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Does the effectiveness of neural language models derive entirely from accurate modeling of surface word co-occurrence statistics, or do these models represent and reason about the world they describe? In BART and T5 transformer language…
Traditionally, the formation of vocabularies has been studied by agent-based models (specially, the Naming Game) in which random pairs of agents negotiate word-meaning associations at each discrete time step. This paper proposes a first…
In order to bring artificial agents into our lives, we will need to go beyond supervised learning on closed datasets to having the ability to continuously expand knowledge. Inspired by a student learning in a classroom, we present an agent…
Training agents to act competently in complex 3D environments from high-dimensional visual information is challenging. Reinforcement learning is conventionally used to train such agents, but requires a carefully designed reward function,…
Neural nets are powerful function approximators, but the behavior of a given neural net, once trained, cannot be easily modified. We wish, however, for people to be able to influence neural agents' actions despite the agents never training…
Self-trained autonomous agents developed using machine learning are showing great promise in a variety of control settings, perhaps most remarkably in applications involving autonomous vehicles. The main challenge associated with…
Humans use language to collectively execute abstract strategies besides using it as a referential tool for identifying physical entities. Recently, multiple attempts at replicating the process of emergence of language in artificial agents…
Word embeddings are a key component of high-performing natural language processing (NLP) systems, but it remains a challenge to learn good representations for novel words on the fly, i.e., for words that did not occur in the training data.…
We present a visually-grounded language understanding model based on a study of how people verbally describe objects in scenes. The emphasis of the model is on the combination of individual word meanings to produce meanings for complex…
Humans are excellent at understanding language and vision to accomplish a wide range of tasks. In contrast, creating general instruction-following embodied agents remains a difficult challenge. Prior work that uses pure language-only models…
As robots become more ubiquitous and capable, it becomes ever more important to enable untrained users to easily interact with them. Recently, this has led to study of the language grounding problem, where the goal is to extract…
In the last few years, neural networks have been intensively used to develop meaningful distributed representations of words and contexts around them. When these representations, also known as "embeddings", are learned from unsupervised…
One significant simplification in most previous work on robot learning is the closed-world assumption where the robot is assumed to know ahead of time a complete set of predicates describing the state of the physical world. However, robots…
From the earliest years of our lives, humans use language to express our beliefs and desires. Being able to talk to artificial agents about our preferences would thus fulfill a central goal of value alignment. Yet today, we lack…
We investigated word recognition in a Visually Grounded Speech model. The model has been trained on pairs of images and spoken captions to create visually grounded embeddings which can be used for speech to image retrieval and vice versa.…
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are increasingly used as research models, but questions remain about their generalizability and representational invariance. Biological neural networks under social constraints evolved to enable…
Pre-trained language models have achieved huge improvement on many NLP tasks. However, these methods are usually designed for written text, so they do not consider the properties of spoken language. Therefore, this paper aims at…
Does language help make sense of the visual world? How important is it to actually see the world rather than having it described with words? These basic questions about the nature of intelligence have been difficult to answer because we…
This survey provides an overview of the evolution of visually grounded models of spoken language over the last 20 years. Such models are inspired by the observation that when children pick up a language, they rely on a wide range of…
The named concepts and compositional operators present in natural language provide a rich source of information about the kinds of abstractions humans use to navigate the world. Can this linguistic background knowledge improve the…