Question: Page 1: "On every step, the agent can ask for more information about its current state, the goal state, or a subgoal state..." "The agent learns when to convey an intent to the assistant..." this is confusing... so, does the agent convey intent, or ask questions? But the assistant is supposed to be omniscient, and always aware of the agent's intent?
Evidence: Human-agent communication at deployment time has been under-explored in machine learning, where the traditional focus has been on building agents that can accomplish tasks on their own (full autonomy). Nevertheless, enabling an agent to exchange information with humans during its operation can potentially enhance its helpfulness and trustworthiness. The ability to request and interpret human advice would help the agent accomplish tasks beyond its built-in knowledge, while the ability to accurately convey when and why it is about to fail would make the agent safer to use.
In his classical work, outlines the desired characteristics of cooperative communication, commonly known as the Gricean maxims of cooperation. Among these characteristics are informativeness (the maxim of quantity) and faithfulness (the maxim of quality). Human-agent communication in current work has fallen short in these two aspects. Traditional frameworks like imitation learning and reinforcement learning employ limited communication protocols where the agent and the human can only exchange simple intentions (requesting low-level actions or rewards;). More powerful frameworks like allow the agent to process high-level instructions from humans, but the agent still only requests generic help. Recent work in natural language processing endows the agent with the ability to generate rich natural language utterances, but the communication is not faithful in the sense that the agent only mirrors human-generated utterances without grounding its communication in self-perception of its (in)capabilities and (un)certainties. Essentially it learns to convey what a human may be concerned about, not what it is concerned about. This paper presents a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework named HARI (Human-Assisted Reinforced Interaction), which supports richer and more faithful human-agent communication. Our framework allows the agent to learn to convey intrinstic needs for specific information and to incorporate diverse types of information from humans to make better decisions. Specifically, the agent in HARI is equipped with three information-seeking intentions: in every step, it can choose to request more information about (i) its current state, (ii) the goal state, or (iii) a subgoal state which, if reached, helps it make progress on the current task. Upon receiving a request, the human can transfer new information to the agent by giving new descriptions of the requested state. These de- Initially (A) it may request more information about the goal, but may not know enough about where it currently is. For example, at location B, due to limited perception, it does not recognize that it is in a living room and stands next to a couch. It can obtain such information from the assistant.
If the current task becomes too difficult (like at location C), the agent can require the assistant to provide a simpler subtask which, if accomplished, helps it make progress on the main task. The agent maintains a stack of tasks and always executes the task at the top. When the agent receives a (sub)task, it pushes the (sub)task to the top of the stack. When it wants to stop executing a (sub)task, it pops the (sub)task from the stack (e.g., at location D). At location E, the agent empties the stack and terminates its execution.
scriptions will be incorporated as new inputs to the agent's decision-making policy. The human thus can transfer any form of information that can be interpreted by the policy (e.g., asking the agent to execute skills that it has learned, giving side information that connects the agent to a situation it is more familiar with). Because the agent's policy can implement a variety of model architectures and learning algorithms, our framework opens up many possibilities for human-agent communication.
To enable faithful communication, we teach the agent to understand its intrinsic needs by interacting with the human and the environment (rather than imitating human behaviors). By requesting different types of information and observing how much each type of information enhances its decisions, the agent gradually learns to determine which information is most useful to obtain in a given situation. With this capability, at deployment time, it can choose when and what information to ask from the human to improve its task performance. To demonstrate the effectiveness of HARI, we simulate a human-assisted navigation problem where an agent has access to only sparse information about its current state and the goal, and can request additional information about these states. On tasks that take place in previously unseen environments, the ability to ask for help improves the agent's success rate by 7× higher compared to performing tasks only by itself. This human-assisted agent even outperforms an agent that always has access to dense information in unseen environments, thanks to the ability to request subgoals. We show that performance of the agent can be further improved by recursively asking for subgoals of subgoals. We discuss limitations of the policy's model and feature representation, which suggest room for future improvements.
Specifically, the agent in HARI is equipped with three information-seeking intentions: in every step, it can choose to request more information about (i) its current state, (ii) the goal state, or (iii) a subgoal state which, if reached, helps it make progress on the current task.
Answer: As stated in the intro, “[the] agent is equipped with .... intents that can be easily translated into human-intelligible requests”. Asking a question is to convey an information-seeking intention. We never assume the human to be omniscient: they know the agent’s *environment* state and goal, but they do not know its inner state.