Seamless interaction between AI agents and humans using natural language remains a key goal in AI research. This paper addresses the challenges of developing interactive agents capable of understanding and executing grounded natural language instructions through the IGLU competition. Despite advancements, challenges such as a scarcity of appropriate datasets and the need for effective evaluation platforms persist. We introduce a scalable data collection tool for gathering interactive grounded language instructions within a Minecraft-like environment, resulting in a Multi-Modal dataset with around 9,000 utterances and over 1,000 clarification questions. Additionally, we present a Human-in-the-Loop interactive evaluation platform for qualitative analysis and comparison of agent performance through multi-turn communication with human annotators. We offer to the community these assets referred to as IDAT (IGLU Dataset And Toolkit) which aim to advance the development of intelligent, interactive AI agents and provide essential resources for further research.

Embodied Instruction Following (EIF) is a crucial task in embodied learning, requiring agents to interact with their environment through egocentric observations to fulfill natural language instructions.Recent advancements have seen a surge in employing large language models (LLMs) within a framework-centric approach to enhance performance in embodied learning tasks, including EIF.Despite these efforts, there exists a lack of a unified understanding regarding the impact of various components-ranging from visual perception to action execution-on task performance.To address this gap, we introduce OPEx, a comprehensive framework that delineates the core components essential for solving embodied learning tasks: Observer, Planner, and Executor.Through extensive evaluations, we provide a deep analysis of how each component influences EIF task performance.Furthermore, we innovate within this space by deploying a multi-agent LLM communication strategy on a TextWorld counterpart, further enhancing task performance.Our findings reveal that LLM-centric design markedly improves EIF outcomes, identify visual perception and low-level action execution as critical bottlenecks, and demonstrate that augmenting LLMs with a multi-agent framework further elevates performance.1

We present an algorithm for skill discovery from expert demonstrations. The algorithm first utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) to propose an initial segmentation of the trajectories. Following that, a hierarchical variational inference framework incorporates the LLM-generated segmentation information to discover reusable skills by merging trajectory segments. To further control the trade-off between compression and reusability, we introduce a novel auxiliary objective based on the Minimum Description Length principle that helps guide this skill discovery process. Our results demonstrate that agents equipped with our method are able to discover skills that help accelerate learning and outperform baseline skill learning approaches on new long-horizon tasks in BabyAI, a grid world navigation environment, as well as ALFRED, a household simulation environment.

Automated scientific discovery promises to accelerate progress across scientific domains, but evaluating an agent's capacity for end-to-end scientific reasoning is challenging as running real-world experiments is often prohibitively expensive or infeasible. In this work we introduce DiscoveryWorld, a virtual environment that enables benchmarking an agent's ability to perform complete cycles of novel scientific discovery in an inexpensive, simulated, multi-modal, long-horizon, and fictional setting.DiscoveryWorld consists of 24 scientific tasks across three levels of difficulty, each with parametric variations that provide new discoveries for agents to make across runs. Tasks require an agent to form hypotheses, design and run experiments, analyze results, and act on conclusions. Task difficulties are normed to range from straightforward to challenging for human scientists with advanced degrees. DiscoveryWorld further provides three automatic metrics for evaluating performance, including: (1) binary task completion, (2) fine-grained report cards detailing procedural scoring of task-relevant actions, and (3) the accuracy of discovered explanatory knowledge.While simulated environments such as DiscoveryWorld are low-fidelity compared to the real world, we find that strong baseline agents struggle on most DiscoveryWorld tasks, highlighting the utility of using simulated environments as proxy tasks for near-term development of scientific discovery competency in agents.

We introduce Language Feedback Models (LFMs) that identify desirable behaviour --- actions that help achieve tasks specified in the instruction - for imitation learning in instruction following. To train LFMs, we obtain feedback from Large Language Models (LLMs) on visual trajectories verbalized to language descriptions. First, by using LFMs to identify desirable behaviour to imitate, we improve in task-completion rate over strong behavioural cloning baselines on three distinct language grounding environments (Touchdown, ScienceWorld, and ALFWorld). Second, LFMs outperform using LLMs as experts to directly predict actions, when controlling for the number of LLM output tokens. Third, LFMs generalize to unseen environments, improving task-completion rate by 3.5-12.0% through one round of adaptation. Finally, LFMs can be modified to provide human-interpretable feedback without performance loss, allowing human verification of desirable behaviour for imitation learning.

In this work, we explore techniques for augmenting interactive AI agents with information from symbolic modules, much like humans use tools like calculators and GPS systems to assist with arithmetic and navigation.We test our agent's abilities in text games-challenging benchmarks for evaluating the multi-step reasoning abilities of game agents in grounded, language-based environments.Our experimental study indicates that injecting the actions from these symbolic modules into the action space of a behavior cloned transformer agent increases performance on four text game benchmarks that test arithmetic, navigation, sorting, and common sense reasoning by an average of 22%, allowing an agent to reach the highest possible performance on unseen games.This action injection technique is easily extended to new agents, environments, and symbolic modules. 1

In this work we investigate the capacity of language models to generate explicit, interpretable, and interactive world models of scientific and common-sense reasoning tasks.We operationalize this as a task of generating text games, expressed as hundreds of lines of PYTHON code.To facilitate this task, we introduce BYTESIZED32 1 , a corpus of 32 reasoning-focused text games totalling 20k lines of PYTHON code.We empirically demonstrate that GPT-4 can use these games as templates for single-shot in-context learning, successfully producing runnable games on unseen topics in 28% of cases.When allowed to selfreflect on program errors, game runnability substantially increases to 57%.While evaluating simulation fidelity is labor intensive, we introduce a suite of automated metrics to assess game fidelity, technical validity, adherence to task specifications, and winnability, showing a high-degree of agreement with expert human ratings.We pose this as a challenge task to spur further development at the juncture of world modeling and code generation.

Large language models (LLMs) can be seen as atomic units of computation mapping sequences to a distribution over sequences. Thus, they can be seen as stochastic language layers in a language network, where the learnable parameters are the natural language prompts at each layer. By stacking two such layers and feeding the output of one layer to the next, we obtain a Deep Language Network (DLN). We first show how to effectively perform prompt optimization for a 1-Layer language network (DLN-1). Then, we present an extension that applies to 2-layer DLNs (DLN-2), where two prompts must be learned. The key idea is to consider the output of the first layer as a latent variable, which requires inference, and prompts to be learned as the parameters of the generative distribution. We first test the effectiveness of DLN-1 in multiple reasoning and natural language understanding tasks. Then, we show that DLN-2 can reach higher performance than a single layer, showing promise that we might reach comparable performance to GPT-4, even when each LLM in the network is smaller and less powerful.

We present SCIENCEWORLD, a benchmark to test agents' scientific reasoning abilities in a new interactive text environment at the level of a standard elementary school science curriculum.Despite the transformer-based progress seen in question-answering and scientific text processing, we find that current models cannot reason about or explain learned science concepts in novel contexts.For instance, models can easily answer what the conductivity of a known material is but struggle when asked how they would conduct an experiment in a grounded environment to find the conductivity of an unknown material.This begs the question of whether current models are simply retrieving answers by way of seeing a large number of similar examples or if they have learned to reason about concepts in a reusable manner.We hypothesize that agents need to be grounded in interactive environments to achieve such reasoning capabilities.Our experiments provide empirical evidence supporting this hypothesisshowing that a 1.5 million parameter agent trained interactively for 100k steps outperforms a 11 billion parameter model statically trained for scientific question-answering and reasoning from millions of expert demonstrations.12

To solve difficult tasks, humans ask questions to acquire knowledge from external sources. In contrast, classical reinforcement learning agents lack such an ability and often resort to exploratory behavior. This is exacerbated as few present-day environments support querying for knowledge. In order to study how agents can be taught to query external knowledge via language, we first introduce two new environments: the grid-world-based Q-BabyAI and the text-based Q-TextWorld. In addition to physical interactions, an agent can query an external knowledge source specialized for these environments to gather information. Second, we propose the ‘Asking for Knowledge’ (AFK) agent, which learns to generate language commands to query for meaningful knowledge that helps solve the tasks. AFK leverages a non-parametric memory, a pointer mechanism and an episodic exploration bonus to tackle (1) irrelevant information, (2) a large query language space, (3) delayed reward for making meaningful queries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the AFK agent outperforms recent baselines on the challenging Q-BabyAI and Q-TextWorld environments.

A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to understand and communicate with language. Interactive Fiction games are fully text-based simulation environments where a player issues text commands to effect change in the environment and progress through the story. We argue that IF games are an excellent testbed for studying language-based autonomous agents. In particular, IF games combine challenges of combinatorial action spaces, language understanding, and commonsense reasoning. To facilitate rapid development of language-based agents, we introduce Jericho, a learning environment for man-made IF games and conduct a comprehensive study of text-agents across a rich set of games, highlighting directions in which agents can improve.

Existing machine reading comprehension (MRC) models do not scale effectively to realworld applications like web-level information retrieval and question answering (QA).We argue that this stems from the nature of MRC datasets: most of these are static environments wherein the supporting documents and all necessary information are fully observed.In this paper, we propose a simple method that reframes existing MRC datasets as interactive, partially observable environments.Specifically, we "occlude" the majority of a document's text and add context-sensitive commands that reveal "glimpses" of the hidden text to a model.We repurpose SQuAD and NewsQA as an initial case study, and then show how the interactive corpora can be used to train a model that seeks relevant information through sequential decision making.We believe that this setting can contribute in scaling models to web-level QA scenarios.1

Playing text-based games requires skills in processing natural language and sequential decision making. Achieving human-level performance on text-based games remains an open challenge, and prior research has largely relied on hand-crafted structured representations and heuristics. In this work, we investigate how an agent can plan and generalize in text-based games using graph-structured representations learned end-to-end from raw text. We propose a novel graph-aided transformer agent (GATA) that infers and updates latent belief graphs during planning to enable effective action selection by capturing the underlying game dynamics. GATA is trained using a combination of reinforcement and self-supervised learning. Our work demonstrates that the learned graph-based representations help agents converge to better policies than their text-only counterparts and facilitate effective generalization across game configurations. Experiments on 500+ unique games from the TextWorld suite show that our best agent outperforms text-based baselines by an average of 24.2%.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been attracting increasing popularity due to their simplicity and effectiveness in a variety of fields. However, a large number of labeled data is generally required to train these networks, which could be very expensive to obtain in some domains. In this paper, we study active learning for GNNs, i.e., how to efficiently label the nodes on a graph to reduce the annotation cost of training GNNs. We formulate the problem as a sequential decision process on graphs and train a GNN-based policy network with reinforcement learning to learn the optimal query strategy. By jointly training on several source graphs with full labels, we learn a transferable active learning policy which can directly generalize to unlabeled target graphs. Experimental results on multiple datasets from different domains prove the effectiveness of the learned policy in promoting active learning performance in both settings of transferring between graphs in the same domain and across different domains.

Xingdi Yuan, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Jie Fu, Zhouhan Lin, Chris Pal, Yoshua Bengio, Adam Trischler. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

State representation learning, or the ability to capture latent generative factors of an environment is crucial for building intelligent agents that can perform a wide variety of tasks. Learning such representations in an unsupervised manner without supervision from rewards is an open problem. We introduce a method that tries to learn better state representations by maximizing mutual information across spatially and temporally distinct features of a neural encoder of the observations. We also introduce a new benchmark based on Atari 2600 games where we evaluate representations based on how well they capture the ground truth state. We believe this new framework for evaluating representation learning models will be crucial for future representation learning research. Finally, we compare our technique with other state-of-the-art generative and contrastive representation learning methods.

Hierarchical Multiscale LSTM (Chung et. al., 2016) is a state-of-the-art language model that learns interpretable structure from character-level input. Such models can provide fertile ground for (cognitive) computational linguistics studies. However, the high complexity of the architecture, training and implementations might hinder its applicability. We provide a detailed reproduction and ablation study of the architecture, shedding light on some of the potential caveats of re-purposing complex deep-learning architectures. We further show that simplifying certain aspects of the architecture can in fact improve its performance. We also investigate the linguistic units (segments) learned by various levels of the model, and argue that their quality does not correlate with the overall performance of the model on language modeling.

Recent work has shown how to learn better visual-semantic embeddings by leveraging image descriptions in more than one language.Here, we investigate in detail which conditions affect the performance of this type of grounded language learning model.We show that multilingual training improves over bilingual training, and that low-resource languages benefit from training with higher-resource languages.We demonstrate that a multilingual model can be trained equally well on either translations or comparable sentence pairs, and that annotating the same set of images in multiple language enables further improvements via an additional caption-caption ranking objective.

Many efforts have been devoted to training generative latent variable models with autoregressive decoders, such as recurrent neural networks (RNN). Stochastic recurrent models have been successful in capturing the variability observed in natural sequential data such as speech. We unify successful ideas from recently proposed architectures into a stochastic recurrent model: each step in the sequence is associated with a latent variable that is used to condition the recurrent dynamics for future steps. Training is performed with amortised variational inference where the approximate posterior is augmented with a RNN that runs backward through the sequence. In addition to maximizing the variational lower bound, we ease training of the latent variables by adding an auxiliary cost which forces them to reconstruct the state of the backward recurrent network. This provides the latent variables with a task-independent objective that enhances the performance of the overall model. We found this strategy to perform better than alternative approaches such as KL annealing. Although being conceptually simple, our model achieves state-of-the-art results on standard speech benchmarks such as TIMIT and Blizzard and competitive performance on sequential MNIST. Finally, we apply our model to language modeling on the IMDB dataset where the auxiliary cost helps in learning interpretable latent variables.

We present Neural Autoregressive Distribution Estimation (NADE) models, which are neural network architectures applied to the problem of unsupervised distribution and density estimation. They leverage the probability product rule and a weight sharing scheme inspired from restricted Boltzmann machines, to yield an estimator that is both tractable and has good generalization performance. We discuss how they achieve competitive performance in modeling both binary and real-valued observations. We also present how deep NADE models can be trained to be agnostic to the ordering of input dimensions used by the autoregressive product rule decomposition. Finally, we also show how to exploit the topological structure of pixels in images using a deep convolutional architecture for NADE.

We present a mathematical construction for the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) that does not require specifying the number of hidden units. In fact, the hidden layer size is adaptive and can grow during training. This is obtained by first extending the RBM to be sensitive to the ordering of its hidden units. Then, with a carefully chosen definition of the energy function, we show that the limit of infinitely many hidden units is well defined. As with RBM, approximate maximum likelihood training can be performed, resulting in an algorithm that naturally and adaptively adds trained hidden units during learning. We empirically study the behavior of this infinite RBM, showing that its performance is competitive to that of the RBM, while not requiring the tuning of a hidden layer size.