This paper describes an implementation of a bot assistant in Minecraft, and the tools and platform allowing players to interact with the bot and to record those interactions. The purpose of building such an assistant is to facilitate the study of agents that can complete tasks specified by dialogue, and eventually, to learn from dialogue interactions.
Dialogue systems have many applications such as customer support or question answering. Typically they have been limited to shallow single turn interactions. However more advanced applications such as career coaching or planning a trip require a much more complex multi-turn dialogue. Current limitations of conversational systems have made it difficult to support applications that require personalization, customization and context dependent interactions. We tackle this challenging problem by using domain-independent AI planning to automatically create dialogue plans, customized to guide a dialogue towards achieving a given goal. The input includes a library of atomic dialogue actions, an initial state of the dialogue, and a goal. Dialogue plans are plugged into a dialogue system capable to orchestrate their execution. Use cases demonstrate the viability of the approach. Our work on dialogue planning has been integrated into a product, and it is in the process of being deployed into another.
Goal-oriented dialogue systems typically rely on components specifically developed for a single task or domain. This limits such systems in two different ways: If there is an update in the task domain, the dialogue system usually needs to be updated or completely re-trained. It is also harder to extend such dialogue systems to different and multiple domains. The dialogue state tracker in conventional dialogue systems is one such component - it is usually designed to fit a well-defined application domain. For example, it is common for a state variable to be a categorical distribution over a manually-predefined set of entities (Henderson et al., 2013), resulting in an inflexible and hard-to-extend dialogue system. In this paper, we propose a new approach for dialogue state tracking that can generalize well over multiple domains without incorporating any domain-specific knowledge. Under this framework, discrete dialogue state variables are learned independently and the information of a predefined set of possible values for dialogue state variables is not required. Furthermore, it enables adding arbitrary dialogue context as features and allows for multiple values to be associated with a single state variable. These characteristics make it much easier to expand the dialogue state space. We evaluate our framework using the widely used dialogue state tracking challenge data set (DSTC2) and show that our framework yields competitive results with other state-of-the-art results despite incorporating little domain knowledge. We also show that this framework can benefit from widely available external resources such as pre-trained word embeddings.
Dialogue research tends to distinguish between chit-chat and goal-oriented tasks. While the former is arguably more naturalistic and has a wider use of language, the latter has clearer metrics and a straightforward learning signal. Humans effortlessly combine the two, for example engaging in chit-chat with the goal of exchanging information or eliciting a specific response. Here, we bridge the divide between these two domains in the setting of a rich multi-player text-based fantasy environment where agents and humans engage in both actions and dialogue. Specifically, we train a goal-oriented model with reinforcement learning against an imitation-learned ``chit-chat model with two approaches: the policy either learns to pick a topic or learns to pick an utterance given the top-K utterances from the chit-chat model. We show that both models outperform an inverse model baseline and can converse naturally with their dialogue partner in order to achieve goals.
A formal description of a Cyber-Physical system should include a rigorous specification of the computational and physical components involved, as well as their interaction. Such a description, thus, lends itself to a compositional model where every module in the model specifies the behavior of a (computational or physical) component or the interaction between different components. We propose a framework based on Soft Constraint Automata that facilitates the component-wise description of such systems and includes the tools necessary to compose subsystems in a meaningful way, to yield a description of the entire system. Most importantly, Soft Constraint Automata allow the description and composition of components preferences as well as environmental constraints in a uniform fashion. We illustrate the utility of our framework using a detailed description of a patrolling robot, while highlighting methods of composition as well as possible techniques to employ them.
Predicting future sensory states is crucial for learning agents such as robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we couple multiple sensory modalities with exploratory actions and propose a predictive neural network architecture to address this problem. Most existing approaches rely on large, manually annotated datasets, or only use visual data as a single modality. In contrast, the unsupervised method presented here uses multi-modal perceptions for predicting future visual frames. As a result, the proposed model is more comprehensive and can better capture the spatio-temporal dynamics of the environment, leading to more accurate visual frame prediction. The other novelty of our framework is the use of sub-networks dedicated to anticipating future haptic, audio, and tactile signals. The framework was tested and validated with a dataset containing 4 sensory modalities (vision, haptic, audio, and tactile) on a humanoid robot performing 9 behaviors multiple times on a large set of objects. While the visual information is the dominant modality, utilizing the additional non-visual modalities improves the accuracy of predictions.