3,035 research outputs found
A Tale of Two DRAGGNs: A Hybrid Approach for Interpreting Action-Oriented and Goal-Oriented Instructions
Robots operating alongside humans in diverse, stochastic environments must be
able to accurately interpret natural language commands. These instructions
often fall into one of two categories: those that specify a goal condition or
target state, and those that specify explicit actions, or how to perform a
given task. Recent approaches have used reward functions as a semantic
representation of goal-based commands, which allows for the use of a
state-of-the-art planner to find a policy for the given task. However, these
reward functions cannot be directly used to represent action-oriented commands.
We introduce a new hybrid approach, the Deep Recurrent Action-Goal Grounding
Network (DRAGGN), for task grounding and execution that handles natural
language from either category as input, and generalizes to unseen environments.
Our robot-simulation results demonstrate that a system successfully
interpreting both goal-oriented and action-oriented task specifications brings
us closer to robust natural language understanding for human-robot interaction.Comment: Accepted at the 1st Workshop on Language Grounding for Robotics at
ACL 201
A Tale of Two DRAGGNs: A Hybrid Approach for Interpreting Action-Oriented and Goal-Oriented Instructions
Robots operating alongside humans in diverse, stochastic environments must be
able to accurately interpret natural language commands. These instructions
often fall into one of two categories: those that specify a goal condition or
target state, and those that specify explicit actions, or how to perform a
given task. Recent approaches have used reward functions as a semantic
representation of goal-based commands, which allows for the use of a
state-of-the-art planner to find a policy for the given task. However, these
reward functions cannot be directly used to represent action-oriented commands.
We introduce a new hybrid approach, the Deep Recurrent Action-Goal Grounding
Network (DRAGGN), for task grounding and execution that handles natural
language from either category as input, and generalizes to unseen environments.
Our robot-simulation results demonstrate that a system successfully
interpreting both goal-oriented and action-oriented task specifications brings
us closer to robust natural language understanding for human-robot interaction.Comment: Accepted at the 1st Workshop on Language Grounding for Robotics at
ACL 201
Grounding Language to Autonomously-Acquired Skills via Goal Generation
We are interested in the autonomous acquisition of repertoires of skills.
Language-conditioned reinforcement learning (LC-RL) approaches are great tools
in this quest, as they allow to express abstract goals as sets of constraints
on the states. However, most LC-RL agents are not autonomous and cannot learn
without external instructions and feedback. Besides, their direct language
condition cannot account for the goal-directed behavior of pre-verbal infants
and strongly limits the expression of behavioral diversity for a given language
input. To resolve these issues, we propose a new conceptual approach to
language-conditioned RL: the Language-Goal-Behavior architecture (LGB). LGB
decouples skill learning and language grounding via an intermediate semantic
representation of the world. To showcase the properties of LGB, we present a
specific implementation called DECSTR. DECSTR is an intrinsically motivated
learning agent endowed with an innate semantic representation describing
spatial relations between physical objects. In a first stage (G -> B), it
freely explores its environment and targets self-generated semantic
configurations. In a second stage (L -> G), it trains a language-conditioned
goal generator to generate semantic goals that match the constraints expressed
in language-based inputs. We showcase the additional properties of LGB w.r.t.
both an end-to-end LC-RL approach and a similar approach leveraging
non-semantic, continuous intermediate representations. Intermediate semantic
representations help satisfy language commands in a diversity of ways, enable
strategy switching after a failure and facilitate language grounding.Comment: Published at ICLR 202
EgoTV: Egocentric Task Verification from Natural Language Task Descriptions
To enable progress towards egocentric agents capable of understanding
everyday tasks specified in natural language, we propose a benchmark and a
synthetic dataset called Egocentric Task Verification (EgoTV). EgoTV contains
multi-step tasks with multiple sub-task decompositions, state changes, object
interactions, and sub-task ordering constraints, in addition to abstracted task
descriptions that contain only partial details about ways to accomplish a task.
We also propose a novel Neuro-Symbolic Grounding (NSG) approach to enable the
causal, temporal, and compositional reasoning of such tasks. We demonstrate
NSG's capability towards task tracking and verification on our EgoTV dataset
and a real-world dataset derived from CrossTask (CTV). Our contributions
include the release of the EgoTV and CTV datasets, and the NSG model for future
research on egocentric assistive agents
From Verbs to Tasks: An Integrated Account of Learning Tasks from Situated Interactive Instruction.
Intelligent collaborative agents are becoming common in the human society. From virtual assistants such as Siri and Google Now to assistive robots, they contribute to human activities in a variety of ways. As they become more pervasive, the challenge of customizing them to a variety of environments and tasks becomes critical. It is infeasible for engineers to program them for each individual use. Our research aims at building interactive robots and agents that adapt to new environments autonomously by interacting with human users using natural modalities.
This dissertation studies the problem of learning novel tasks from human-agent dialog. We propose a novel approach for interactive task learning, situated interactive instruction (SII), and investigate approaches to three computational challenges that arise in designing SII agents: situated comprehension, mixed-initiative interaction, and interactive task learning. We propose a novel mixed-modality grounded representation for task verbs which encompasses their lexical, semantic, and
task-oriented aspects. This representation is useful in situated comprehension and can be learned through human-agent interactions. We introduce the Indexical Model of comprehension that can exploit
extra-linguistic contexts for resolving semantic ambiguities in situated comprehension of task commands. The Indexical model is integrated with a mixed-initiative interaction model that facilitates
a flexible task-oriented human-agent dialog. This dialog serves as the basis of interactive task learning. We propose an interactive variation of explanation-based learning that can acquire the proposed
representation. We demonstrate that our learning paradigm is efficient, can transfer knowledge between structurally similar tasks, integrates agent-driven exploration with instructional learning, and can acquire several tasks. The methods proposed in this thesis are integrated in Rosie - a generally instructable agent developed in the Soar cognitive architecture and embodied on a table-top robot.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111573/1/shiwali_1.pd
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