STORY2GAME: Generating (Almost) Everything in an Interactive Fiction Game

We introduce STORY2GAME, a novel approach to using Large Language Models to generate text-based interactive fiction games that starts by generating a story, populates the world, and builds the code for actions in a game engine that enables the story to play out interactively. Whereas a given set of hard-coded actions can artificially constrain story generation, the ability to generate actions means the story generation process can be more open-ended but still allow for experiences that are grounded in a game state. The key to successful action generation is to use LLM-generated preconditions and effects of actions in the stories as guides for what aspects of the game state must be tracked and changed by the game engine when a player performs an action. We also introduce a technique for dynamically generating new actions to accommodate the player's desire to perform actions that they think of that are not part of the story. Dynamic action generation may require on-the-fly updates to the game engine's state representation and revision of previously generated actions. We evaluate the success rate of action code generation with respect to whether a player can interactively play through the entire generated story.

Explainable AI Reloaded: Challenging the XAI Status Quo in the Era of Large Language Models

When the initial vision of Explainable (XAI) was articulated, the most popular framing was to open the (proverbial) "black-box" of AI so that we could understand the inner workings. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), the very ability to open the black-box is increasingly limited especially when it comes to non-AI expert end-users. In this paper, we challenge the assumption of "opening" the black-box in the LLM era and argue for a shift in our XAI expectations. Highlighting the epistemic blind spots of an algorithm-centered XAI view, we argue that a human-centered perspective can be a path forward. We operationalize the argument by synthesizing XAI research along three dimensions: explainability outside the black-box, explainability around the edges of the black box, and explainability that leverages infrastructural seams. We conclude with takeaways that reflexively inform XAI as a domain.

Is Exploration All You Need? Effective Exploration Characteristics for Transfer in Reinforcement Learning

In deep reinforcement learning (RL) research, there has been a concerted effort to design more efficient and productive exploration methods while solving sparse-reward problems. These exploration methods often share common principles (e.g., improving diversity) and implementation details (e.g., intrinsic reward). Prior work found that non-stationary Markov decision processes (MDPs) require exploration to efficiently adapt to changes in the environment with online transfer learning. However, the relationship between specific exploration characteristics and effective transfer learning in deep RL has not been characterized. In this work, we seek to understand the relationships between salient exploration characteristics and improved performance and efficiency in transfer learning. We test eleven popular exploration algorithms on a variety of transfer types -- or ``novelties'' -- to identify the characteristics that positively affect online transfer learning. Our analysis shows that some characteristics correlate with improved performance and efficiency across a wide range of transfer tasks, while others only improve transfer performance with respect to specific environment changes. From our analysis, make recommendations about which exploration algorithm characteristics are best suited to specific transfer situations.

A Simple Way to Incorporate Novelty Detection in World Models

Reinforcement learning (RL) using world models has found significant recent successes. However, when a sudden change to world mechanics or properties occurs then agent performance and reliability can dramatically decline. We refer to the sudden change in visual properties or state transitions as {\em novelties}. Implementing novelty detection within generated world model frameworks is a crucial task for protecting the agent when deployed. In this paper, we propose straightforward bounding approaches to incorporate novelty detection into world model RL agents, by utilizing the misalignment of the world model's hallucinated states and the true observed states as an anomaly score. We first provide an ontology of novelty detection relevant to sequential decision making, then we provide effective approaches to detecting novelties in a distribution of transitions learned by an agent in a world model. Finally, we show the advantage of our work in a novel environment compared to traditional machine learning novelty detection methods as well as currently accepted RL focused novelty detection algorithms.

Charting the Sociotechnical Gap in Explainable AI: A Framework to Address the Gap in XAI

Explainable AI (XAI) systems are sociotechnical in nature; thus, they are subject to the sociotechnical gap--divide between the technical affordances and the social needs. However, charting this gap is challenging. In the context of XAI, we argue that charting the gap improves our problem understanding, which can reflexively provide actionable insights to improve explainability. Utilizing two case studies in distinct domains, we empirically derive a framework that facilitates systematic charting of the sociotechnical gap by connecting AI guidelines in the context of XAI and elucidating how to use them to address the gap. We apply the framework to a third case in a new domain, showcasing its affordances. Finally, we discuss conceptual implications of the framework, share practical considerations in its operationalization, and offer guidance on transferring it to new contexts. By making conceptual and practical contributions to understanding the sociotechnical gap in XAI, the framework expands the XAI design space.

Neuro-Symbolic World Models for Adapting to Open World Novelty

Open-world novelty--a sudden change in the mechanics or properties of an environment--is a common occurrence in the real world. Novelty adaptation is an agent's ability to improve its policy performance post-novelty. Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods assume that the world is a closed, fixed process. Consequentially, RL policies adapt inefficiently to novelties. To address this, we introduce WorldCloner, an end-to-end trainable neuro-symbolic world model for rapid novelty adaptation. WorldCloner learns an efficient symbolic representation of the pre-novelty environment transitions, and uses this transition model to detect novelty and efficiently adapt to novelty in a single-shot fashion. Additionally, WorldCloner augments the policy learning process using imagination-based adaptation, where the world model simulates transitions of the post-novelty environment to help the policy adapt. By blending ''imagined'' transitions with interactions in the post-novelty environment, performance can be recovered with fewer total environment interactions. Using environments designed for studying novelty in sequential decision-making problems, we show that the symbolic world model helps its neural policy adapt more efficiently than model-based and model-based neural-only reinforcement learning methods.

Neural Story Planning

Automated plot generation is the challenge of generating a sequence of events that will be perceived by readers as the plot of a coherent story. Traditional symbolic planners plan a story from a goal state and guarantee logical causal plot coherence but rely on a library of hand-crafted actions with their preconditions and effects. This closed world setting limits the length and diversity of what symbolic planners can generate. On the other hand, pre-trained neural language models can generate stories with great diversity, while being generally incapable of ending a story in a specified manner and can have trouble maintaining coherence. In this paper, we present an approach to story plot generation that unifies causal planning with neural language models. We propose to use commonsense knowledge extracted from large language models to recursively expand a story plot in a backward chaining fashion. Specifically, our system infers the preconditions for events in the story and then events that will cause those conditions to become true. We performed automatic evaluation to measure narrative coherence as indicated by the ability to answer questions about whether different events in the story are causally related to other events. Results indicate that our proposed method produces more coherent plotlines than several strong baselines.

Seamful XAI: Operationalizing Seamful Design in Explainable AI

Mistakes in AI systems are inevitable, arising from both technical limitations and sociotechnical gaps. While black-boxing AI systems can make the user experience seamless, hiding the seams risks disempowering users to mitigate fallouts from AI mistakes. While Explainable AI (XAI) has predominantly tackled algorithmic opaqueness, we propose that seamful design can foster Humancentered XAI by strategically revealing sociotechnical and infrastructural mismatches. We introduce the notion of Seamful XAI by (1) conceptually transferring "seams" to the AI context and (2) developing a design process that helps stakeholders design with seams, thereby augmenting explainability and user agency. We explore this process with 43 AI practitioners and users, using a scenario-based co-design activity informed by real-world use cases. We share empirical insights, implications, and critical reflections on how this process can help practitioners anticipate and craft seams in AI, how seamfulness can improve explainability, empower end-users, and facilitate Responsible AI.

Social Construction of XAI: Do We Need One Definition to Rule Them All?

There is a growing frustration amongst researchers and developers in Explainable AI (XAI) around the lack of consensus around what is meant by 'explainability'. Do we need one definition of explainability to rule them all? In this paper, we argue why a singular definition of XAI is neither feasible nor desirable at this stage of XAI's development. We view XAI through the lenses of Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) to explicate how diverse stakeholders (relevant social groups) have different interpretations (interpretative flexibility) that shape the meaning of XAI. Forcing a standardization (closure) on the pluralistic interpretations too early can stifle innovation and lead to premature conclusions. We share how we can leverage the pluralism to make progress in XAI without having to wait for a definitional consensus.

Experiential Explanations for Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches are becoming increasingly popular in various key disciplines, including robotics and healthcare. However, many of these systems are complex and non-interpretable, making it challenging for non-AI experts to understand or intervene. One of the challenges of explaining RL agent behavior is that, when learning to predict future expected reward, agents discard contextual information about their experiences when training in an environment and rely solely on expected utility. We propose a technique, Experiential Explanations, for generating local counterfactual explanations that can answer users' why-not questions by explaining qualitatively the effects of the various environmental rewards on the agent's behavior. We achieve this by training additional modules alongside the policy. These models, called influence predictors, model how different reward sources influence the agent's policy, thus restoring lost contextual information about how the policy reflects the environment. To generate explanations, we use these models in addition to the policy to contrast between the agent's intended behavior trajectory and a counterfactual trajectory suggested by the user.