Extending Interactive Task Learning

Abstract

Our goal is creating artificial agents that can interact with humans and learn completely new tasks through instruction. Solving this problem requires integrating man:' capabilities across AI. In this project, we identified three dimensions of task complexity (diverse types of actions, task formulations, and task modifiers), and implemented extensions that demonstrate greater learning capabilities for each dimension than previous work. First, we extended the representations and learning mechanism for innate tasks so the agent can learn tasks that utilize many different types of actions beyond physical object manipulation, such as communication and mental operations. Second, we implemented a novel goal-graph representation so that an instructor can formulate a task as achieving a goc.l and let the agent use planning to execute it, or can formulate the task as executing a procedure, or sequence of steps, when it is not easy to define a goal. Third, we added support for learning subtasks with various modifying clauses, such as temporal constraints, conditions, or looping structures. Our system has been used with various robotic platforms, and it combines all of these extensions while learning complex hierarchical tasks that cover extended periods of time and demonstrate significant flexibility.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 22, 2021
Accession Number
AD1224115

Entities

People

  • John E. Laird

Organizations

  • University of Michigan

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Instructional Design and Training Evaluation.
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - Autonomous System Control