United States

Robots operating in human spaces must be able to engage in natural language interaction, both understanding and executing instructions, and using conversation to resolve ambiguity and correct mistakes. To study this, we introduce TEACh, a dataset of over 3,000 human-human, interactive dialogues to complete household tasks in simulation. A Commander with access to oracle information about a task communicates in natural language with a Follower. The Follower navigates through and interacts with the environment to complete tasks varying in complexity from &quot;Make Coffee&quot; to &quot;Prepare Breakfast&quot;, asking questions and getting additional information from the Commander. We propose three benchmarks using TEACh to study embodied intelligence challenges, and we evaluate initial models&#39; abilities in dialogue understanding, language grounding, and task execution.

AAAI 2022

TEACh: Task-Driven Embodied Agents that Chat

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Robots operating in human spaces must be able to engage in natural language interaction, both understanding and executing instructions, and using conversation to resolve ambiguity and correct mistakes. To study this, we introduce TEACh, a dataset of over 3,000 human-human, interactive dialogues to complete household tasks in simulation. A Commander with access to oracle information about a task communicates in natural language with a Follower. The Follower navigates through and interacts with the environment to complete tasks varying in complexity from "Make Coffee" to "Prepare Breakfast", asking questions and getting additional information from the Commander. We propose three benchmarks using TEACh to study embodied intelligence challenges, and we evaluate initial models' abilities in dialogue understanding, language grounding, and task execution.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Code understanding is an increasingly important application of Artificial Intelligence. A fundamental aspect of understanding code is understanding text about code, e.g., documentation  and forum discussions.  Pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT) are a popular approach for various NLP tasks, and there are now a variety of benchmarks, such as GLUE, to help improve the development of such models for natural language understanding. However, little is known about how well such models work on textual artifacts about code, and we are unaware of any systematic set of downstream tasks for such an evaluation.  In this paper, we derive a set of benchmarks (BLANCA - Benchmarks for LANguage models on Coding Artifacts) that assess code understanding based on tasks such as predicting the best answer to a question in a forum post, finding related forum posts, or predicting classes related in a hierarchy from class documentation.  We evaluate performance of current state-of-the-art language models on these tasks and show that there is significant improvement on each task from fine tuning.  We also show that multi-task training over BLANCA tasks help build better language models for code understanding.

Can Machines Read Coding Manuals Yet? – A Benchmark for Building Better Language Models for Code Understanding

Real world tasks are hierarchical and compositional. Tasks can be composed of multiple subtasks (or sub-goals) that are dependent on each other. These subtasks are defined in terms of entities (e.g., "apple", "pear") that can be recombined to form new subtasks (e.g., "pickup apple", and "pickup pear"). To solve these tasks efficiently, an agent must infer subtask dependencies (e.g. an agent must execute "pickup apple" before "place apple in pot"), and generalize the inferred dependencies to new subtasks (e.g. "place apple in pot" is similar to "place apple in pan"). Moreover, an agent may also need to solve unseen tasks, which can involve unseen entities. To this end, we formulate parameterized subtask graph inference (PSGI), a method for modeling subtask dependencies using first-order logic with factored entities. To facilitate this, we learn parameter attributes in a zero-shot manner, which are used as quantifiers (e.g. is_pickable(X)) for the factored subtask graph. We show this approach accurately learns the latent structure on hierarchical and compositional tasks more efficiently than prior work, and show PSGI can generalize by modelling structure on subtasks unseen during adaptation.

Learning Parameterized Task Structure for Generalization to Unseen Entities

Walrasian equilibrium is a prominent market equilibrium notion, but rarely exists in markets with indivisible items.
 We introduce a new market equilibrium notion, called two-price equilibrium (2PE). A 2PE is a relaxation of Walrasian equilibrium, where instead of a single price per item, every item has two prices: one for the item's owner and a (possibly) higher one for all other buyers. 
 Thus, a 2PE is given by a tuple (S,p_high,p_low) of an allocation S and two price vectors p_high,p_low, where every buyer i is maximally happy with her bundle S_i, given prices p_low for items in S_i and prices p_high for all other items. 
 2PE generalizes previous market equilibrium notions, such as conditional equilibrium, and is related to relaxed equilibrium notions like endowment equilibrium. 
 We define the discrepancy of a 2PE --- a measure of distance from Walrasian equilibrium --- as the sum of differences p_high_j-p_low_j over all items (normalized by social welfare).
 We show that the social welfare degrades gracefully with the discrepancy; namely, the social welfare of a 2PE with discrepancy d is at least a fraction 1/d+1 of the optimal welfare.
 We use this to establish welfare guarantees for markets with subadditive valuations over identical items.
 In particular, we show that every such market admits a 2PE with at least 1/7 of the optimal welfare.
 This is in contrast to Walrasian equilibrium or conditional equilibrium which may not even exist.
 Our techniques provide new insights regarding valuation functions over identical items, which we also use to characterize instances that admit a WE.

Two-Price Equilibrium

We study the problem of fair and efficient allocation of a set of indivisible chores to agents with additive cost functions. We consider the popular fairness notion of envy-freeness up to one good (EF1) with the efficiency notion of Pareto-optimality (PO). While it is known that EF1+PO allocations exists and can be computed in pseudo-polynomial time in the case of goods, the same problem is open for chores.
 
 Our first result is a strongly polynomial-time algorithm for computing an EF1+PO allocation for bivalued instances, where agents have (at most) two disutility values for the chores. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first non-trivial class of chores to admit an EF1+PO allocation and an efficient algorithm for its computation. 
 
 We also study the problem of computing an envy-free (EF) and PO allocation for the case of divisible chores. While the existence of EF+PO allocation is known via competitive equilibrium with equal incomes, its efficient computation is open. Our second result shows that for bivalued instances, an EF+PO allocation can be computed in strongly polynomial-time.

Fair and Efficient Allocations of Chores under Bivalued Preferences

Many real-world scenarios, such as human activity recognition (HAR) in IoT, can be formalized as a multi-task multi-view learning problem. Each specific task consists of multiple shared feature views collected from multiple sources, either homogeneous or heterogeneous. Common among recent approaches is to employ a typical hard/soft sharing strategy at the initial phase separately for each view across tasks to uncover common knowledge, underlying the assumption that all views are conditionally independent. On the one hand, multiple views across tasks possibly relate to each other under practical situations. On the other hand, supervised methods might be insufficient when labeled data is scarce. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a novel framework ASM2TV for semi-supervised multi-task multi-view learning. We present a new perspective named gating control policy, a learnable task-view-interacted sharing policy that adaptively selects the most desirable candidate shared block for any view across any task, which uncovers more fine-grained task-view-interacted relatedness and improves inference efficiency. Significantly, our proposed gathering consistency adaption procedure takes full advantage of large amounts of unlabeled fragmented time-series, making it a general framework that accommodates a wide range of applications. Experiments on two diverse real-world HAR benchmark datasets collected from various subjects and sources demonstrate our framework's superiority over other state-of-the-arts. Anonymous codes are available at https://github.com/zachstarkk/ASM2TV.

ASM2TV: An Adaptive Semi-Supervised Multi-Task Multi-View Learning Framework for Human Activity Recognition

Gradient temporal difference (Gradient TD) algorithms are a popular class of stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms used for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. Here, we consider Gradient TD algorithms with an additional heavy ball momentum term and provide choice of step size and momentum parameter that ensures almost sure convergence of these algorithms asymptotically. In doing so, we decompose the heavy ball Gradient TD iterates into three separate iterates with different step sizes. We first analyze these iterates under one-timescale SA setting using results from current literature. However, the one-timescale case is restrictive and a more general analysis can be provided by looking at a three-timescale decomposition of the iterates. In the process we provide the first conditions for stability and convergence of general three-timescale SA. We then prove that the heavy ball Gradient TD algorithm is convergent using our three-timescale SA analysis. Finally, we evaluate these algorithms on standard RL problems and report improvement in performance over the vanilla algorithms.

Gradient Temporal Difference with Momentum: Stability and Convergence

Graph matching aims to establish correspondences between vertices of graphs such that both the node and edge attributes agree. Various learning-based methods were recently proposed for finding correspondences between image key points based on deep graph matching formulations. While these approaches mainly focus on learning node and edge attributes, they completely ignore the 3D geometry of the underlying 3D objects depicted in the 2D images. We fill this gap by proposing a trainable framework that takes advantage of graph neural networks for learning a deformable 3D geometry model from inhomogeneous image collections, i.e. a set of images that depict different instances of objects from the same category. Experimentally we demonstrate that our method outperforms recent learning-based approaches for graph matching considering both accuracy and cycle-consistency error, while we in addition obtain the underlying 3D geometry of the objects depicted in the 2D images.

Joint Deep Multi-Graph Matching and 3D Geometry Learning from Inhomogeneous 2D Image Collections

Goal Recognition Design (GRD) problems identify the minimum number of environmental modifications aiming to force an interacting agent to reveal its goal as early as possible. Researchers proposed several extensions to the original model, some of them handling stochastic agent action outcomes. While this generalization is useful, it assumes optimal acting agents, which limits its applicability to more realistic scenarios. This paper presents the Suboptimal Stochastic GRD model, where we consider boundedly rational agents that, due to limited resources, might follow a suboptimal policy. Inspired by theories on human behavior asserting that humans are (close to) optimal when making perceptual decisions, we assume the chosen policy has at most m suboptimal actions. Our contribution includes (I) Extending the stochastic goal recognition design framework by supporting suboptimal agents in cases where an observer has either full or partial observability; (ii) Presenting methods to evaluate the ambiguity of the model under these assumptions; and (iii) Evaluating our approach on a range of benchmark applications.

Stochastic Goal Recognition Design Problems with Suboptimal Agents

Uncertainty estimation is an essential step in the evaluation of the robustness for deep learning models in computer vision, especially when applied in risk-sensitive areas. However, most state-of-the-art deep learning models either fail to obtain uncertainty estimation or need significant modification (e.g., formulating a proper Bayesian treatment) to obtain it. Most previous methods are not able to take an arbitrary model off the shelf and generate uncertainty estimation without retraining or redesigning it. To address this gap, we perform a systematic exploration into training-free uncertainty estimation for dense regression, an unrecognized yet important problem, and provide a theoretical construction justifying such estimations. We propose three simple and scalable methods to analyze the variance of outputs from a trained network under tolerable perturbations: infer-transformation, infer-noise, and infer-dropout. They operate solely during the inference, without the need to re-train, re-design, or fine-tune the models, as typically required by state-of-the-art uncertainty estimation methods. Surprisingly, even without involving such perturbations in training, our methods produce comparable or even better uncertainty estimation when compared to training-required state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/lumi9587/train-free-uncertainty.

Training-Free Uncertainty Estimation for Dense Regression: Sensitivity as a Surrogate

Hamiltonian systems represent an important class of dynamical systems such as pendulums, molecular dynamics, and cosmic systems. The choice of solvers is significant to the accuracy when simulating Hamiltonian systems, where symplectic solvers show great significance. Recent advances in neural network-based hypersolvers, though achieve competitive results, still lack the symplecity necessary for reliable simulations, especially over long time horizons. To alleviate this, we introduce Hyperverlet, a new hypersolver composing the traditional, symplectic velocity Verlet and symplectic neural network-based solvers. More specifically, we propose a parameterization of symplectic neural networks and prove that hyperbolic tangent is r-finite expanding the set of allowable activation functions for symplectic neural networks, improving the accuracy. Extensive experiments on a spring-mass and a pendulum system justify the design choices and suggest that Hyperverlet outperforms both traditional solvers and hypersolvers.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2022

Can Machines Read Coding Manuals Yet? – A Benchmark for Building Better Language Models for Code Understanding

Similar lecture

FOAM: A Follower-aware Speaker Model For Vision-and-Language Navigation

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from AAAI 2022

Can Machines Read Coding Manuals Yet? – A Benchmark for Building Better Language Models for Code Understanding

Similar lecture

FOAM: A Follower-aware Speaker Model For Vision-and-Language Navigation

Downloads