Learning to Model the World with Language

To interact with humans in the world, agents need to understand the diverse types of language that people use, relate them to the visual world, and act based on them. While current agents learn to execute simple language instructions from task rewards, we aim to build agents that leverage diverse language that conveys general knowledge, describes the state of the world, provides interactive feedback, and more. Our key idea is that language helps agents predict the future: what will be observed, how the world will behave, and which situations will be rewarded. This perspective unifies language understanding with future prediction as a powerful self-supervised learning objective. We present Dynalang, an agent that learns a multimodal world model that predicts future text and image representations and learns to act from imagined model rollouts. Unlike traditional agents that use language only to predict actions, Dynalang acquires rich language understanding by using past language also to predict future language, video, and rewards. In addition to learning from online interaction in an environment, Dynalang can be pretrained on datasets of text, video, or both without actions or rewards. From using language hints in grid worlds to navigating photorealistic scans of homes, Dynalang utilizes diverse types of language to improve task performance, including environment descriptions, game rules, and instructions.

Open Problems and Fundamental Limitations of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a technique for training AI systems to align with human goals. RLHF has emerged as the central method used to finetune state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). Despite this popularity, there has been relatively little public work systematizing its flaws. In this paper, we (1) survey open problems and fundamental limitations of RLHF and related methods; (2) overview techniques to understand, improve, and complement RLHF in practice; and (3) propose auditing and disclosure standards to improve societal oversight of RLHF systems. Our work emphasizes the limitations of RLHF and highlights the importance of a multi-faceted approach to the development of safer AI systems.

Goal Representations for Instruction Following: A Semi-Supervised Language Interface to Control

Our goal is for robots to follow natural language instructions like "put the towel next to the microwave." But getting large amounts of labeled data, i.e. data that contains demonstrations of tasks labeled with the language instruction, is prohibitive. In contrast, obtaining policies that respond to image goals is much easier, because any autonomous trial or demonstration can be labeled in hindsight with its final state as the goal. In this work, we contribute a method that taps into joint image- and goal- conditioned policies with language using only a small amount of language data. Prior work has made progress on this using vision-language models or by jointly training language-goal-conditioned policies, but so far neither method has scaled effectively to real-world robot tasks without significant human annotation. Our method achieves robust performance in the real world by learning an embedding from the labeled data that aligns language not to the goal image, but rather to the desired change between the start and goal images that the instruction corresponds to. We then train a policy on this embedding: the policy benefits from all the unlabeled data, but the aligned embedding provides an interface for language to steer the policy. We show instruction following across a variety of manipulation tasks in different scenes, with generalization to language instructions outside of the labeled data. Videos and code for our approach can be found on our website: http://tiny.cc/grif .

Toward Grounded Social Reasoning

Consider a robot tasked with tidying a desk with a meticulously constructed Lego sports car. A human may recognize that it is not socially appropriate to disassemble the sports car and put it away as part of the "tidying". How can a robot reach that conclusion? Although large language models (LLMs) have recently been used to enable social reasoning, grounding this reasoning in the real world has been challenging. To reason in the real world, robots must go beyond passively querying LLMs and *actively gather information from the environment* that is required to make the right decision. For instance, after detecting that there is an occluded car, the robot may need to actively perceive the car to know whether it is an advanced model car made out of Legos or a toy car built by a toddler. We propose an approach that leverages an LLM and vision language model (VLM) to help a robot actively perceive its environment to perform grounded social reasoning. To evaluate our framework at scale, we release the MessySurfaces dataset which contains images of 70 real-world surfaces that need to be cleaned. We additionally illustrate our approach with a robot on 2 carefully designed surfaces. We find an average 12.9% improvement on the MessySurfaces benchmark and an average 15% improvement on the robot experiments over baselines that do not use active perception. The dataset, code, and videos of our approach can be found at https://minaek.github.io/groundedsocialreasoning.

Bridging RL Theory and Practice with the Effective Horizon

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) works impressively in some environments and fails catastrophically in others. Ideally, RL theory should be able to provide an understanding of why this is, i.e. bounds predictive of practical performance. Unfortunately, current theory does not quite have this ability. We compare standard deep RL algorithms to prior sample complexity prior bounds by introducing a new dataset, BRIDGE. It consists of 155 MDPs from common deep RL benchmarks, along with their corresponding tabular representations, which enables us to exactly compute instance-dependent bounds. We find that prior bounds do not correlate well with when deep RL succeeds vs. fails, but discover a surprising property that does. When actions with the highest Q-values under the random policy also have the highest Q-values under the optimal policy, deep RL tends to succeed; when they don't, deep RL tends to fail. We generalize this property into a new complexity measure of an MDP that we call the effective horizon, which roughly corresponds to how many steps of lookahead search are needed in order to identify the next optimal action when leaf nodes are evaluated with random rollouts. Using BRIDGE, we show that the effective horizon-based bounds are more closely reflective of the empirical performance of PPO and DQN than prior sample complexity bounds across four metrics. We also show that, unlike existing bounds, the effective horizon can predict the effects of using reward shaping or a pre-trained exploration policy.

Learning to Influence Human Behavior with Offline Reinforcement Learning

In the real world, some of the most complex settings for learned agents involve interaction with humans, who often exhibit suboptimal, unpredictable behavior due to sophisticated biases. Agents that interact with people in such settings end up influencing the actions that these people take. Our goal in this work is to enable agents to leverage that influence to improve the human's performance in collaborative tasks, as the task unfolds. Unlike prior work, we do not assume online training with people (which tends to be too expensive and unsafe), nor access to a high fidelity simulator of the environment. Our idea is that by taking a variety of previously observed human-human interaction data and labeling it with the task reward, offline reinforcement learning (RL) can learn to combine components of behavior, and uncover actions that lead to more desirable human actions. First, we show that offline RL can learn strategies to influence and improve human behavior, despite those strategies not appearing in the dataset, by utilizing components of diverse, suboptimal interactions. In addition, we demonstrate that offline RL can learn influence that adapts with humans, thus achieving long-term coordination with them even when their behavior changes. We evaluate our proposed method with real people in the Overcooked collaborative benchmark domain, and demonstrate successful improvement in human performance.

Automatically Auditing Large Language Models via Discrete Optimization

Auditing large language models for unexpected behaviors is critical to preempt catastrophic deployments, yet remains challenging. In this work, we cast auditing as an optimization problem, where we automatically search for input-output pairs that match a desired target behavior. For example, we might aim to find a non-toxic input that starts with "Barack Obama" that a model maps to a toxic output. This optimization problem is difficult to solve as the set of feasible points is sparse, the space is discrete, and the language models we audit are non-linear and high-dimensional. To combat these challenges, we introduce a discrete optimization algorithm, ARCA, that jointly and efficiently optimizes over inputs and outputs. Our approach automatically uncovers derogatory completions about celebrities (e.g. "Barack Obama is a legalized unborn" -> "child murderer"), produces French inputs that complete to English outputs, and finds inputs that generate a specific name. Our work offers a promising new tool to uncover models' failure-modes before deployment.

Towards Modeling and Influencing the Dynamics of Human Learning

Humans have internal models of robots (like their physical capabilities), the world (like what will happen next), and their tasks (like a preferred goal). However, human internal models are not always perfect: for example, it is easy to underestimate a robot's inertia. Nevertheless, these models change and improve over time as humans gather more experience. Interestingly, robot actions influence what this experience is, and therefore influence how people's internal models change. In this work we take a step towards enabling robots to understand the influence they have, leverage it to better assist people, and help human models more quickly align with reality. Our key idea is to model the human's learning as a nonlinear dynamical system which evolves the human's internal model given new observations. We formulate a novel optimization problem to infer the human's learning dynamics from demonstrations that naturally exhibit human learning. We then formalize how robots can influence human learning by embedding the human's learning dynamics model into the robot planning problem. Although our formulations provide concrete problem statements, they are intractable to solve in full generality. We contribute an approximation that sacrifices the complexity of the human internal models we can represent, but enables robots to learn the nonlinear dynamics of these internal models. We evaluate our inference and planning methods in a suite of simulated environments and an in-person user study, where a 7DOF robotic arm teaches participants to be better teleoperators. While influencing human learning remains an open problem, our results demonstrate that this influence is possible and can be helpful in real human-robot interaction.

On the Sensitivity of Reward Inference to Misspecified Human Models

Inferring reward functions from human behavior is at the center of value alignment - aligning AI objectives with what we, humans, actually want. But doing so relies on models of how humans behave given their objectives. After decades of research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and behavioral economics, obtaining accurate human models remains an open research topic. This begs the question: how accurate do these models need to be in order for the reward inference to be accurate? On the one hand, if small errors in the model can lead to catastrophic error in inference, the entire framework of reward learning seems ill-fated, as we will never have perfect models of human behavior. On the other hand, if as our models improve, we can have a guarantee that reward accuracy also improves, this would show the benefit of more work on the modeling side. We study this question both theoretically and empirically. We do show that it is unfortunately possible to construct small adversarial biases in behavior that lead to arbitrarily large errors in the inferred reward. However, and arguably more importantly, we are also able to identify reasonable assumptions under which the reward inference error can be bounded linearly in the error in the human model. Finally, we verify our theoretical insights in discrete and continuous control tasks with simulated and human data.

Time-Efficient Reward Learning via Visually Assisted Cluster Ranking

One of the most successful paradigms for reward learning uses human feedback in the form of comparisons. Although these methods hold promise, human comparison labeling is expensive and time consuming, constituting a major bottleneck to their broader applicability. Our insight is that we can greatly improve how effectively human time is used in these approaches by batching comparisons together, rather than having the human label each comparison individually. To do so, we leverage data dimensionality-reduction and visualization techniques to provide the human with a interactive GUI displaying the state space, in which the user can label subportions of the state space. Across some simple Mujoco tasks, we show that this high-level approach holds promise and is able to greatly increase the performance of the resulting agents, provided the same amount of human labeling time.