Natasha Jaques

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31ranked-venue papers
8as first author
18since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-8413-9469ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 27 · 5 first-author · 18 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 5 · 5 first-authorGraphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 4 · 3 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 3 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Satellite Assignment Problems
abstract
Assignment problems are a classic combinatorial optimization problem in which a group of agents must be assigned to a group of tasks such that maximum utility is achieved while satisfying assignment constraints. Given the utility of each agent completing each task, polynomial-time algorithms exist to solve a single assignment problem in its simplest form. However, in many modern-day applications such as satellite constellations, power grids, and mobile robot scheduling, assignment problems unfold over time, with the utility for a given assignment depending heavily on the state of the system. We apply multi-agent reinforcement learning to this problem, learning the value of assignments by bootstrapping from the known polynomial-time greedy solver and then learning from further experience. We then choose assignments using a distributed optimal assignment mechanism rather than by selecting them directly. We demonstrate that this algorithm is theoretically justified and avoids pitfalls experienced by other RL algorithms in this setting. Finally, we show that our algorithm significantly outperforms other methods in the literature, even while scaling to realistic scenarios with hundreds of agents and tasks.
Joshua Holder, Natasha Jaques, Mehran Mesbahi
AAAI2
2025 Infer Human's Intentions Before Following Natural Language Instructions
abstract
For AI agents to be helpful to humans, they should be able to follow natural language instructions to complete everyday cooperative tasks in human environments. However, real human instructions inherently possess ambiguity, because the human speakers assume sufficient prior knowledge about their hidden goals and intentions. Standard language grounding and planning methods fail to address such ambiguities because they do not model human internal goals as additional partially observable factors in the environment. We propose a new framework, Follow Instructions with Social and Embodied Reasoning (FISER), aiming for better natural language instruction following in collaborative embodied tasks. Our framework makes explicit inferences about human goals and intentions as intermediate reasoning steps. We implement a set of Transformer-based models and evaluate them over a challenging benchmark, HandMeThat. We empirically demonstrate that using social reasoning to explicitly infer human intentions before making action plans surpasses purely end-to-end approaches. We also compare our implementation with strong baselines, including Chain of Thought prompting on the largest available pre-trained language models, and find that FISER provides better performance on the embodied social reasoning tasks under investigation, reaching the state-of-the-art on HandMeThat.
Yanming Wan, Jiayuan Mao, Natasha Jaques
AAAI5
2025 Cross-environment Cooperation Enables Zero-shot Multi-agent Coordination
Kunal Jha, Wilka Carvalho, Yancheng Liang, Simon S. Du, Natasha Jaques, Max Kleiman-Weiner
CogSci5
2025 InvestESG: A multi-agent reinforcement learning benchmark for studying climate investment as a social dilemma
abstract
**InvestESG** is a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) benchmark designed to study the impact of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure mandates on corporate climate investments. The benchmark models an intertemporal social dilemma where companies balance short-term profit losses from climate mitigation efforts and long-term benefits from reducing climate risk, while ESG-conscious investors attempt to influence corporate behavior through their investment decisions. Companies allocate capital across mitigation, greenwashing, and resilience, with varying strategies influencing climate outcomes and investor preferences. We are releasing open-source versions of InvestESG in both PyTorch and JAX, which enable scalable and hardware-accelerated simulations for investigating competing incentives in mitigate climate change. Our experiments show that without ESG-conscious investors with sufficient capital, corporate mitigation efforts remain limited under the disclosure mandate. However, when a critical mass of investors prioritizes ESG, corporate cooperation increases, which in turn reduces climate risks and enhances long-term financial stability. Additionally, providing more information about global climate risks encourages companies to invest more in mitigation, even without investor involvement. Our findings align with empirical research using real-world data, highlighting MARL's potential to inform policy by providing insights into large-scale socio-economic challenges through efficient testing of alternative policy and market designs.
Xiaoxuan Hou, Jiayi Yuan 0002, Joel Z. Leibo, Natasha Jaques
ICLR4
2025 Cross-environment Cooperation Enables Zero-shot Multi-agent Coordination
abstract
Zero-shot coordination (ZSC), the ability to adapt to a new partner in a cooperative task, is a critical component of human-compatible AI. While prior work has focused on training agents to cooperate on a single task, these specialized models do not generalize to new tasks, even if they are highly similar. Here, we study how reinforcement learning on a **distribution of environments with a single partner** enables learning general cooperative skills that support ZSC with **many new partners on many new problems**. We introduce *two* Jax-based, procedural generators that create billions of solvable coordination challenges. We develop a new paradigm called **Cross-Environment Cooperation (CEC)**, and show that it outperforms competitive baselines quantitatively and qualitatively when collaborating with real people. Our findings suggest that learning to collaborate across many unique scenarios encourages agents to develop general norms, which prove effective for collaboration with different partners. Together, our results suggest a new route toward designing generalist cooperative agents capable of interacting with humans without requiring human data.
Kunal Jha, Wilka Carvalho, Yancheng Liang, Simon S. Du, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Natasha Jaques
ICML6
2025 Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis
abstract
Achieving human-level performance on real world tasks is a north star for the robotics community. We present the first learned robot agent that reaches amateur humanlevel performance in competitive table tennis. Table tennis is a physically demanding sport that takes humans years to master. We contribute (1) a hierarchical and modular policy architecture consisting of (i) low level controllers with their skill descriptors that model their capabilities and (ii) a high level controller that chooses the low level skills, (2) techniques for enabling zero-shot sim-to-real and curriculum building, including an iterative approach (train in sim, deploy in real), and (3) real time adaptation to unseen opponents. Policy performance was assessed through 29 robot vs. human matches of which the robot won 45 % (13/29). All humans were unseen players and their skill level varied from beginner to tournament level. Whilst the robot lost all matches vs. the most advanced players it won 100 % matches vs. beginners and 55 % matches vs. intermediate players, demonstrating solidly amateur humanlevel performance. Videos of the matches can be viewed here1.See sites https://google.com/view/competitive-robot-table-tennis.
David B. D'Ambrosio, Saminda Abeyruwan, Laura Graesser, Atil Iscen, Heni Ben Amor, Alex Bewley, Barney J. Reed, Krista Reymann, Leila Takayama, Yuval Tassa, Krzysztof Choromanski, Erwin Coumans, Deepali Jain, Navdeep Jaitly, Natasha Jaques, Satoshi Kataoka, Yuheng Kuang, Nevena Lazic, Reza Mahjourian, Sherry Moore, Kenneth Oslund, Anish Shankar, Vikas Sindhwani, Vincent Vanhoucke, Grace Vesom, Peng Xu 0010, Pannag R. Sanketi
ICRA15
2025 Consistently Simulating Human Personas with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning
abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human users in interactive settings such as therapy, education, and social role-play. While these simulations enable scalable training and evaluation of AI agents, off-the-shelf LLMs often drift from their assigned personas, contradict earlier statements, or abandon role-appropriate behavior. We introduce a unified framework for evaluating and improving persona consistency in LLM-generated dialogue. We define three automatic metrics—prompt-to-line consistency, line-to-line consistency, and Q\&A consistency—that capture different types of persona drift and validate each against human annotations. Using these metrics as reward signals, we apply multi-turn reinforcement learning to fine-tune LLMs for three user roles: a patient, a student, and a social chat partner. Our method reduces inconsistency by over 55%, resulting in more coherent, faithful, and trustworthy simulated users.
Marwa Abdulhai, Ryan Cheng, Donovan Clay, Tim Althoff, Sergey Levine, Natasha Jaques
NeurIPS6
2025 Evaluating Generalization Capabilities of LLM-Based Agents in Mixed-Motive Scenarios Using Concordia
abstract
Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities for social interaction and are increasingly being deployed in situations where they might engage with both human and artificial agents. These interactions represent a critical frontier for LLM-based agents, yet existing evaluation methods fail to measure how well these capabilities generalize to novel social situations. In this paper, we introduce a method for evaluating the ability of LLM-based agents to cooperate in zero-shot, mixed-motive environments using Concordia, a natural language multi-agent simulation environment. Our method measures general cooperative intelligence by testing an agent's ability to identify and exploit opportunities for mutual gain across diverse partners and contexts. We present empirical results from the NeurIPS 2024 Concordia Contest, where agents were evaluated on their ability to achieve mutual gains across a suite of diverse scenarios ranging from negotiation to collective action problems. Our findings reveal significant gaps between current agent capabilities and the robust generalization required for reliable cooperation, particularly in scenarios demanding persuasion and norm enforcement.
Chandler Smith, Marwa Abdulhai, Manfred Diaz, Marko Tesic, Rakshit S. Trivedi, Alexander Vezhnevets, Lewis Hammond, Jesse Clifton, Minsuk Chang, Edgar A. Duéñez-Guzmán, John P. Agapiou, Jayd Matyas, Danny Karmon, Beining Zhang, Jim Dilkes, Akash Kundu, Emanuel Tewolde, Jebish Purbey, Ram Mohan Rao Kadiyala, Siddhant Gupta, Aliaksei Korshuk, Buyantuev Alexander, Ilya Makarov, Rolando Fernandez, Zhihan Wang, Caroline Wang, Jiaxun Cui, Lingyun Xiao, Yoonchang Sung, Muhammad Arrasy Rahman, Peter Stone 0001, Yipeng Kang, Hyeonggeun Yun, Ananya, Taehun Cha, Elizaveta Tennant, Olivia Macmillan-Scott, Marta Segura, Diana Riazi, Fuyang Cui, Sriram Ganapathi, Toryn Q. Klassen, Nico Schiavone, Mogtaba Alim, Sheila A. McIlraith, Manuel Ríos, Oswaldo Peña, Manuela Chacon-Chamorro, Rubén Manrique, Luis Felipe Giraldo, Nicanor Quijano, Fangwei Zhong, Wenming Tu, Zhaowei Zhang 0001, Zixia Jia, Zilong Zheng, Chichen Lin, Weijian Fan, Chenao Liu, Sneheel Sarangi, Shuqing Shi, Yali Du 0001, Avinaash Anand Kulandaivel, Yang Liu 0266, Ruiyang Wu 0007, Chetan Talele, Sunjia Lu, Gema Parreno, Shamika Dhuri, Bain McHale, Tim Baarslag, Dylan Hadfield-Menell, Natasha Jaques, José Hernández-Orallo, Joel Z. Leibo
NeurIPS84
2025 Enhancing Personalized Multi-Turn Dialogue with Curiosity Reward
abstract
Effective conversational agents must personalize their interactions to adapt to user preferences, personalities, and attributes across diverse domains like education and healthcare. Current methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), often prioritize helpfulness and safety but fall short in fostering truly empathetic, adaptive, and personalized dialogues. Existing personalization approaches typically rely on extensive user history, limiting their effectiveness for new or context-limited users. To address these limitations, we propose leveraging a user model to incorporate a curiosity-based intrinsic reward into multi-turn RLHF. This novel reward mechanism encourages the agent to actively infer user traits by optimizing conversations to improve its user model's accuracy. Consequently, the agent delivers more personalized interactions by learning more about the user. We demonstrate our method's effectiveness in two distinct domains: significantly improving personalization performance in a conversational recommendation task, and personalizing conversations for different learning styles in an educational setting with improved generalization capabilities compared to traditional multi-turn RLHF, all while maintaining conversation quality. Our method offers a promising solution for creating more personalized, adaptive, and engaging conversational agents.
Yanming Wan, Jiaxing Wu, Marwa Abdulhai, Lior Shani, Natasha Jaques
NeurIPS5
2024 Moral Foundations of Large Language Models
abstract
Moral foundations theory (MFT) is a social psychological theory that decomposes human moral reasoning into five factors, including care/harm, liberty/oppression, and sanctity/degradation (Graham et al., 2009).People vary in the weight they place on these dimensions when making moral decisions, in part due to their cultural upbringing and political ideology.As large language models (LLMs) are trained on datasets collected from the internet, they may reflect the biases that are present in such corpora.This paper uses MFT as a lens to analyze whether popular LLMs have acquired a bias towards a particular set of moral values.We analyze known LLMs and find they exhibit particular moral foundations, and show how these relate to human moral foundations and political affiliations.We also measure the consistency of these biases, or whether they vary strongly depending on the context of how the model is prompted.Finally, we show that we can adversarially select prompts that encourage the moral to exhibit a particular set of moral foundations, and that this can affect the model's behavior on downstream tasks.These findings help illustrate the potential risks and unintended consequences of LLMs assuming a particular moral stance.
Marwa Abdulhai, Gregory Serapio-García, Clément Crepy, Daria Valter, John Canny, Natasha Jaques
EMNLP6
2024 Adaptive Accompaniment with ReaLchords
abstract
Jamming requires coordination, anticipation, and collaborative creativity between musicians. Current generative models of music produce expressive output but are not able to generate in an online manner, meaning simultaneously with other musicians (human or otherwise). We propose ReaLchords, an online generative model for improvising chord accompaniment to user melody. We start with an online model pretrained by maximum likelihood, and use reinforcement learning to finetune the model for online use. The finetuning objective leverages both a novel reward model that provides feedback on both harmonic and temporal coherency between melody and chord, and a divergence term that implements a novel type of distillation from a teacher model that can see the future melody. Through quantitative experiments and listening tests, we demonstrate that the resulting model adapts well to unfamiliar input and produce fitting accompaniment. ReaLchords opens the door to live jamming, as well as simultaneous co-creation in other modalities.
Yusong Wu, Tim Cooijmans, Kyle Kastner, Adam Roberts, Ian Simon, Alexander Scarlatos, Chris Donahue, Cassie Tarakajian, Shayegan Omidshafiei, Aaron C. Courville, Pablo Samuel Castro, Natasha Jaques, Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang
ICML12
2024 Learning to Cooperate with Humans using Generative Agents
abstract
Training agents that can coordinate zero-shot with humans is a key mission in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Current algorithms focus on training simulated human partner policies which are then used to train a Cooperator agent. The simulated human is produced either through behavior cloning over a dataset of human cooperation behavior, or by using MARL to create a population of simulated agents. However, these approaches often struggle to produce a Cooperator that can coordinate well with real humans, since the simulated humans fail to cover the diverse strategies and styles employed by people in the real world. We show \emph{learning a generative model of human partners} can effectively address this issue. Our model learns a latent variable representation of the human that can be regarded as encoding the human's unique strategy, intention, experience, or style. This generative model can be flexibly trained from any (human or neural policy) agent interaction data. By sampling from the latent space, we can use the generative model to produce different partners to train Cooperator agents. We evaluate our method---Generative Agent Modeling for Multi-agent Adaptation (GAMMA)---on Overcooked, a challenging cooperative cooking game that has become a standard benchmark for zero-shot coordination. We conduct an evaluation with real human teammates, and the results show that GAMMA consistently improves performance, whether the generative model is trained on simulated populations or human datasets. Further, we propose a method for posterior sampling from the generative model that is biased towards the human data, enabling us to efficiently improve performance with only a small amount of expensive human interaction data.
Yancheng Liang, Daphne Chen, Abhishek Gupta 0004, Simon S. Du, Natasha Jaques
NeurIPS5
2024 Personalizing Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback with Variational Preference Learning
abstract
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a powerful paradigm for aligning foundation models to human values and preferences. However, current RLHF techniques cannot account for the naturally occurring differences in individual human preferences across a diverse population. When these differences arise, traditional RLHF frameworks simply average over them, leading to inaccurate rewards and poor performance for individual subgroups. To address the need for pluralistic alignment, we develop a class of multimodal RLHF methods. Our proposed techniques are based on a latent variable formulation - inferring a novel user-specific latent and learning reward models and policies conditioned on this latent without additional user-specific data. While conceptually simple, we show that in practice, this reward modeling requires careful algorithmic considerations around model architecture and reward scaling. To empirically validate our proposed technique, we first show that it can provide a way to combat underspecification in simulated control problems, inferring and optimizing user-specific reward functions. Next, we conduct experiments on pluralistic language datasets representing diverse user preferences and demonstrate improved reward function accuracy. We additionally show the benefits of this probabilistic framework in terms of measuring uncertainty, and actively learning user preferences. This work enables learning from diverse populations of users with divergent preferences, an important challenge that naturally occurs in problems from robot learning to foundation model alignment.
Sriyash Poddar, Yanming Wan, Hamish Ivison, Natasha Jaques
NeurIPS5
2024 Melting Pot Contest: Charting the Future of Generalized Cooperative Intelligence
abstract
Multi-agent AI research promises a path to develop human-like and human-compatible intelligent technologies that complement the solipsistic view of other approaches, which mostly do not consider interactions between agents. Aiming to make progress in this direction, the Melting Pot contest 2023 focused on the problem of cooperation among interacting agents and challenged researchers to push the boundaries of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for mixed-motive games. The contest leveraged the Melting Pot environment suite to rigorously evaluate how well agents can adapt their cooperative skills to interact with novel partners in unforeseen situations. Unlike other reinforcement learning challenges, this challenge focused on social rather than environmental generalization. In particular, a population of agents performs well in Melting Pot when its component individuals are adept at finding ways to cooperate both with others in their population and with strangers. Thus Melting Pot measures cooperative intelligence.The contest attracted over 600 participants across 100+ teams globally and was a success on multiple fronts: (i) it contributed to our goal of pushing the frontiers of MARL towards building more cooperatively intelligent agents, evidenced by several submissions that outperformed established baselines; (ii) it attracted a diverse range of participants, from independent researchers to industry affiliates and academic labs, both with strong background and new interest in the area alike, broadening the field’s demographic and intellectual diversity; and (iii) analyzing the submitted agents provided important insights, highlighting areas for improvement in evaluating agents' cooperative intelligence. This paper summarizes the design aspects and results of the contest and explores the potential of Melting Pot as a benchmark for studying Cooperative AI. We further analyze the top solutions and conclude with a discussion on promising directions for future research.
Rakshit S. Trivedi, Akbir Khan, Jesse Clifton, Lewis Hammond, Edgar A. Duéñez-Guzmán, Dipam Chakraborty, John P. Agapiou, Jayd Matyas, Alexander Vezhnevets, Barna Pásztor, Yunke Ao, Omar G. Younis, Benjamin Swain, Haoyuan Qin, Mian Deng, Ziwei Deng, Utku Erdoganaras, Yue Zhao 0023, Marko Tesic, Natasha Jaques, Jakob N. Foerster, Vincent Conitzer, José Hernández-Orallo, Dylan Hadfield-Menell, Joel Z. Leibo
NeurIPS21
2022 Less is More: Generating Grounded Navigation Instructions from Landmarks
abstract
We study the automatic generation of navigation instructions from 360° images captured on indoor routes. Existing generators suffer from poor visual grounding, causing them to rely on language priors and hallucinate objects. Our Marky-mt5 system addresses this by focusing on visual landmarks; it comprises a first stage landmark detector and a second stage generator-a multimodal, multilingual, multi-task encoder-decoder. To train it, we bootstrap grounded landmark annotations on top of the Room-across-Room (RxR) dataset. Using text parsers, weak supervision from RxR's pose traces, and a multilingual image-text encoder trained on 1.8b images, we identify 971k English, Hindi and Telugu landmark descriptions and ground them to specific regions in panoramas. On Room-to-Room, human wayfind-ers obtain success rates (SR) of 71% following Marky-mt5's instructions, just shy of their 75% SR following human instructions-and well above SRs with other genera-tors. Evaluations on RxR's longer, diverse paths obtain 61-64% SRs on three languages. Generating such high-quality navigation instructions in novel environments is a step to-wards conversational navigation tools and could facilitate larger-scale training of instruction-following agents.
Su Wang 0001, Ceslee Montgomery, Jordi Orbay, Vighnesh Birodkar, Aleksandra Faust, Izzeddin Gur, Natasha Jaques, Austin Waters, Jason Baldridge
CVPR7
2021 PsiPhi-Learning: Reinforcement Learning with Demonstrations using Successor Features and Inverse Temporal Difference Learning
abstract
We study reinforcement learning (RL) with no-reward demonstrations, a setting in which an RL agent has access to additional data from the interaction of other agents with the same environment. However, it has no access to the rewards or goals of these agents, and their objectives and levels of expertise may vary widely. These assumptions are common in multi-agent settings, such as autonomous driving. To effectively use this data, we turn to the framework of successor features. This allows us to disentangle shared features and dynamics of the environment from agent-specific rewards and policies. We propose a multi-task inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) algorithm, called \emph{inverse temporal difference learning} (ITD), that learns shared state features, alongside per-agent successor features and preference vectors, purely from demonstrations without reward labels. We further show how to seamlessly integrate ITD with learning from online environment interactions, arriving at a novel algorithm for reinforcement learning with demonstrations, called $\Psi \Phi$-learning (pronounced ‘Sci-Fi’). We provide empirical evidence for the effectiveness of $\Psi \Phi$-learning as a method for improving RL, IRL, imitation, and few-shot transfer, and derive worst-case bounds for its performance in zero-shot transfer to new tasks.
Angelos Filos, Clare Lyle, Yarin Gal, Sergey Levine, Natasha Jaques, Gregory Farquhar
ICML5
2021 Emergent Social Learning via Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
abstract
Social learning is a key component of human and animal intelligence. By taking cues from the behavior of experts in their environment, social learners can acquire sophisticated behavior and rapidly adapt to new circumstances. This paper investigates whether independent reinforcement learning (RL) agents in a multi-agent environment can learn to use social learning to improve their performance. We find that in most circumstances, vanilla model-free RL agents do not use social learning. We analyze the reasons for this deficiency, and show that by imposing constraints on the training environment and introducing a model-based auxiliary loss we are able to obtain generalized social learning policies which enable agents to: i) discover complex skills that are not learned from single-agent training, and ii) adapt online to novel environments by taking cues from experts present in the new environment. In contrast, agents trained with model-free RL or imitation learning generalize poorly and do not succeed in the transfer tasks. By mixing multi-agent and solo training, we can obtain agents that use social learning to gain skills that they can deploy when alone, even out-performing agents trained alone from the start.
Kamal Ndousse, Douglas Eck, Sergey Levine, Natasha Jaques
ICML4
2021 Environment Generation for Zero-Shot Compositional Reinforcement Learning
abstract
Many real-world problems are compositional – solving them requires completing interdependent sub-tasks, either in series or in parallel, that can be represented as a dependency graph. Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents often struggle to learn such complex tasks due to the long time horizons and sparse rewards. To address this problem, we present Compositional Design of Environments (CoDE), which trains a Generator agent to automatically build a series of compositional tasks tailored to the RL agent’s current skill level. This automatic curriculum not only enables the agent to learn more complex tasks than it could have otherwise, but also selects tasks where the agent’s performance is weak, enhancing its robustness and ability to generalize zero-shot to unseen tasks at test-time. We analyze why current environment generation techniques are insufficient for the problem of generating compositional tasks, and propose a new algorithm that addresses these issues. Our results assess learning and generalization across multiple compositional tasks, including the real-world problem of learning to navigate and interact with web pages. We learn to generate environments composed of multiple pages or rooms, and train RL agents capable of completing wide-range of complex tasks in those environments. We contribute two new benchmark frameworks for generating compositional tasks, compositional MiniGrid and gMiniWoB for web navigation. CoDE yields 4x higher success rate than the strongest baseline, and demonstrates strong performance of real websites learned on 3500 primitive tasks.
Izzeddin Gur, Natasha Jaques, Yingjie Miao, Manoj Tiwari, Honglak Lee, Aleksandra Faust
NeurIPS2
2020 Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Open-Domain Dialog
abstract
Open-domain dialog generation is a challenging problem; maximum likelihood training can lead to repetitive outputs, models have difficulty tracking long-term conversational goals, and training on standard movie or online datasets may lead to the generation of inappropriate, biased, or offensive text. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful framework that could potentially address these issues, for example by allowing a dialog model to optimize for reducing toxicity and repetitiveness. However, previous approaches which apply RL to open-domain dialog generation do so at the word level, making it difficult for the model to learn proper credit assignment for long-term conversational rewards. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL), VHRL, which uses policy gradients to tune the utterance-level embedding of a variational sequence model. This hierarchical approach provides greater flexibility for learning long-term, conversational rewards. We use self-play and RL to optimize for a set of human-centered conversation metrics, and show that our approach provides significant improvements – in terms of both human evaluation and automatic metrics – over state-of-the-art dialog models, including Transformers.
Abdelrhman Saleh, Natasha Jaques, Asma Ghandeharioun, Judy Hanwen Shen, Rosalind W. Picard
AAAI2
2020 Human-centric dialog training via offline reinforcement learning
abstract
Natasha Jaques, Judy Hanwen Shen, Asma Ghandeharioun, Craig Ferguson, Agata Lapedriza, Noah Jones, Shixiang Gu, Rosalind Picard. Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). 2020.
Natasha Jaques, Judy Hanwen Shen, Asma Ghandeharioun, Craig Ferguson, Àgata Lapedriza, Noah Jones, Shixiang Gu, Rosalind W. Picard
EMNLP (1)1
2020 Emergent Complexity and Zero-shot Transfer via Unsupervised Environment Design
abstract
A wide range of reinforcement learning (RL) problems --- including robustness, transfer learning, unsupervised RL, and emergent complexity --- require specifying a distribution of tasks or environments in which a policy will be trained. However, creating a useful distribution of environments is error prone, and takes a significant amount of developer time and effort. We propose Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) as an alternative paradigm, where developers provide environments with unknown parameters, and these parameters are used to automatically produce a distribution over valid, solvable environments. Existing approaches to automatically generating environments suffer from common failure modes: domain randomization cannot generate structure or adapt the difficulty of the environment to the agent's learning progress, and minimax adversarial training leads to worst-case environments that are often unsolvable. To generate structured, solvable environments for our protagonist agent, we introduce a second, antagonist agent that is allied with the environment-generating adversary. The adversary is motivated to generate environments which maximize regret, defined as the difference between the protagonist and antagonist agent's return. We call our technique Protagonist Antagonist Induced Regret Environment Design (PAIRED). Our experiments demonstrate that PAIRED produces a natural curriculum of increasingly complex environments, and PAIRED agents achieve higher zero-shot transfer performance when tested in highly novel environments.
Michael Dennis 0001, Natasha Jaques, Eugene Vinitsky, Alexandre M. Bayen, Stuart Russell 0001, Andrew Critch, Sergey Levine
NeurIPS2
2020 Personalized Multitask Learning for Predicting Tomorrow's Mood, Stress, and Health
abstract
While accurately predicting mood and wellbeing could have a number of important clinical benefits, traditional machine learning (ML) methods frequently yield low performance in this domain. We posit that this is because a one-size-fits-all machine learning model is inherently ill-suited to predicting outcomes like mood and stress, which vary greatly due to individual differences. Therefore, we employ Multitask Learning (MTL) techniques to train personalized ML models which are customized to the needs of each individual, but still leverage data from across the population. Three formulations of MTL are compared: i) MTL deep neural networks, which share several hidden layers but have final layers unique to each task; ii) Multi-task Multi-Kernel learning, which feeds information across tasks through kernel weights on feature types; and iii) a Hierarchical Bayesian model in which tasks share a common Dirichlet Process prior. We offer the code for this work in open source. These techniques are investigated in the context of predicting future mood, stress, and health using data collected from surveys, wearable sensors, smartphone logs, and the weather. Empirical results demonstrate that using MTL to account for individual differences provides large performance improvements over traditional machine learning methods and provides personalized, actionable insights.
Sara Taylor, Natasha Jaques, Ehimwenma Nosakhare, Akane Sano, Rosalind W. Picard
IEEE Trans. Affect. Comput.2
2019 Social Influence as Intrinsic Motivation for Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning
abstract
We propose a unified mechanism for achieving coordination and communication in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), through rewarding agents for having causal influence over other agents’ actions. Causal influence is assessed using counterfactual reasoning. At each timestep, an agent simulates alternate actions that it could have taken, and computes their effect on the behavior of other agents. Actions that lead to bigger changes in other agents’ behavior are considered influential and are rewarded. We show that this is equivalent to rewarding agents for having high mutual information between their actions. Empirical results demonstrate that influence leads to enhanced coordination and communication in challenging social dilemma environments, dramatically increasing the learning curves of the deep RL agents, and leading to more meaningful learned communication protocols. The influence rewards for all agents can be computed in a decentralized way by enabling agents to learn a model of other agents using deep neural networks. In contrast, key previous works on emergent communication in the MARL setting were unable to learn diverse policies in a decentralized manner and had to resort to centralized training. Consequently, the influence reward opens up a window of new opportunities for research in this area.
Natasha Jaques, Angeliki Lazaridou, Edward Hughes 0001, Caglar Gulcehre, Pedro A. Ortega, DJ Strouse, Joel Z. Leibo, Nando de Freitas
ICML1
2019 Approximating Interactive Human Evaluation with Self-Play for Open-Domain Dialog Systems
abstract
Building an open-domain conversational agent is a challenging problem. Current evaluation methods, mostly post-hoc judgments of static conversation, do not capture conversation quality in a realistic interactive context. In this paper, we investigate interactive human evaluation and provide evidence for its necessity; we then introduce a novel, model-agnostic, and dataset-agnostic method to approximate it. In particular, we propose a self-play scenario where the dialog system talks to itself and we calculate a combination of proxies such as sentiment and semantic coherence on the conversation trajectory. We show that this metric is capable of capturing the human-rated quality of a dialog model better than any automated metric known to-date, achieving a significant Pearson correlation (r>.7, p<.05). To investigate the strengths of this novel metric and interactive evaluation in comparison to state-of-the-art metrics and human evaluation of static conversations, we perform extended experiments with a set of models, including several that make novel improvements to recent hierarchical dialog generation architectures through sentiment and semantic knowledge distillation on the utterance level. Finally, we open-source the interactive evaluation platform we built and the dataset we collected to allow researchers to efficiently deploy and evaluate dialog models.
Asma Ghandeharioun, Judy Hanwen Shen, Natasha Jaques, Craig Ferguson, Noah Jones, Àgata Lapedriza, Rosalind W. Picard
NeurIPS3
2017 Multimodal autoencoder: A deep learning approach to filling in missing sensor data and enabling better mood prediction
abstract
To accomplish forecasting of mood in real-world situations, affective computing systems need to collect and learn from multimodal data collected over weeks or months of daily use. Such systems are likely to encounter frequent data loss, e.g. when a phone loses location access, or when a sensor is recharging. Lost data can handicap classifiers trained with all modalities present in the data. This paper describes a new technique for handling missing multimodal data using a specialized denoising autoencoder: the Multimodal Autoencoder (MMAE). Empirical results from over 200 participants and 5500 days of data demonstrate that the MMAE is able to predict the feature values from multiple missing modalities more accurately than reconstruction methods such as principal components analysis (PCA). We discuss several practical benefits of the MMAE's encoding and show that it can provide robust mood prediction even when up to three quarters of the data sources are lost.
Natasha Jaques, Sara Taylor, Akane Sano, Rosalind W. Picard
ACII1
2017 Sequence Tutor: Conservative Fine-Tuning of Sequence Generation Models with KL-control
abstract
This paper proposes a general method for improving the structure and quality of sequences generated by a recurrent neural network (RNN), while maintaining information originally learned from data, as well as sample diversity. An RNN is first pre-trained on data using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), and the probability distribution over the next token in the sequence learned by this model is treated as a prior policy. Another RNN is then trained using reinforcement learning (RL) to generate higher-quality outputs that account for domain-specific incentives while retaining proximity to the prior policy of the MLE RNN. To formalize this objective, we derive novel off-policy RL methods for RNNs from KL-control. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated on two applications; 1) generating novel musical melodies, and 2) computational molecular generation. For both problems, we show that the proposed method improves the desired properties and structure of the generated sequences, while maintaining information learned from data.
Natasha Jaques, Shixiang Gu, Dzmitry Bahdanau, José Miguel Hernández-Lobato, Richard E. Turner, Douglas Eck
ICML1
2016 Personality, Attitudes, and Bonding in Conversations
Natasha Jaques, Yoo Lim Kim, Rosalind W. Picard
IVA1
2016 Understanding and Predicting Bonding in Conversations Using Thin Slices of Facial Expressions and Body Language
Natasha Jaques, Daniel McDuff, Yoo Lim Kim, Rosalind W. Picard
IVA1
2015 Predicting students' happiness from physiology, phone, mobility, and behavioral data
abstract
In order to model students' happiness, we apply machine learning methods to data collected from undergrad students monitored over the course of one month each. The data collected include physiological signals, location, smartphone logs, and survey responses to behavioral questions. Each day, participants reported their wellbeing on measures including stress, health, and happiness. Because of the relationship between happiness and depression, modeling happiness may help us to detect individuals who are at risk of depression and guide interventions to help them. We are also interested in how behavioral factors (such as sleep and social activity) affect happiness positively and negatively. A variety of machine learning and feature selection techniques are compared, including Gaussian Mixture Models and ensemble classification. We achieve 70% classification accuracy of self-reported happiness on held-out test data.
Natasha Jaques, Sara Taylor, Asaph Azaria, Asma Ghandeharioun, Akane Sano, Rosalind W. Picard
ACII1
2015 Recognizing academic performance, sleep quality, stress level, and mental health using personality traits, wearable sensors and mobile phones
abstract
What can wearable sensors and usage of smart phones tell us about academic performance, self-reported sleep quality, stress and mental health condition? To answer this question, we collected extensive subjective and objective data using mobile phones, surveys, and wearable sensors worn day and night from 66 participants, for 30 days each, totaling 1,980 days of data. We analyzed daily and monthly behavioral and physiological patterns and identified factors that affect academic performance (GPA), Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) score, perceived stress scale (PSS), and mental health composite score (MCS) from SF-12, using these month-long data. We also examined how accurately the collected data classified the participants into groups of high/low GPA, good/poor sleep quality, high/low self-reported stress, high/low MCS using feature selection and machine learning techniques. We found associations among PSQI, PSS, MCS, and GPA and personality types. Classification accuracies using the objective data from wearable sensors and mobile phones ranged from 67-92%.
Akane Sano, Andrew J. K. Phillips, Amy Z. Yu, Andrew W. McHill, Sara Taylor, Natasha Jaques, Charles A. Czeisler, Elizabeth B. Klerman, Rosalind W. Picard
BSN6
2014 Predicting Affect from Gaze Data during Interaction with an Intelligent Tutoring System
Natasha Jaques, Cristina Conati, Jason M. Harley, Roger Azevedo
Intelligent Tutoring Systems1