Accelerating Reinforcement Learning via Error-Related Human Brain Signals

Abstract

In this work, we investigate how implicit neural feed back can accelerate reinforcement learning in complex robotic manipulation settings. While prior electroencephalogram (EEG) guided reinforcement learning studies have primarily focused on navigation or low-dimensional locomotion tasks, we aim to understand whether such neural evaluative signals can improve policy learning in high-dimensional manipulation tasks involving obstacles and precise end-effector control. We integrate error related potentials decoded from offline-trained EEG classifiers into reward shaping and systematically evaluate the impact of human-feedback weighting. Experiments on a 7-DoF manipulator in an obstacle-rich reaching environment show that neural feedback accelerates reinforcement learning and, depending on the human-feedback weighting, can yield task success rates that at times exceed those of sparse-reward baselines. Moreover, when applying the best-performing feedback weighting across all sub jects, we observe consistent acceleration of reinforcement learning relative to the sparse-reward setting. Furthermore, leave-one subject-out evaluations confirm that the proposed framework remains robust despite the intrinsic inter-individual variability in EEG decodability. Our findings demonstrate that EEG-based reinforcement learning can scale beyond locomotion tasks and provide a viable pathway for human-aligned manipulation skill acquisition.