annette ten Teije·Frank van Harmelen
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Abstract

Humans quickly learn new concepts from a small number of examples. Replicating this capacity with Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems has proven to be challenging. When it comes to learning subjective tasks-where there is an evident scarcity of data-this capacity needs to be recreated. In this work, we propose an intuitive human-agent teaching architecture in which the human can teach an agent how to perform a task by providing demonstrations, i.e., examples. To have an intuitive interaction, we argue that the agent should be able to learn incrementally from a few single examples. To allow for this, our objective is to broaden the agent's task understanding using domain knowledge. Then, using a learning method to enable the agent to learn efficiently from a limited number of examples. Finally, to optimize how human can select the most representative and less redundant examples to provide the agent with. We apply our proposed method to the subjective task of ingredient substitution, where the agent needs to learn how to substitute ingredients in recipes based on human examples. We replicate human input using the Recipe1MSubs dataset. In our experiments, the agent achieves half its task performance after only 100 examples are provided, compared to the complete training set of 50k examples. We show that by providing examples in strategic order along with a learning method that leverages external symbolic knowledge, the agent can generalize more efficiently.

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Nikolaos Kondylidis, Andrea Rafanelli, Ilaria Tiddi, Annette ten Teije, Frank van Harmelen. 2025-09-29. "Stop replacing salt with sugar!'': Towards Intuitive Human-Agent Teaching. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24651

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