Sharing the Cost of Success: A Game for Evaluating and Learning Collaborative Multi-Agent Instruction Giving and Following Policies

Philipp Sadler, Sherzod Hakimov, David Schlangen

Abstract
In collaborative goal-oriented settings, the participants are not only interested in achieving a successful outcome, but do also implicitly negotiate the effort they put into the interaction (by adapting to each other). In this work, we propose a challenging interactive reference game that requires two players to coordinate on vision and language observations. The learning signal in this game is a score (given after playing) that takes into account the achieved goal and the players’ assumed efforts during the interaction. We show that a standard Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) setup achieves a high success rate when bootstrapped with heuristic partner behaviors that implement insights from the analysis of human-human interactions. And we find that a pairing of neural partners indeed reduces the measured joint effort when playing together repeatedly. However, we observe that in comparison to a reasonable heuristic pairing there is still room for improvement—which invites further research in the direction of cost-sharing in collaborative interactions.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1287
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
14770–14783
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1287
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Philipp Sadler, Sherzod Hakimov, and David Schlangen. 2024. Sharing the Cost of Success: A Game for Evaluating and Learning Collaborative Multi-Agent Instruction Giving and Following Policies. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 14770–14783, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Sharing the Cost of Success: A Game for Evaluating and Learning Collaborative Multi-Agent Instruction Giving and Following Policies (Sadler et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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