Probabilistic gaze imitation and saliency learning in a robotic head

Imitation is a powerful mechanism for transferring knowledge from an instructor to a naive observer, one that is deeply contingent on a state of shared attention between these two agents. In this paper we present Bayesian algorithms that implement the core of an imitation learning framework. We use gaze imitation, coupled with task-dependent saliency learning, to build a state of shared attention between the instructor and observer. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithms in a gaze following and saliency learning task implemented on an active vision robotic head. Our results suggest that the ability to follow gaze and learn instructor- and task-specific saliency models could play a crucial role in building systems capable of complex forms of human-robot interaction.