Hierarchical Control of Situated Agents through Natural Language

Shuyan Zhou, Pengcheng Yin, Graham Neubig


Abstract
When humans perform a particular task, they do so hierarchically: splitting higher-level tasks into smaller sub-tasks. However, most works on natural language (NL) command of situated agents have treated the procedures to be executed as flat sequences of simple actions, or any hierarchies of procedures have been shallow at best. In this paper, we propose a formalism of procedures as programs, a method for representing hierarchical procedural knowledge for agent command and control aimed at enabling easy application to various scenarios. We further propose a modeling paradigm of hierarchical modular networks, which consist of a planner and reactors that convert NL intents to predictions of executable programs and probe the environment for information necessary to complete the program execution. We instantiate this framework on the IQA and ALFRED datasets for NL instruction following. Our model outperforms reactive baselines by a large margin on both datasets. We also demonstrate that our framework is more data-efficient, and that it allows for fast iterative development.
Anthology ID:
2022.suki-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Structured and Unstructured Knowledge Integration (SUKI)
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, USA
Editors:
Wenhu Chen, Xinyun Chen, Zhiyu Chen, Ziyu Yao, Michihiro Yasunaga, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang
Venue:
SUKI
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
67–84
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.suki-1.8
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.suki-1.8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shuyan Zhou, Pengcheng Yin, and Graham Neubig. 2022. Hierarchical Control of Situated Agents through Natural Language. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Structured and Unstructured Knowledge Integration (SUKI), pages 67–84, Seattle, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hierarchical Control of Situated Agents through Natural Language (Zhou et al., SUKI 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.suki-1.8.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.suki-1.8.mp4
Data
ALFRED