Deep reinforcement learning for conversational robots playing games

Deep reinforcement learning for interactive multimodal robots is attractive for endowing machines with trainable skill acquisition. But this form of learning still represents several challenges. The challenge that we focus in this paper is effective policy learning. To address that, in this paper we compare the Deep Q-Networks (DQN) method against a variant that aims for stronger decisions than the original method by avoiding decisions with the lowest negative rewards. We evaluated our baseline and proposed algorithms in agents playing the game of Noughts and Crosses with two grid sizes (3x3 and 5x5). Experimental results show evidence that our proposed method can lead to more effective policies than the baseline DQN method, which can be used for training interactive social robots

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Generation

Recent neural models of dialogue generation offer great promise for generating responses for conversational agents, but tend to be shortsighted, predicting utterances one at a time while ignoring their influence on future outcomes. Modeling the future direction of a dialogue is crucial to generating coherent, interesting dialogues, a need which led traditional NLP models of dialogue to draw on reinforcement learning. In this paper, we show how to integrate these goals, applying deep reinforcement learning to model future reward in chatbot dialogue. The model simulates dialogues between two virtual agents, using policy gradient methods to reward sequences that display three useful conversational properties: informativity (non-repetitive turns), coherence, and ease of answering (related to forward-looking function). We evaluate our model on diversity, length as well as with human judges, showing that the proposed algorithm generates more interactive responses and manages to foster a more sustained conversation in dialogue simulation. This work marks a first step towards learning a neural conversational model based on the long-term success of dialogues

Training an interactive humanoid robot using multimodal deep reinforcement learning

Training robots to perceive, act and communicate using multiple modalities still represents a challenging problem, particularly if robots are expected to learn efficiently from small sets of example interactions. We describe a learning approach as a step in this direction, where we teach a humanoid robot how to play the game of noughts and crosses. Given that multiple multimodal skills can be trained to play this game, we focus our attention to training the robot to perceive the game, and to interact in this game. Our multimodal deep reinforcement learning agent perceives multimodal features and exhibits verbal and non-verbal actions while playing. Experimental results using simulations show that the robot can learn to win or draw up to 98% of the games. A pilot test of the proposed multimodal system for the targeted game---integrating speech, vision and gestures---reports that reasonable and fluent interactions can be achieved using the proposed approach

A Data-Efficient Deep Learning Approach for Deployable Multimodal Social Robots

The deep supervised and reinforcement learning paradigms (among others) have the potential to endow interactive multimodal social robots with the ability of acquiring skills autonomously. But it is still not very clear yet how they can be best deployed in real world applications. As a step in this direction, we propose a deep learning-based approach for efficiently training a humanoid robot to play multimodal games---and use the game of `Noughts \& Crosses' with two variants as a case study. Its minimum requirements for learning to perceive and interact are based on a few hundred example images, a few example multimodal dialogues and physical demonstrations of robot manipulation, and automatic simulations. In addition, we propose novel algorithms for robust visual game tracking and for competitive policy learning with high winning rates, which substantially outperform DQN-based baselines. While an automatic evaluation shows evidence that the proposed approach can be easily extended to new games with competitive robot behaviours, a human evaluation with 130 humans playing with the {\it Pepper} robot confirms that highly accurate visual perception is required for successful game play