Julia Santaniello

dblp:410/3887 · DBLP profile ↗
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1ranked-venue papers
1as first author
1since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · none

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021

Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.

Human-computer interaction and pervasive computing
1 paper
Wearable and physiological sensing · 50% Human-robot interaction · 50%
Artificial intelligence
1 paper
Reinforcement learning · 100%

Topics — the 3 heaviest of 3, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
reinforcement learning from human feedback
1.012026
Towards Reinforcement Learning from Neural Feedback: Mapping fNIRS Signals to Agent Performance · AAAI 2026
Wearable and physiological sensing
brain-computer interface
1.012026
Towards Reinforcement Learning from Neural Feedback: Mapping fNIRS Signals to Agent Performance · AAAI 2026
Human-robot interaction
implicit feedback
1.012026
Towards Reinforcement Learning from Neural Feedback: Mapping fNIRS Signals to Agent Performance · AAAI 2026

Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics

transfer learning · 2.0fine-tuning · 2.0fNIRS classification · 2.0
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Towards Reinforcement Learning from Neural Feedback: Mapping fNIRS Signals to Agent Performance
abstract
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a methodology that aligns agent behavior with human preferences by integrating human feedback into the agent's training process. We introduce a possible framework that employs passive Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) to guide agent training from implicit neural signals. We present and release a novel dataset of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) recordings collected from 25 human participants across three domains: a Pick-and-Place Robot, Lunar Lander, and Flappy Bird. We train classifiers to predict levels of agent performance (optimal, sub-optimal, or worst-case) from windows of preprocessed fNIRS feature vectors, achieving an average F1 score of 67% for binary classification and 46% for multi-class models averaged across conditions and domains. We also train regressors to predict the degree of deviation between an agent's chosen action and a set of near-optimal policies, providing a continuous measure of performance. We evaluate cross-subject generalization and demonstrate that fine-tuning pre-trained models with a small sample of subject-specific data increases average F1 scores by 17% and 41% for binary and multi-class models, respectively. Our work demonstrates that mapping implicit fNIRS signals to agent performance is feasible and can be improved, laying the foundation for future brain-driven RLHF systems.
Julia Santaniello, Matthew Russell, Benson Jiang, Donatello Sassaroli, Robert J. K. Jacob, Jivko Sinapov
AAAI1