Yes, this Way! Learning to Ground Referring Expressions into Actions with Intra-episodic Feedback from Supportive Teachers

Philipp Sadler, Sherzod Hakimov, David Schlangen


Abstract
The ability to pick up on language signals in an ongoing interaction is crucial for future machine learning models to collaborate and interact with humans naturally. In this paper, we present an initial study that evaluates intra-episodic feedback given in a collaborative setting. We use a referential language game as a controllable example of a task-oriented collaborative joint activity. A teacher utters a referring expression generated by a well-known symbolic algorithm (the “Incremental Algorithm”) as an initial instruction and then monitors the follower’s actions to possibly intervene with intra-episodic feedback (which does not explicitly have to be requested). We frame this task as a reinforcement learning problem with sparse rewards and learn a follower policy for a heuristic teacher. Our results show that intra-episodic feedback allows the follower to generalize on aspects of scene complexity and performs better than providing only the initial statement.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.587
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9228–9239
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.587
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.587
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Philipp Sadler, Sherzod Hakimov, and David Schlangen. 2023. Yes, this Way! Learning to Ground Referring Expressions into Actions with Intra-episodic Feedback from Supportive Teachers. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 9228–9239, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Yes, this Way! Learning to Ground Referring Expressions into Actions with Intra-episodic Feedback from Supportive Teachers (Sadler et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.587.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.587.mp4