Seeded self-play for language learning

Abhinav Gupta, Ryan Lowe, Jakob Foerster, Douwe Kiela, Joelle Pineau


Abstract
How can we teach artificial agents to use human language flexibly to solve problems in real-world environments? We have an example of this in nature: human babies eventually learn to use human language to solve problems, and they are taught with an adult human-in-the-loop. Unfortunately, current machine learning methods (e.g. from deep reinforcement learning) are too data inefficient to learn language in this way. An outstanding goal is finding an algorithm with a suitable ‘language learning prior’ that allows it to learn human language, while minimizing the number of on-policy human interactions. In this paper, we propose to learn such a prior in simulation using an approach we call, Learning to Learn to Communicate (L2C). Specifically, in L2C we train a meta-learning agent in simulation to interact with populations of pre-trained agents, each with their own distinct communication protocol. Once the meta-learning agent is able to quickly adapt to each population of agents, it can be deployed in new populations, including populations speaking human language. Our key insight is that such populations can be obtained via self-play, after pre-training agents with imitation learning on a small amount of off-policy human language data. We call this latter technique Seeded Self-Play (S2P). Our preliminary experiments show that agents trained with L2C and S2P need fewer on-policy samples to learn a compositional language in a Lewis signaling game.
Anthology ID:
D19-6409
Original:
D19-6409v1
Version 2:
D19-6409v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the Beyond Vision and LANguage: inTEgrating Real-world kNowledge (LANTERN)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Aditya Mogadala, Dietrich Klakow, Sandro Pezzelle, Marie-Francine Moens
Venue:
WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
62–66
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-6409
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-6409
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abhinav Gupta, Ryan Lowe, Jakob Foerster, Douwe Kiela, and Joelle Pineau. 2019. Seeded self-play for language learning. In Proceedings of the Beyond Vision and LANguage: inTEgrating Real-world kNowledge (LANTERN), pages 62–66, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Seeded self-play for language learning (Gupta et al., 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/D19-6409.pdf