32 research outputs found
Modeling Human Understanding of Complex Intentional Action with a Bayesian Nonparametric Subgoal Model
Most human behaviors consist of multiple parts, steps, or subtasks. These
structures guide our action planning and execution, but when we observe others,
the latent structure of their actions is typically unobservable, and must be
inferred in order to learn new skills by demonstration, or to assist others in
completing their tasks. For example, an assistant who has learned the subgoal
structure of a colleague's task can more rapidly recognize and support their
actions as they unfold. Here we model how humans infer subgoals from
observations of complex action sequences using a nonparametric Bayesian model,
which assumes that observed actions are generated by approximately rational
planning over unknown subgoal sequences. We test this model with a behavioral
experiment in which humans observed different series of goal-directed actions,
and inferred both the number and composition of the subgoal sequences
associated with each goal. The Bayesian model predicts human subgoal inferences
with high accuracy, and significantly better than several alternative models
and straightforward heuristics. Motivated by this result, we simulate how
learning and inference of subgoals can improve performance in an artificial
user assistance task. The Bayesian model learns the correct subgoals from fewer
observations, and better assists users by more rapidly and accurately inferring
the goal of their actions than alternative approaches.Comment: Accepted at AAAI 1
Frequency vs. Association for Constraint Selection in Usage-Based Construction Grammar
A usage-based Construction Grammar (CxG) posits that slot-constraints
generalize from common exemplar constructions. But what is the best model of
constraint generalization? This paper evaluates competing frequency-based and
association-based models across eight languages using a metric derived from the
Minimum Description Length paradigm. The experiments show that
association-based models produce better generalizations across all languages by
a significant margin
Macro Grammars and Holistic Triggering for Efficient Semantic Parsing
To learn a semantic parser from denotations, a learning algorithm must search
over a combinatorially large space of logical forms for ones consistent with
the annotated denotations. We propose a new online learning algorithm that
searches faster as training progresses. The two key ideas are using macro
grammars to cache the abstract patterns of useful logical forms found thus far,
and holistic triggering to efficiently retrieve the most relevant patterns
based on sentence similarity. On the WikiTableQuestions dataset, we first
expand the search space of an existing model to improve the state-of-the-art
accuracy from 38.7% to 42.7%, and then use macro grammars and holistic
triggering to achieve an 11x speedup and an accuracy of 43.7%.Comment: EMNLP 201
Compositional Policy Priors
This paper describes a probabilistic framework for incorporating structured inductive biases into reinforcement learning. These inductive biases arise from policy priors, probability distributions over optimal policies. Borrowing recent ideas from computational linguistics and Bayesian nonparametrics, we define several families of policy priors that express compositional, abstract structure in a domain. Compositionality is expressed using probabilistic context-free grammars, enabling a compact representation of hierarchically organized sub-tasks. Useful sequences of sub-tasks can be cached and reused by extending the grammars nonparametrically using Fragment Grammars. We present Monte Carlo methods for performing inference, and show how structured policy priors lead to substantially faster learning in complex domains compared to methods without inductive biases.This work was supported by AFOSR FA9550-07-1-0075 and ONR
N00014-07-1-0937. SJG was supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the NSF
Modeling human understanding of complex intentional action with a Bayesian nonparametric subgoal model
Most human behaviors consist of multiple parts, steps, or subtasks. These structures guide our action planning and execution, but when we observe others, the latent structure of their actions is typically unobservable, and must be inferred in order to learn new skills by demonstration, or to assist others in completing their tasks. For example, an assistant who has learned the subgoal structure of a colleague's task can more rapidly recognize and support their actions as they unfold. Here we model how humans infer subgoals from observations of complex action sequences using a nonparametric Bayesian model, which assumes that observed actions are generated by approximately rational planning over unknown subgoal sequences. We test this model with a behavioral experiment in which humans observed different series of goal-directed actions, and inferred both the number and composition of the subgoal sequences associated with each goal. The Bayesian model predicts human subgoal inferences with high accuracy, and significantly better than several alternative models and straightforward heuristics. Motivated by this result, we simulate how learning and inference of subgoals can improve performance in an artificial user assistance task. The Bayesian model learns the correct subgoals from fewer observations, and better assists users by more rapidly and accurately inferring the goal of their actions than alternative approaches