Related papers: Conversational agents for fostering curiosity-driv…
In the early stages of human life, babies develop their skills by exploring different scenarios motivated by their inherent satisfaction rather than by extrinsic rewards from the environment. This behavior, referred to as intrinsic…
A goal shared by artificial intelligence and information retrieval is to create an oracle, that is, a machine that can answer our questions, no matter how difficult they are. A more limited, but still instrumental, version of this oracle is…
The ability to cooperate through language is a defining feature of humans. As the perceptual, motory and planning capabilities of deep artificial networks increase, researchers are studying whether they also can develop a shared language to…
This paper tackles the problem of learning a questioner in the goal-oriented visual dialog task. Several previous works adopt model-free reinforcement learning. Most pretrain the model from a finite set of human-generated data. We argue…
This paper explores an intrinsic motivation for mutual awareness, hypothesizing that humans possess a fundamental drive to understand and to be understood even in the absence of extrinsic rewards. Through simulations of the perceptual…
We present a rational analysis of curiosity, proposing that people's curiosity is driven by seeking stimuli that maximize their ability to make appropriate responses in the future. This perspective offers a way to unify previous theories of…
Spoken English proficiency is a powerful driver of economic mobility for low-income Indian youth, yet opportunities for spoken practice remain scarce in schools. We investigate the deployment of a voice-based chatbot for English…
Intelligent conversational agents, or chatbots, can take on various identities and are increasingly engaging in more human-centered conversations with persuasive goals. However, little is known about how identities and inquiry strategies…
Following the recent release of various Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Conversation Agents (CAs), adolescents are increasingly using CAs for interactive knowledge discovery on sensitive topics, including mental and sexual health topics.…
In inductive inference, we investigate the learnability of classes of formal languages. We are interested in what classes of languages are learnable in certain learning settings. A class of languages is learnable, if there is a learner that…
Effective human-agent collaboration is increasingly prevalent in real-world applications. Current trends in such collaborations are predominantly unidirectional, with users providing instructions or posing questions to agents, where agents…
A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to ask rich, creative, and revealing questions. Here we introduce a cognitive model capable of constructing human-like questions. Our approach treats questions as formal programs that, when…
Intrinsic rewards have been increasingly used to mitigate the sparse reward problem in single-agent reinforcement learning. These intrinsic rewards encourage the agent to look for novel experiences, guiding the agent to explore the…
Intelligent tutors have proven to be effective in K-12 education, though their impact on adult learners -- especially as a supplementary resource -- remains underexplored. Understanding how adults voluntarily engage with educational…
Collective behavior is widespread across the animal kingdom. To date, however, the developmental and mechanistic foundations of collective behavior have not been formally established. What learning mechanisms drive the development of…
Developing agents that can quickly adapt their behavior to new tasks remains a challenge. Meta-learning has been applied to this problem, but previous methods require either specifying a reward function which can be tedious or providing…
This paper engages in a speculative exploration of the concept of an artificial agent capable of conducting research. Initially, it examines how the act of research can be conceptually characterized, aiming to provide a starting point for…
Language models (LLMs) offer potential as a source of knowledge for agents that need to acquire new task competencies within a performance environment. We describe efforts toward a novel agent capability that can construct cues (or…
Curiosity-based reward schemes can present powerful exploration mechanisms which facilitate the discovery of solutions for complex, sparse or long-horizon tasks. However, as the agent learns to reach previously unexplored spaces and the…
The current mainstream approach to train natural language systems is to expose them to large amounts of text. This passive learning is problematic if we are interested in developing interactive machines, such as conversational agents. We…