English

Overcoming Referential Ambiguity in Language-Guided Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2023-09-28 v2 Computation and Language

Abstract

Teaching an agent to perform new tasks using natural language can easily be hindered by ambiguities in interpretation. When a teacher provides an instruction to a learner about an object by referring to its features, the learner can misunderstand the teacher's intentions, for instance if the instruction ambiguously refer to features of the object, a phenomenon called referential ambiguity. We study how two concepts derived from cognitive sciences can help resolve those referential ambiguities: pedagogy (selecting the right instructions) and pragmatism (learning the preferences of the other agents using inductive reasoning). We apply those ideas to a teacher/learner setup with two artificial agents on a simulated robotic task (block-stacking). We show that these concepts improve sample efficiency for training the learner.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.12758,
  title  = {Overcoming Referential Ambiguity in Language-Guided Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Hugo Caselles-Dupré and Olivier Sigaud and Mohamed Chetouani},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.12758},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

NeurIPS 2022 Workshop

R2 v1 2026-06-28T02:07:03.569Z