English

Improving Natural Language Interaction with Robots Using Advice

Computation and Language 2019-05-14 v1 Artificial Intelligence Robotics Machine Learning

Abstract

Over the last few years, there has been growing interest in learning models for physically grounded language understanding tasks, such as the popular blocks world domain. These works typically view this problem as a single-step process, in which a human operator gives an instruction and an automated agent is evaluated on its ability to execute it. In this paper we take the first step towards increasing the bandwidth of this interaction, and suggest a protocol for including advice, high-level observations about the task, which can help constrain the agent's prediction. We evaluate our approach on the blocks world task, and show that even simple advice can help lead to significant performance improvements. To help reduce the effort involved in supplying the advice, we also explore model self-generated advice which can still improve results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.04655,
  title  = {Improving Natural Language Interaction with Robots Using Advice},
  author = {Nikhil Mehta and Dan Goldwasser},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.04655},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Accepted as a short paper at NAACL 2019 (8 pages)

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:03:55.456Z