When Robots Rate Their Own Interactions: Engagement Validity and the Strangeness Failure
Victor Lockwood, Hasan Mahmud, Mohammad Javad Khojasteh, Prabu David, Jamison Heard
- 发表年份
- 2026
- 访问权限
- 开放获取
摘要
Human-robot interaction (HRI) evaluation relies almost exclusively on human-completed questionnaires, leaving the robot's perspective unexamined. We propose an \textit{inverted evaluation}, in which LLM-powered robots complete the same standardized instruments from their own perspective, and test whether these ratings agree with human ground truth. In Study~1, five LLMs completed HRI-CUES, Godspeed, and RoSAS questionnaires for 25~interactions ($N = 1{,}522$ evaluations) from the HRI-CUES dataset. LLMs achieved moderate-to-strong agreement on engagement dimensions (satisfaction $r$ up to $.65$ and enjoyment $r$ up to $.72$) with excellent test-retest reliability (ICC $\geq .82$), but \textit{systematically inverted} the comfort/strangeness dimension ($r = -.44$ to $-.67$, all $p < .05$), conflating engagement with comfort. In Study~2, a Nao robot running Claude~Sonnet~4.5 replicated these patterns in live interactions ($N = 4$), including real-time turn-by-turn assessment. The strangeness failure persisted across five models, synthetic controls, and embodied deployment for two participants. We argue that current LLM-based robots lack access to the internal affective states needed to assess constructs like strangeness, and that inverted evaluation requires supplementary modalities (e.g., physiological signals, gaze, proxemics) to move beyond behavioral proxies. These findings establish boundary conditions for using LLMs as interaction evaluators in HRI.
关键词
相关论文
The Uncanny Valley [From the Field]
Masahiro Mori, Karl F. MacDorman, Norri Kageki
2012
Measurement Instruments for the Anthropomorphism, Animacy, Likeability, Perceived Intelligence, and Perceived Safety of Robots
Christoph Bartneck, Dana Kulić, Elizabeth A. Croft 等 4 位作者
2008
The development of Honda humanoid robot
Kazuo Hirai, Masato Hirose, Y. Haikawa 等 4 位作者
2002
A Meta-Analysis of Factors Affecting Trust in Human-Robot Interaction
Peter A. Hancock, Deborah R. Billings, Kristin E. Schaefer 等 6 位作者
2011