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Action advising is a knowledge transfer technique for reinforcement learning based on the teacher-student paradigm. An expert teacher provides advice to a student during training in order to improve the student's sample efficiency and…
Understanding procedural language requires anticipating the causal effects of actions, even when they are not explicitly stated. In this work, we introduce Neural Process Networks to understand procedural text through (neural) simulation of…
Effective human-robot interaction, such as in robot learning from human demonstration, requires the learning agent to be able to ground abstract concepts (such as those contained within instructions) in a corresponding high-dimensional…
Key to tasks that require reasoning about natural language in visual contexts is grounding words and phrases to image regions. However, observing this grounding in contemporary models is complex, even if it is generally expected to take…
The problem of achieving common understanding between agents that use different vocabularies has been mainly addressed by designing techniques that explicitly negotiate mappings between their vocabularies, requiring agents to share a…
Collaborative robotics requires effective communication between a robot and a human partner. This work proposes a set of interpretive principles for how a robotic arm can use pointing actions to communicate task information to people by…
To cooperate with humans effectively, virtual agents need to be able to understand and execute language instructions. A typical setup to achieve this is with a scripted teacher which guides a virtual agent using language instructions.…
To learn directed behaviors in complex environments, intelligent agents need to optimize objective functions. Various objectives are known for designing artificial agents, including task rewards and intrinsic motivation. However, it is…
Complex, multi-task problems have proven to be difficult to solve efficiently in a sparse-reward reinforcement learning setting. In order to be sample efficient, multi-task learning requires reuse and sharing of low-level policies. To…
Many English-as-a-second language learners have trouble using near-synonym words (e.g., small vs.little; briefly vs.shortly) correctly, and often look for example sentences to learn how two nearly synonymous terms differ. Prior work uses…
Human action is naturally compositional: humans can easily recognize and perform actions with objects that are different from those used in training demonstrations. In this paper, we study the compositionality of action by looking into the…
Comprehending procedural text, e.g., a paragraph describing photosynthesis, requires modeling actions and the state changes they produce, so that questions about entities at different timepoints can be answered. Although several recent…
Language models significantly benefit from context tokens, such as prompts or scratchpads. They perform better when prompted with informative instructions, and they acquire new reasoning capabilities by generating a scratch-pad before…
This paper addresses the problem of classifying observations when features are context-sensitive, specifically when the testing set involves a context that is different from the training set. The paper begins with a precise definition of…
Humans teach others about the world through language and demonstration. When might one of these modalities be more effective than the other? In this work, we study the factors that modulate the effectiveness of language vs. demonstration…
Active learning agents typically employ a query selection algorithm which solely considers the agent's learning objectives. However, this may be insufficient in more realistic human domains. This work uses imitation learning to enable an…
Manual annotations are a prerequisite for many applications of machine learning. However, weaknesses in the annotation process itself are easy to overlook. In particular, scholars often choose what information to give to annotators without…
Imitation learning is an effective approach for autonomous systems to acquire control policies when an explicit reward function is unavailable, using supervision provided as demonstrations from an expert, typically a human operator.…
In order for robots and other artificial agents to efficiently learn to perform useful tasks defined by an end user, they must understand not only the goals of those tasks, but also the structure and dynamics of that user's environment.…
Emotion is a crucial phenomenon in the functioning of human beings in society. However, it remains a widely open subject, particularly in its textual manifestations. This paper examines an industrial corpus manually annotated following an…