Akihiro Kishimoto


2022

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Finding Sub-task Structure with Natural Language Instruction
Ryokan Ri | Yufang Hou | Radu Marinescu | Akihiro Kishimoto
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Learning with Natural Language Supervision

When mapping a natural language instruction to a sequence of actions, it is often useful toidentify sub-tasks in the instruction. Such sub-task segmentation, however, is not necessarily provided in the training data. We present the A2LCTC (Action-to-Language Connectionist Temporal Classification) algorithm to automatically discover a sub-task segmentation of an action sequence.A2LCTC does not require annotations of correct sub-task segments and learns to find them from pairs of instruction and action sequence in a weakly-supervised manner. We experiment with the ALFRED dataset and show that A2LCTC accurately finds the sub-task structures. With the discovered sub-tasks segments, we also train agents that work on the downstream task and empirically show that our algorithm improves the performance.