Learning a Hierarchical Planner from Humans in Multiple Generations

A typical way in which a machine acquires knowledge from humans is by programming. Compared to learning from demonstrations or experiences, programmatic learning allows the machine to acquire a novel skill as soon as the program is written, and, by building a library of programs, a machine can quickly learn how to perform complex tasks. However, as programs often take their execution contexts for granted, they are brittle when the contexts change, making it difficult to adapt complex programs to new contexts. We present natural programming, a library learning system that combines programmatic learning with a hierarchical planner. Natural programming maintains a library of decompositions, consisting of a goal, a linguistic description of how this goal decompose into sub-goals, and a concrete instance of its decomposition into sub-goals. A user teaches the system via curriculum building, by identifying a challenging yet not impossible goal along with linguistic hints on how this goal may be decomposed into sub-goals. The system solves for the goal via hierarchical planning, using the linguistic hints to guide its probability distribution in proposing the right plans. The system learns from this interaction by adding newly found decompositions in the successful search into its library. Simulated studies and a human experiment (n=360) on a controlled environment demonstrate that natural programming can robustly compose programs learned from different users and contexts, adapting faster and solving more complex tasks when compared to programmatic baselines.

Compositional Foundation Models for Hierarchical Planning

To make effective decisions in novel environments with long-horizon goals, it is crucial to engage in hierarchical reasoning across spatial and temporal scales. This entails planning abstract subgoal sequences, visually reasoning about the underlying plans, and executing actions in accordance with the devised plan through visual-motor control. We propose Compositional Foundation Models for Hierarchical Planning (HiP), a foundation model which leverages multiple expert foundation model trained on language, vision and action data individually jointly together to solve long-horizon tasks. We use a large language model to construct symbolic plans that are grounded in the environment through a large video diffusion model. Generated video plans are then grounded to visual-motor control, through an inverse dynamics model that infers actions from generated videos. To enable effective reasoning within this hierarchy, we enforce consistency between the models via iterative refinement. We illustrate the efficacy and adaptability of our approach in three different long-horizon table-top manipulation tasks.

Inferring the Future by Imagining the Past

A single panel of a comic book can say a lot: it shows not only where characters currently are, but also where they came from, what their motivations are, and what might happen next. More generally, humans can often infer a complex sequence of past and future events from a *single snapshot image* of an intelligent agent. Building on recent work in cognitive science, we offer a Monte Carlo algorithm for making such inferences. Drawing a connection to Monte Carlo path tracing in computer graphics, we borrow ideas that help us dramatically improve upon prior work in sample efficiency. This allows us to scale to a wide variety of challenging inference problems with only a handful of samples. It also suggests some degree of cognitive plausibility, and indeed we present human subject studies showing that our algorithm matches human intuitions in a variety of domains that previous methods could not scale to.

Acting as Inverse Inverse Planning

Great storytellers know how to take us on a journey. They direct characters to act -- not necessarily in the most rational way -- but rather in a way that leads to interesting situations, and ultimately creates an impactful experience for audience members looking on. If audience experience is what matters most, then can we help artists and animators *directly* craft such experiences, independent of the concrete character actions needed to evoke those experiences? In this paper, we offer a novel computational framework for such tools. Our key idea is to optimize animations with respect to *simulated* audience members' experiences. To simulate the audience, we borrow an established principle from cognitive science: that human social intuition can be modeled as "inverse planning," the task of inferring an agent's (hidden) goals from its (observed) actions. Building on this model, we treat storytelling as "*inverse* inverse planning," the task of choosing actions to manipulate an inverse planner's inferences. Our framework is grounded in literary theory, naturally capturing many storytelling elements from first principles. We give a series of examples to demonstrate this, with supporting evidence from human subject studies.

When to Make Exceptions: Exploring Language Models as Accounts of Human Moral Judgment

AI systems are becoming increasingly intertwined with human life. In order to effectively collaborate with humans and ensure safety, AI systems need to be able to understand, interpret and predict human moral judgments and decisions. Human moral judgments are often guided by rules, but not always. A central challenge for AI safety is capturing the flexibility of the human moral mind -- the ability to determine when a rule should be broken, especially in novel or unusual situations. In this paper, we present a novel challenge set consisting of rule-breaking question answering (RBQA) of cases that involve potentially permissible rule-breaking -- inspired by recent moral psychology studies. Using a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) as a basis, we propose a novel moral chain of thought (MORALCOT) prompting strategy that combines the strengths of LLMs with theories of moral reasoning developed in cognitive science to predict human moral judgments. MORALCOT outperforms seven existing LLMs by 6.2% F1, suggesting that modeling human reasoning might be necessary to capture the flexibility of the human moral mind. We also conduct a detailed error analysis to suggest directions for future work to improve AI safety using RBQA. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/feradauto/MoralCoT

Modeling human intention inference in continuous 3D domains by inverse planning and body kinematics

How to build AI that understands human intentions, and uses this knowledge to collaborate with people? We describe a computational framework for evaluating models of goal inference in the domain of 3D motor actions, which receives as input the 3D coordinates of an agent's body, and of possible targets, to produce a continuously updated inference of the intended target. We evaluate our framework in three behavioural experiments using a novel Target Reaching Task, in which human observers infer intentions of actors reaching for targets among distracts. We describe Generative Body Kinematics model, which predicts human intention inference in this domain using Bayesian inverse planning and inverse body kinematics. We compare our model to three heuristics, which formalize the principle of least effort using simple assumptions about the actor's constraints, without the use of inverse planning. Despite being more computationally costly, the Generative Body Kinematics model outperforms the heuristics in certain scenarios, such as environments with obstacles, and at the beginning of reaching actions while the actor is relatively far from the intended target. The heuristics make increasingly accurate predictions during later stages of reaching actions, such as, when the intended target is close, and can be inferred by extrapolating the wrist trajectory. Our results identify contexts in which inverse body kinematics is useful for intention inference. We show that human observers indeed rely on inverse body kinematics in such scenarios, suggesting that modeling body kinematic can improve performance of inference algorithms.

Map Induction: Compositional spatial submap learning for efficient exploration in novel environments

Humans are expert explorers. Understanding the computational cognitive mechanisms that support this efficiency can advance the study of the human mind and enable more efficient exploration algorithms. We hypothesize that humans explore new environments efficiently by inferring the structure of unobserved spaces using spatial information collected from previously explored spaces. This cognitive process can be modeled computationally using program induction in a Hierarchical Bayesian framework that explicitly reasons about uncertainty with strong spatial priors. Using a new behavioral Map Induction Task, we demonstrate that this computational framework explains human exploration behavior better than non-inductive models and outperforms state-of-the-art planning algorithms when applied to a realistic spatial navigation domain.

Learning Evolved Combinatorial Symbols with a Neuro-symbolic Generative Model

Humans have the ability to rapidly understand rich combinatorial concepts from limited data. Here we investigate this ability in the context of auditory signals, which have been evolved in a cultural transmission experiment to study the emergence of combinatorial structure in language. We propose a neuro-symbolic generative model which combines the strengths of previous approaches to concept learning. Our model performs fast inference drawing on neural network methods, while still retaining the interpretability and generalization from limited data seen in structured generative approaches. This model outperforms a purely neural network-based approach on classification as evaluated against both ground truth and human experimental classification preferences, and produces superior reproductions of observed signals as well. Our results demonstrate the power of flexible combined neural-symbolic architectures for human-like generalization in raw perceptual domains and offers a step towards developing precise computational models of inductive biases in language evolution.

Improving the Reconstruction of Disentangled Representation Learners via Multi-Stage Modelling

Current autoencoder-based disentangled representation learning methods achieve disentanglement by penalizing the (aggregate) posterior to encourage statistical independence of the latent factors. This approach introduces a trade-off between disentangled representation learning and reconstruction quality since the model does not have enough capacity to learn correlated latent variables that capture detail information present in most image data. To overcome this trade-off, we present a novel multi-stage modelling approach where the disentangled factors are first learned using a preexisting disentangled representation learning method (such as $\beta$-TCVAE); then, the low-quality reconstruction is improved with another deep generative model that is trained to model the missing correlated latent variables, adding detail information while maintaining conditioning on the previously learned disentangled factors. Taken together, our multi-stage modelling approach results in a single, coherent probabilistic model that is theoretically justified by the principal of D-separation and can be realized with a variety of model classes including likelihood-based models such as variational autoencoders, implicit models such as generative adversarial networks, and tractable models like normalizing flows or mixtures of Gaussians. We demonstrate that our multi-stage model has much higher reconstruction quality than current state-of-the-art methods with equivalent disentanglement performance across multiple standard benchmarks.

Program Synthesis with Pragmatic Communication

Program synthesis techniques construct or infer programs from user-provided specifications, such as input-output examples. Yet most specifications, especially those given by end-users, leave the synthesis problem radically ill-posed, because many programs may simultaneously satisfy the specification. Prior work resolves this ambiguity by using various inductive biases, such as a preference for simpler programs. This work introduces a new inductive bias derived by modeling the program synthesis task as rational communication, drawing insights from recursive reasoning models of pragmatics. Given a specification, we score a candidate program both on its consistency with the specification, and also whether a rational speaker would chose this particular specification to communicate that program. We develop efficient algorithms for such an approach when learning from input-output examples, and build a pragmatic program synthesizer over a simple grid-like layout domain. A user study finds that end-user participants communicate more effectively with the pragmatic program synthesizer over a non-pragmatic one.