W ATCH -A ND -H ELP : A C HALLENGE FOR S OCIAL P ERCEPTION AND H UMAN -AI C OLLABORATION
A BSTRACT
In this paper, we introduce Watch-And-Help (WAH) a challenge for testing social intelligence in agents.
In WAH, an AI agent needs to help a human-like agent perform a complex household task efﬁciently.
To succeed, the AI agent needs to i) understand the underlying goal of the task by watching a single demonstration of the human-like agent performing the same task (social perception) and ii) coordinate with the human-like agent to solve the task in an unseen environment as fast as possible (human-AI collaboration).
For this challenge, we build VirtualHomeSocial, a multi-agent household environment and provide a benchmark including both planning and learning based baselines.
We evaluate the performance of AI agents with the human-like agent as well as with real humans using objective metrics and subjective user ratings.
Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed challenge and virtual environment enable a systematic evaluation on the important aspects of machine social intelligence at scale
I NTRODUCTION
Humans exhibit altruistic behaviors at an early age (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006).
Without much prior experience, children can robustly recognize goals of other people by simply watching them act in an environment, and are able to come up with plans to help them, even in novel scenarios.
In contrast, the most advanced AI systems to date still struggle with such basic social skills.
In order to achieve the level of social intelligence required to effectively help humans, an AI agent should acquire two key abilities: i) social perception, i.e., the ability to understand human behavior, and ii) collaborative planning, i.e., the ability to reason about the physical environment and plan its actions to coordinate with humans.
In this paper, we are interested in developing AI agents with these two abilities.
Towards this goal, we introduce a new AI challenge, Watch-And-Help (WAH), which focuses on social perception and human-AI collaboration.
In this challenge, an AI agent needs to collaborate with a human-like agent to enable it to achieve the goal faster.
In particular, we present a 2-stage framework as shown in Figure 1.
In the ﬁrst, Watch stage, an AI agent (Bob) watches a human-like agent (Alice) performing a task once and infers Alice’s goal from her actions.
In the second, Help stage, Bob helps Alice achieve the same goal in a different environment as quickly as possible (i.e., with the minimum number of environment steps).
This 2-stage framework poses unique challenges for human-AI collaboration.
Unlike prior work which provides a common goal a priori or considers a small goal space (Goodrich & Schultz, 2007;
Carroll et al., 2019), our AI agent has to reason about what the human-like agent is trying to achieve by watching a single demonstration.
Furthermore, the AI agent has to generalize its acquired knowl- [Figure] edge about the human-like agent’s goal to a new environment in the Help stage.
Prior work does not investigate such generalization.
To enable multi-agent interactions in realistic environments, we extend an open source virtual platform, VirtualHome (Puig et al., 2018), and build a multi-agent virtual environment, VirtualHomeSocial.
VirtualHome-Social simulates realistic and rich home environments where agents can interact with different objects (e.g, by opening a container or grabbing an object) and with other agents (e.g., following, helping, avoiding collisions) to perform complex tasks.
VirtualHome-Social also provides i) built-in agents that emulate human behaviors, allowing training and testing of AI agents alongside virtual humans, and ii) an interface for human players, allowing evaluation with real humans and collecting/displaying human activities in realistic environments (a functionality key to machine social intelligence tasks but not offered by existing multi-agent platforms).
We plan to open source our environment.
We design an evaluation protocol and provide a benchmark for the challenge, including a goal inference model for the Watch stage, and multiple planning and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) baselines for the Help stage.
Experimental results indicate that to achieve success in the proposed challenge, AI agents must acquire strong social perception and generalizable helping strategies.
These fundamental aspects of machine social intelligence have been shown to be key to humanAI collaboration in prior work (Grosz & Kraus, 1996; Albrecht & Stone, 2018).
In this work, we demonstrate how we can systematically evaluate them in more realistic settings at scale.
The main contributions of our work are: i) a new social intelligence challenge, Watch-And-Help, for evaluating AI agents’ social perception and their ability to collaborate with other agents, ii) a multiagent platform allowing AI agents to perform complex household tasks by interacting with objects and with built-in agents or real humans, and iii) a benchmark consisting of multiple planning and learning based approaches which highlights important aspects of machine social intelligence.
R ELATED W ORK
Human activity understanding.
An important part of the challenge is to understand human activities.
Prior work on activity recognition has been mostly focused on recognizing short actions (Sigurdsson et al., 2018;
Caba Heilbron et al., 2015; Fouhey et al., 2018), predicting pedestrian trajectories (Kitani et al., 2012; Alahi et al., 2016), recognizing group activities (Shu et al., 2015; Choi & Savarese, 2013; Ibrahim et al., 2016), and recognizing plans (Kautz, 1991; Ramırez & Geffner, 2009).
We are interested in the kinds of activity understanding that require inferring other people’s mental states (e.g., intentions, desires, beliefs) from observing their behaviors.
Therefore, the Watch stage of our challenge focuses on the understanding of humans’ goals in a long sequence of actions instead.
This is closely related to work on computational Theory of Mind that aims at inferring [Figure] (plate, table): 2 ON(glass, table): ON(fork, table):
[Figure]
[Figure]
Alice’s
[Figure]
WATCH
[Figure]
humans’ goals by observing their actions (Baker et al., 2017; Ullman et al., 2009; Rabinowitz et al., 2018; Shum et al., 2019).
However, in prior work, activities were simulated in toy environments (e.g., 2D grid worlds).
In contrast, this work provides a of activity in simulated real-world environments
Human-robot interaction.
The helping aspect of the WAH challenge has been extensively studied in human-robot interaction (HRI).
However, prior work in HRI has been mainly restricted in lab environments (Goodrich & Schultz, 2007; Dautenhahn, 2007; Nikolaidis et al., 2015;
Rozo et al., 2016) and the goals in the collaborative tasks were either shared by both agents or were deﬁned in a small space.
The setup in WAH is much more challenging – the goal is sampled from a large space, needs to be inferred from a single demonstration, and must be performed in realistic and diverse household environments through a long sequence of actions.
Multi-agent virtual environments .
There has been a large body of platforms for various multiagent tasks (Jaderberg et al., 2019; Samvelyan et al., 2019; OpenAI, 2018; Lowe et al., 2017; Resnick et al., 2018; Shu & Tian, 2018;
Carroll et al., 2019; Suarez et al., 2019; Baker et al., 2019; Bard et al., 2020).
However, these multi-agent platforms can only simulate simple or game-like environments and do not support for human-AI collaborations on real-life activities.
Existing platforms for realistic virtual environments mainly focus on single agent settings for tasks such as navigation (Savva et al., 2019; Xia et al., 2018; Brodeur et al., 2017; Zhu et al., 2017;
Xia et al., 2018) , embodied question answering (Gordon et al., 2017; Wijmans et al., 2019; Das et al., 2018), or single agent task completion (Puig et al., 2018;
Shridhar et al., 2019; Misra et al., 2018; Gao et al., 2019).
In contrast, the proposed VirtualHome-Social environment allows AI agents to engage in multi-agent household activities by i) simulating realistic and interactive home environments, ii) incorporating humanoid agents with human-like behaviors into the system, iii) providing a wide range of commands and animations for navigation and object manipulation, and iv) allowing human participation.
Because of these features, VirtualHome-Social can serve as a testbed for complex social perception and humanAI collaboration tasks, which is complementary to existing virtual environments.
T HE W ATCH -A ND -H ELP C HALLENGE
The Watch-And-Help challenge aims to study AI agents’ ability to help humans in household activities.
To do that, we design a set of tasks deﬁned by predicates describing the ﬁnal state of the environment.
For each task, we ﬁrst provide Bob a video that shows Alice successfully performing the activity ( Watch stage), and then place both agents in a new environment where Bob has to help
Alice achieve the same goal with the minimum number of time steps ( Help stage).
Figure 2 provides an overview of the system setup for the Watch-And-Help challenge.
For this challenge, we build a multi-agent platform, VirtualHome-Social (Section 4), that i) supports concurrent actions from multiple agents and ii) provides observations for the agents.
Alice represents a built-in agent in the system; she plans her actions based on her own goal and a partial observation of the environment.
Bob serves as an external AI agent, who does not know Alice’s ground-truth goal and only has access to a single demonstration of Alice performing the same task in the past.
During the
Help stage, Bob receives his observation from the system at each step and sends an action command back to control the avatar in the environment.
Alice, on her part, updates her plan at each step based on her latest observation to reﬂect any world state change caused by Bob.
We also allow a human to control Alice in our system.
We discuss how the system and the built-in agent work in Section 4.
Problem Setup.
Formally, each task in the challenge is deﬁned by Alice’s goal g (i.e., a set of goal predicates), a demonstration of Alice taking actions to achieve that goal D
= { s t Alice , a t Alice } Tt =1 (i.e., a sequence of states s t Alice and actions a t Alice ), and a new environment where Bob collaborates with
Alice and help achieve the same goal as quickly as possible.
During training, the ground-truth goal of Alice is shown to Bob as supervision; during testing, Bob no longer has access to the ground-truth goal and thus has to infer it from the given demonstration.
Goal Deﬁnitions.
We deﬁne the goal of a task as a set of predicates and their counts, which describes the target state.
Each goal has 2 - 8 predicates.
For instance, “ ON(plate, dinnertable):2 ;
ON(wineglass, dinnertable):1 ” means “putting two plates and one wine glass onto the dinner table.”
The objects in a predicate refer to object classes rather than instances, meaning that any object of a speciﬁed class is acceptable.
This goal deﬁnition reﬂects different preferences of agents (when setting up a dinner table, some prefer to put water glasses, others may prefer to put wine glasses), increasing the diversity in tasks.
We design ﬁve predicate sets representing ﬁve types of household activities: 1) setting up a dinner table, 2) putting groceries / leftovers to the fridge, 3) preparing a simple meal, 4) washing dishes, and 5) reading a book while having snacks or drinks.
In total, there are 30 different types of predicates.
In each task, the predicates of a goal are sampled from one of the ﬁve predicate sets (as a single household activity).
More details about the predicate sets and goal deﬁnitions are listed in Appendix B.1.
V IRTUAL H OME -S OCIAL
Building machine social intelligence for real-life activities poses additional challenges compared to typical multi-agent settings, such as far more unconstrained goal and action spaces, and the need to display human actions realistically for social perception.
With that in mind, we create VirtualHome-Social, a new environment where multiple agents (including real humans) can execute actions concurrently and observe each other’s behaviors.
Furthermore, we embed planning-based agents in the environment as virtual humans that AI agents can reason about and interact with.
In the rest of this section, we describe the observations, actions, and the built-in human-like agent provided in VirtualHome-Social.
Appendix A includes more information.
Observation space .
The environment supports symbolic and visual observations, allowing agents to learn helping behaviors under different conditions.
The symbolic observations consist on a scene graph, with nodes representing objects and edges describing spatial relationships between them.
Action space .
Agents can navigate in the environment and interact with objects in it.
To interact with objects, agents need to specify an action and the index of the intended object (e.g., “grab (cid:104) 3 (cid:105) ” stands for grabbing the object with id 3).
An agent can only interact with objects that are within its ﬁeld of sight, and therefore its action space changes at every step.
Human-like agents.
To enable a training and testing environment for human-AI interactions, it is critical to incorporate built-in agents that emulate humans when engaging in multi-agent activities.
Carroll et al.
(2019) has attempted to train policies imitating human demonstrations.
But those policies would not reliably perform complex tasks in partially observable environments.
Therefore, we devise a planning-based agent with bounded rationality, provided as part of the platform.
This agent operates on the symbolic representation of its partial observation of the environment.
As shown in Figure 3, it relies on two key components: 1) a belief of object locations in the environment
[Figure] (Figure 13 in Appendix A.3), and 2) a hierarchical planner, which uses Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) (Browne et al., 2012) and regression planning (RP) (Korf, 1987) to ﬁnd a plan for a given goal based on its belief.
At every step, the human-like agent updates its belief based on the latest observation, ﬁnds a new plan, and executes the ﬁrst action of the plan concurrently with other agents.
The proposed design allows agents to robustly perform tasks in partially observable environments while producing human-like behaviors 2 .
We provide more details of this agent in Appendix A.3.
B ENCHMARK 5. E VALUATION P ROTOCOL
Training and Testing Setup.
We create a training set with 1011 tasks and 2 testing sets (test-1, test-2).
Each test set has 100 tasks.
We make sure that i) the helping environment in each task is different from the environment in the pairing demonstration (we sample a different apartment and randomize the initial state), and ii) goals (predicate combinations) in the test set are unseen during training.
To evaluate generalization, we also hold out 2 apartments for the Help stage in the test sets.
For the training set and test-1 set, all predicates in each goal are from the same predicate set, whereas a goal in test-2 consists of predicates sampled from two different predicates sets representing multiactivity scenarios (e.g., putting groceries to the fridge and washing dishes).
Note that during testing, the ground-truth goals are not shown to the evaluated Bob agent.
More details can be found in
Appendix B. An episode is terminated once all predicates in Alice’s goal are satisﬁed (i.e., a success) or the time limit (250 steps) is reached (i.e., a failure).
Evaluation Metrics.
We evaluate the performance of an AI agent by three types of metrics: i) success rate, ii) speedup, and iii) a cumulative reward.
For speedup, we compare the episode length when Alice and Bob are working together ( L Help ) with the episode length when Alice is working alone ( L Alice ), i.e., L Alice /L
Bob − 1 .
To account for both the success rate and the speedup, we deﬁne the cumulative reward of an episode with T steps as R =
(cid:80)
Tt =1 1 ( s t =
s g ) − 0 .
004 , where s t is the state at step t , s g is the goal state.
R ranges from -1 (failure) to 1 (achieving the goal in zero steps).
5. B ASELINES
To address this challenge, we propose a set of baselines that consist of two components as shown in
Figure 4: a goal inference model and a goal-conditioned helping planner / policy.
In this paper, we assume that the AI agent has access to the ground-truth states of objects within its ﬁeld of view (but one could also use raw pixels as input).
We describe our approach for the two components below.
Goal inference.
We train a goal inference model based on the symbolic representation of states in the demonstration.
At each step, we ﬁrst encode the state using a Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) over visible objects and feed the encoded state into a long short-term memory (LSTM) (Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1997).
We use average pooling to aggregate the latent states from the LSTM over time and build a classiﬁer for each predicate to infer its count.
Effectively, we build 30 classiﬁers, corresponding to the 30 predicates in our taxonomy and the fact that each can appear multiple times.
Helping policy/planner.
Due to the nature of the tasks in our challenge – e.g., partial observability, a large action space, sparse rewards, strict preconditions for actions – it is difﬁcult to search for a helping plan or learn a helping policy directly over the agent’s actions.
To mitigate these difﬁculties, we propose a hierarchical architecture with two modules for both planning and RL-based approaches as shown in Figure 4.
At every step, given the goal inferred from the demonstration, ˆ g , and the current observation of Bob, a high-level policy or planner will output a predicate as the best subgoal to pursue for the current step; the subgoal is subsequently fed to a low-level policy or planner which will yield Bob’s action a t Bob at this step.
In our baselines, we use either a learned policy or a planner for each module.
We use the symbolic representation of visible objects as Bob’s observation o t Bob for all models.
We summarize the overall design of the baseline models as follows (please refer to
Appendix C for the details of models and training procedures):
HP : A hierarchical planner, where the high-level planner and the low-level planner are implemented by MCTS and regression planning (RP) respectively.
This is the same planner as the one for Alice, except that i) it has its own partial observation and thus a different belief from Alice, and
ii
) when given the ground-truth goal, the high-level planner uses Alice’s plan to avoid overlapping with her.
Hybrid : A hybrid model of RL and planning, where an RL policy serves as the high-level policy and an RP is deployed to generated plans for each subgoal sampled from the RL-based high-level policy.
This is to train an agent equipped with basic skills for achieving subgoals to help Alice through RL.
HRL : A hierarchical RL baseline where high-level and low-level policies are all learned.
Random :
A naive agent that takes a random action at each step.
To show the upper bound performance in the challenge, we also provide two oracles:
Oracle B : An HP-based Bob agent with full knowledge of the environment and the true goal of
Alice. Oracle A, B : Alice has full knowledge of the environment too.
5. R ESULTS
We evaluate the Watch stage by measuring the recognition performance of the predicates.
The proposed model achieves a precision and recall of 0.85 and 0.96 over the test-1 set.
To evaluate the importance of seeing the full demonstration, we test a model that takes as input the graph representation of the last observation, leading to a precision and recall of 0.79 and 0.75.
When using actions taken by Alice as the input, the performance increases to a precision and recall of 0.99 and 0.99.
The chance precision and recall is 0.08 and 0.09.
We report the performance of our proposed baselines (average and standard error across all episodes) in the Help stage in Figure 5.
In addition to the full challenge setup, we also report the performance of the helping agents using true goals (indicated by the subscript TG ) and using random goals (by RG ), and the performance of Alice working alone.
Results show that planning-based approaches are the most effective in helping Alice.
Speciﬁcally, HP TG achieves the best performance among non-oracle baselines by using the true goals and reasoning about Alice’s future plan, avoiding redundant actions and collisions with her (Figure 6 illustrates an example of collaboration).
Using the inferred goals, both HP and Hybrid can offer effective help.
However, with a random goal inference ( HP RG ), a capable Bob agent becomes counter productive – frequently undoing what Alice has achieved due to their conﬂicting goals (conﬂicts appear in 40% of the overall episodes, 65% for Put Groceries and Set Meal ).
This calls for an AI agent with the ability to adjust its goal inference dynamically by observing Alice’s behavior in the new environment (e.g., Alice correcting a mistake made by
Bob signals incorrect goal inference).
HRL works no better than Random , even though it shares the same global policy with Hybrid .
While the high level policy selects reasonable predicates to perform the task, the low level policy does not manage to achieve the desired goal.
In most of the cases, this is due to the agent picking the right object, but failing to put it to the target location afterwards.
This suggests that it is crucial for Bob to develop robust abilities to achieve the subgoals.
There is no signiﬁcant difference between Random and Alice baselines ( t (99) = − 1 .
38 , p = 0 . 17 ).
We also evaluate the baselines in the test-2 set, containing tasks with multiple activities.
The goal inference model achieves a precision and recall of 0.68 and 0.64.
The performance gap from testindicates that the model fails to generalize to generalize to multi-activity scenarios, overﬁtting to predicate combinations seen during training.
For the Help stage, we evaluate the performance of
[Figure]
[Figure]
[Figure]
, which is a result of the lower goal recognition accuracy in the Watch stage.
To better understand the important factors for the effectiveness of helping, we analyze the helping behaviors exhibited in our experiments and how they affect Alice from the following aspects.
Predicting Alice’s Future Action.
When coordinating with Alice, Bob should be able to predict
Alice’s future actions to efﬁciently distribute the work and avoid conﬂicts (Figure 7ab).
Helping Alice’s Belief’s Update. In addition to directly achieving predicates in Alice’s goal, Bob can also help by inﬂuencing Alice’s belief update.
A typical behavior is that when Bob opens containers, Alice can update her belief accordingly and ﬁnd the goal object more quickly (Figure 7c).
This is the main reason why Bob with random actions can sometimes help speed up the task too.
Multi-level Actions.
The current baselines do not consider plans over low-level actions (e.g., pathﬁnding).
This strategy signiﬁcantly decreases the search space, but will also result in inefﬁcient [Figure] and inability to predict other agents’ future paths.
Consequently, agent sometimes unintentionally blocks Alice (Figure 7d).
A better AI agent should consider actions on both levels.
False Belief.
Actions taken by an agent may cause another agent to have false beliefs (Figure 7e).
H UMAN E XPERIMENTS
Our ultimate goal is to build AI agents that can work with real humans.
Thus, we further conduct the following two human experiments, where Alice is controlled by a real human.
Experiment 1: Human performing tasks alone.
In this experiment, we recruited 6 subjects to perform tasks alone by controlling Alice.
Subjects were given the same observation and action space as what the human-like agent had access to.
They could click one of the visible objects (including all rooms) and select a corresponding action (e.g., “walking towards”, “open”) from a menu to perform.
They could also choose to move forward or turn left/right by pressing arrow keys.
We evaluatedtasks in the test set.
Each task was performed by 2 subjects, and we used the average steps they took as the single-agent performance for that task, which is then used for computing the speedup when
AI agents help humans.
The performance of a single agent when being controlled by a human or by a human-like agent in these 30 tasks is shown in Fig.
8ab with the label of Alice .
Human players are slightly more efﬁcient than the human-like agent but the difference is not signiﬁcant, as reported by the t-test over the number of steps they took ( t (29)
= − 1 .
63 , p = .
Experiment 2: Collaboration with real humans.
This experiment evaluates how helpful AI agents are when working with real humans.
We recruited 12 subjects and conducted 90 trials of human-AI collaboration using the same 30 tasks as in Exp. 1.
In each trial, a subject was randomly paired with one of three baseline agents, HP , Hybrid , and HP RG , to perform a task.
After each trial, subjects were asked to rate the AI agent they just worked with on a scale of 1 to 7 based on three criteria commonly used in prior work (Hoffman, 2019): i) how much the agent knew about the true goal ( - no knowledge, 4 - some knowledge, 7 - perfect knowledge), ii) how helpful you found the agent was (1 - hurting, 4 - neutral, 7 - very helpful), and iii) whether you would trust the agent to do its job (1 - no trust, 4 - neutral, 7 - full trust).
For a fair comparison, we made sure that the random goal predictions for HP RG were the same as the ones used in the evaluation with the human-like agent.
As shown Figure 8, the ranking of the three baseline AI agents remains the same when the humanlike agent is replaced by real humans, and the perceived performance (subjective ratings) is consistent with the objective scores.
We found no signiﬁcant difference in the objective metrics between helping humans and helping the human-like agent; the only exception is that, when paired with real humans, HP RG had a higher success rate (and consequently a higher average cumulative reward).
This is because humans recognized that the AI agent might have conﬂicting subgoals and would ﬁnish other subgoals ﬁrst instead of competing over the conﬂicting ones with the AI agent forever, whereas the human-like agent was unable to do so.
Appendix D.3 shows an example.
This adaption gave humans a better chance to complete the full goal within the time limit.
We provide more details of the procedures, results, and analyses of the human experiments in Appendix D.
C ONCLUSION
In this work we proposed an AI challenge to demonstrate social perception and human-AI collaboration in common household activities.
We developed a multi-agent virtual environment to test an
AI agent’s ability to reason about other agents’ mental states and help them in unfamiliar scenarios.
Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed challenge can systematically evaluate key aspects of social intelligence at scale.
We also show that our human-like agent behaves similarly to real humans in the proposed tasks and the objects metrics are consistent with subject ratings.
Our platform opens up exciting directions of future work, such as online goal inference and direct communication between agents.
We hope that the proposed challenge and virtual environment can promote future research on building more sophisticated machine social intelligence A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
The information provided in this document is derived from an effort sponsored by the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and awarded to Raytheon BBN Technologies under
Contract Number HR001120C
A V IRTUAL H OME -S OCIAL A. C OMPARISON WITH E XISTING P LATFORMS
There have been many virtual environments designed for single-agent and multi-agent tasks.
Tablesummarizes the key features of the proposed VirtualHome-Social in comparison with existing virtual platforms.
The key features of our environment include i) multiple camera views, ii) both high-level and low-level actions, iii) humanoid avatars with realistic motion simulations, iv) built-in human-like agents emulating human behaviors in household activities, and v) multi-agent capacities.
Critically, VirtualHome-Social enables collecting and displaying human activities in realistic environments, which is a key function necessarily for social perception and human-AI collaboration.
In contrast, existing multi-agent platforms do no offer such functionality.
[Table]
[Figure]
[Table]
[Figure]
A. E NVIRONMENT D ESCRIPTION
The environment is composed of different apartments with objects that can be placed to generate diverse scenes for the Watch and Help stages.
Each object contains a class name, a set of states, 3D coordinates and an index for identiﬁcation, which is needed for action commands that involve object interaction.
The object indices are unique and consistent in the scene so that an agent can track the identities of individual objects throughout an episode.
A.2. A PARTMENTS
[Figure]
We provide 7 distinctive apartments in total as shown in Figure 9.
For the purpose of testing agents’ generalization abilities, in the Watch-And-Help challenge, the last two apartments are held out for the helping environments in the testing set exclusively. [Figure] [Table] [Figure]
[Table]
[Figure]
A.2. A VATARS
VirtualHome-Social provides a pool of diverse humanoid avatars (see Figure 10).
This allows us to randomly sample different avatars for both agents in the Watch-And-Help challenge.
We hope this can help reduce the biases in the environment.
The supplementary video shows an example of this, where the clothing color indicates the role of each agent.
For the public release of the platform, we intend to further increase the diversity of the avatar pool.
A.2. O BSERVATION
The environment supports symbolic and visual observations (Figure 11a), allowing agents to learn helping behaviors under different conditions.
The visual observations provide RGB, depth, semantic and instance segmentation, albedo and luminance, normal maps, 3D skeletons and bounding boxes. Building upon Liao et al. (2019), we represent the symbolic observations as a state graph with each node representing the class label and physical state of an object and each edge representing the spatial relation of two objects.
The environment also provides multiple views and supports both full observability and partial observability settings.
We show examples of the observations in the supplementary video.
In addition to the world states, our system also allows users to include direct messages from other agents as part of the observation for an agent.
A.2. A CTION SPACE
As shown in Figure 11b, agents in VirtualHome-Social can perform both high-level actions, such as navigating towards a known location, or interacting with an observed object, and low-level actions, [Figure] [Figure] such as turning or moving forward for a small step.
For actions involving interactions with entities (objects or other agents)
[Figure]
an agent needs to specify the indices of the intended entities (e
[Figure]
g., “grab (cid:104) 3 (cid:105) ” stands for grabbing the object with id 3). An agent can only interact with objects that are within its ﬁeld of sight
[Figure]
and therefore its action space changes at every step.
When executing navigation actions, an agent can only move 1 meter towards the target location within one step.
On average, an agent’s action space includes 167 different actions per step.
A. H UMAN - LIKE A GENT
We discuss how the human-like agent works in more details here.
The agent pipeline can be seen in
Figure 12.
The agent has access to a partial observation of the environment, limited to the objects that are in the same room and not in some closed container.
The agent is equipped with a belief module (Figure 13), that gives information about the unseen objects, under the assumption that the existence of objects in the environment is known, but not their location.
For each object in the environment, the belief contains a distribution of the possible locations where it could be.
We adopt uniform distributions as the initial belief when the agent has not observed anything.
At each time, the agent obtains a partial observation, and updates its belief distribution accordingly.
Then, the belief module samples a possible world state from the current distribution.
To ensure that the belief state is consistent between steps, we only resample object locations that violate the current belief (e.g. an object was believed to be in the fridge but the agent sees that the fridge is in fact empty).
Based on the sampled state, a hierarchical planner will search for the optimal plan for reaching the goal, based on the goal deﬁnition.
Speciﬁcally, we use MCTS to search for a sequence of subgoals (i.e., predicates), and then each subgoal is fed to a regression planner (RP) that will search for an action sequence to achieve the subgoal.
For the high-level planner, the subgoal space is obtained by the intersection between what predicates remained to be achieved and what predicates could be achieved based on the sampled state.
Note here each subgoal would specify an object instance instead of only the object class deﬁned in the goal so that the low-level planner will be informed which object instances it needs to interact with.
For instance, in the example illustrated in Figure 12, there are two plates (whose indices are 12, 52) and the dinner table’s index is 31 according to the sampled state.
There are two unsatisﬁed goal predicates (i.e., two ON(plate, dinnertable) ), then a possible subgoal space for the high-level planner would be { ON(12, 31) , ON(52, 31) } .
For RP, it starts from the state deﬁned by the subgoal and searches for the low-level plan backward until it ﬁnds an action that is part of the current action space of the agent.
To mimic human behaviors in a home setting, we also expect the human-like agent to close containers unless it needs to look inside or put objects into them.
For that, we augment the MCTS-based high-level planner with heuristics for the closing behavior – the agent will close an container when it ﬁnds no relevant goal objects inside or has already grabbed/put in the all target objects out of that container.
We ﬁnd that this augmentation makes the overall agent behaviors closer to what a real human would do in a household environment.
Thanks to the hierarchical design, the planner for the human-like agent can be run in real-time (on average, replanning at each step only takes 0.05 second).
This also gives the agent a bounded rationality, in that the plan is not the most optimal but is reasonably efﬁcient.
The optimality of the planner can be further tuned by the hyper-parameters of MCTS, such as the number of simulation, the maximum number steps in the rollouts, and the exploration coefﬁcients.
A. S PECIFICATIONS
The environment can be run in a single or multiple processes.
A single process runs at 10 actions per second.
We train our models using 10 processes in parallel.
B M ORE D ETAILS ON THE C HALLENGE S ETUP B. P REDICATE S ETS FOR G OAL D EFINITIONS
[Table]
Table 2 summarizes the ﬁve predicate sets used for deﬁning goals.
Note that VirtualHome-Social supports more predicates for potential future extensions on the goal deﬁnitions
. B. T RAINING AND T ESTING S ETUP
During training, we randomly sample one of the 1011 training tasks for setting up a training episode.
For evaluating an AI agent on the testing set, we run each testing task for ﬁve times using different random seeds and report the average performance.
[Figure]
O b j e c t s 0.
For training goal inference, we also provide an additional training set of 5303 demonstrations (without pairing helping environments) synthesized in the 5 training apartments.
Note that these demonstrations are exclusively used for training goal inference models and would not be used for helping tasks.
B. D ISTRIBUTION OF I NITIAL O BJECT L OCATIONS
Figure 14 shows the initial location distribution of all objects in the helping environments sampled for the challenge, and Figure 15 shows the initial location distributions for only the objects involved in the goal predicates.
C I MPLEMENTATION D ETAILS OF B ASELINES C. G OAL I NFERENCE M ODULE
Figure 16 shows the architecture of the goal inference model described in the paper, where d =indicates the dimension of vectors.
In this network, the LSTM has 128 hidden units and the MLP units are comprised of two 128-dim fully connected layers.
For both node embeddings and the latent states from the LSTM, we use average pooling. [Figure] [Figure]
C. H IERARCHICAL P LANNER
The hierarchical planner ( HP ) baseline is similar to the planner designed for the human-like agent (Section A.3) but has its own observation and belief.
When given the ground-truth goal of Alice, the
MCTS-based high-level planner will remove the subgoal that Alice is going to pursue from its own subgoal space.
C. G ENERAL T RAINING P ROCEDURE FOR RL- BASED A PPROACHES
We train the high-level RL policy by giving ground-truth goals and by using RP as the low-level planner to reach the subgoals sampled from the high-level policy.
Whenever a goal predicate is satisﬁed (either by Alice or by Bob), Bob will get a reward of +2; it will also get a -0.1 penalty after each time step.
We adopt the multi-task RL approach introduced in Shu et al.
(2017) to train the lowlevel policy in a single-agent setting, where we randomly sample one of the predicates in the goal in each training episode and set it to be the objective for Bob.
This is to ensure that Bob can learn to achieve subgoals through the low-level policy by himself.
The HRL baseline is implemented by combining the high-level and low-level policies that are trained separately.
C. L OW - LEVEL P OLICY
Figure 17 illustrates the network architecture for the low-level policy.
We use the symbolic observation (only the visible object nodes) as input, and encode them in the same way as Figure 16 does.
We encode two object classes in the given subgoal sg (i.e., a predicate) through word2vec encoding yielding two 128-dim vectors.
We then concatenate these two vectors and feed them to a fully connected layer to get a 128-dim goal encoding.
Based on the goal encoding, we further get two attention vectors, σ object and σ type .
Each element of the attention vectors ranges from 0 to 1.
For each object node, we use the element-wise product of σ object and its node embedding to get its reshaped representation.
Similarly, we can get the reshaped context representation by an element-wise product of the context embedding and σ type .
This is inspired by a common goal-conditioned policy network architecture (Chaplot et al., 2018; Shu et al., 2017), which helps extract state information relevant to the goal.
From each reshaped node representation, we can get a scalar for each object representing the log-likelihood of selecting that object to interact with for the current action.
After a softmax over all the object logits, we get the object selection policy π object ( k | o t , sg ) , where k is the index of the object instance selected from all visible objects (which also includes “Null” for actions that do not involve an object).
For encoding the history, we feed the reshaped context representation to an LSTM with 128 hidden units.
Based on the latent state from the LSTM, we get i) the action type policy π type ( a | o t , sg ) , which selects an action type (i.e., “open,” “close,” “grab,” “put,” “walk,” or “follow”), and ii) the value function V ( o t , sg ) .
The sampled k and a jointly deﬁne the action for the AI agent.
Note that some sampled combinations may not be valid actions, which will not be executed by the VirtualHome-Social environment.
In addition to the policy and value output, we also build a binary classiﬁer for each visible node to predict whether it is close enough for the agent to interact with according to the symbolic graphs.
This closeness prediction serves an auxiliary prediction which helps the network learn a better state representation and consequently greatly improves the sample efﬁciency.
In each training episode, we randomly sample a predicate from the complete goal deﬁnition as the ﬁnal goal of the agent.
The agent gets a reward of 0.05 for being close to the target object and/or location, and a reward of 10.0 when it grabs the correct object or puts it to the correct location.
Note that when training the low-level policy, we set up a single-agent environment to ensure that the AI agent can learn to achieve a predicate by itself.
We adopt a 2-phase curriculum learning similar to Shu et al.
In the ﬁrst phase, we train a policy for grabbing the target object indicated in the goal.
During this phase, a training episode terminates whenever the agent grabs the correct type of object.
In the second phase, we train another policy which learns to reuse the learned grabbing policy (which is deployed whenever the “grab” action type is sampled) to get the goal object and then put the grabbed object to target location speciﬁed in the goal.
We use off-policy advantage actor-critic (A2C) (Mnih et al., 2016) for policy optimization.
The network is updated by RMSprop (Tieleman & Hinto, 2012) with a learning rate of 0.001 and a batch size of 32.
The ﬁrst phase is trained with 100,000 episodes and the second phase is trained with 26,000 episodes.
C. H IGH - LEVEL P OLICY
As Figure 18 depicts, the high-level policy (used by Hybrid and HRL baselines) has a similar architecture design as the low-level policy.
Compared with the low-level policy, it does not need to deﬁne object selection policy; instead, based on the latent state from the LSTM, it outputs the policy for selecting the ﬁrst and the second object class in a predicate to form a subgoal 3 .
It also augments the goal encoder in the low-level policy with a sum pooling (i.e., Bag of Words) to aggregate the encoding of all predicates in a goal, where predicates are duplicated w.r.t.
their counts in the goal deﬁnition (e.g., in Figure 18, ON(plate, dinnertable) appears twice, which means there are should be 2 plates on the dinnertable).
Similar to the low-level policy, we get an attention vector σ g from the goal encoding to reshape the state representation.
In total, the network has three outputs: the object subgoal policy for sampling the object class name in the subgoal, the location subgoal policy for sampling the target location class name in the subgoal, and a value function.
The high-level policy is trained with a regression planner deployed to ﬁnd a low-level plan for reaching that subgoal.
Note that the regression planner searches for a plan based on a state sampled from the agent’s belief maintained by a belief module discussed in Section A.3.
It will also randomly select object instances from the sampled state that ﬁt the deﬁned object classes in the subgoals sampled from the high-level policy.
Similar to the low-level policy, we use off-policy A2C for policy optimization, and the network is updated by RMSprop with a learning rate of 0.001 and a batch size of 16.
We ﬁrst train the highlevel policy in a single-agent setting where the AI agent is trained to perform a task by itself; we then ﬁnetune the high-level policy in the full training setting where the human-like agent is also present and works alongside with the AI agent.
During training, we always provide the ground-truth goal of
Alice to the AI agent.
D A DDITIONAL D ETAILS OF H UMAN E XPERIMENTS D. H UMAN SUBJECTS
Both the collection of human plans as well as the evaluations in our user studies were conducted by recruited participants, who gave informed consent.
D. P ROCEDURE FOR C OLLECTING H UMAN P LANS
To collect the tasks for both experiments, we built a web interface on top of VirtualHome-Social, allowing humans to control the characters in the environment.
Speciﬁcally, the subjects in our human experiments were always asked to control Alice.
At every step, humans were given a set of visible objects, and the corresponding actions that they could perform with those objects (in addition to the low-level actions), matching the observation and action space of the human-like agent.
When working with an AI agent, both the human player and the AI agent took actions concurrently.
In both experiments, human players were given a short tutorial and had a chance to get familiar with the controls.
They were shown the exact goals to be achieved, and were instructed to ﬁnish the task as fast as possible.
For each task, we set the same time limit, i.e., 250 steps.
A task is terminated when it exceeds the time limit or when all the goals speciﬁed have been reached.
The 30 tasks used in the human experiments were randomly sampled from the test set and were evenly distributed across 5 task categories (i.e., 6 tasks for each category).
In Experiment 2, each subject was asked to perform 7 or 8 trials.
We made sure that each subject got to play with all three baseline AI agents in at least 2 trials.
D. E XAMPLE OF H UMAN A DAPTING TO AI AGENTS WITH C ONFLICTING G OALS
The main reason why real humans work better than the human-like agent when paired with an AI agent that has a conﬂicting goal (in particular, the HP RG baseline), is that they can recognize the conﬂicting goal, and avoid competing over the same objects forever.
Figure 20 depicts an example of this adaptive behavior from a real human player in Experiment 2, which results in the completion of the task within the time limit.
Note that in our experiments, a task is considered successful and terminated once all the predicates in a goal have been achieved.
This also calls for an AI agent with the ability to adjust its goal inference dynamically by observing
Alice’s behavior in the new environment (e.g., Alice correcting a mistake made by Bob signals incorrect goal inference).
D. S UBJECTIVE E VALUATION OF S INGLE A GENT P LANS
To evaluate whether people think the human-like agent behaves similarly to humans given the same goals, we recruited another 8 subjects.
We showed each subject 15 videos, each of which is a video replay of a human or the human-like agent performing one of the 30 tasks (we randomly selected one human video and one built-in agent video for each task).
For each video, subjects were given the goal and asked to rate how much they agreed with the statement, “the character in the video behaves similarly to a human given the same goal in this apartment,” on a Likert scale of 5 (1 is “strongly disagree,” 3 is “neutral,” and 5 is “strongly agree”) 4 .
The average ratings for the characters controlled by the human-like agent and by the real humans are 3.38 ( ± 0 . 93 ) and 3.72 ( ± 0 . 92 ) respectively.
We found no signiﬁcant difference between the ratings for the human-like agent’s plans and the ratings for the real humans’ plans in our tasks, as reported by a paired, two-tailed t-test ( t (29) = − 1 .
35 , p = .
This demonstrates that the proposed human-like agent can produce plans that are similar to real humans’ plans in our challenge.
Based on the free responses collected from the subjects who rated these videos, human plans look slightly more efﬁcient sometimes since they do not look for objects in unlikely places and avoid moving back and forth between rooms frequently.
The human-like agent behaves similarly in most of the time but would occasionally search through the rooms in a counter-intuitive order due to its bounded rationality and the fact that plans are sampled stochastically.
D. A DDITIONAL Q UANTITATIVE A NALYSES OF H UMAN E XPERIMENT R ESULTS
To evaluate whether the performance of a baseline AI agent helping the human-like agent reﬂects the performance of it helping real humans, we conduct paired, two-tailed t-test for the three baselines in
Experiment 2 based on their cumulative rewards.
For HP RG , there is a signiﬁcant difference between helping the human-like agent and helping real humans ( t (29) =
− 2 .
36 , p = .
03 ) as discussed in
Section 6 and Appendix D.3.
However, there is no signiﬁcant difference for HP ( t (29) = − 1 .
78 , p = .
1 ) and Hybrid (( t (29) = − 0 .
5 , p = .
This validates that, in general, collaboration with
Alice grabs a wine glass
And puts it on the table
Bob immediately grabs the wine glass goes to the dishwasher and puts it there.
Bob immediately grabs it
Goes to the dishwasher and puts it there
Instead of getting back the glass, Alice focuses on other subgoals first
After finishing the other subgoals, she goes to get the wineglass
Alice finds out
So she gets the glass out of the dishwasher and puts it back to the table
Bob sees that the glass has been put to the table
So he puts the glass back to the dishwasher again
After Alice puts the wine glass to the table and puts it back to the table,completingthetask.
Ground-truth goal: ON(plate, dinnertable):
ON(waterglass, dinnertable): 2 ON(wineglass, dinnertable):
ON(fork, dinnertable):
A random goal sampled by Bob (HP RG ): IN(wineglass, dishwasher):
ON(poundcake, dinnertable): 2 IN(pancake, fridge):
ON(wine, dinnertable):
The human-like agent and HP RG A real human player and HP RG
the human-like agent is comparable to collaboration with real humans. Given these analyses, the training and evaluation procedure 5 presented in this paper is both scalable and comprehensive. 5 I.e., i) training AI agents with the human-like agent