Robert E. Wray

James R. Kirk, Robert E. Wray, Peter Lindes et al.

Language models (LLMs) offer potential as a source of knowledge for agents that need to acquire new task competencies within a performance environment. We describe efforts toward a novel agent capability that can construct cues (or "prompts") that result in useful LLM responses for an agent learning a new task. Importantly, responses must not only be "reasonable" (a measure used commonly in research on knowledge extraction from LLMs) but also specific to the agent's task context and in a form that the agent can interpret given its native language capacities. We summarize a series of empirical investigations of prompting strategies and evaluate responses against the goals of targeted and actionable responses for task learning. Our results demonstrate that actionable task knowledge can be obtained from LLMs in support of online agent task learning.

James R. Kirk, Robert E. Wray, Peter Lindes et al.

Autonomous agents are able to draw on a wide variety of potential sources of task knowledge; however current approaches invariably focus on only one or two. Here we investigate the challenges and impact of exploiting diverse knowledge sources to learn online, in one-shot, new tasks for a simulated office mobile robot. The resulting agent, developed in the Soar cognitive architecture, uses the following sources of domain and task knowledge: interaction with the environment, task execution and search knowledge, human natural language instruction, and responses retrieved from a large language model (GPT-3). We explore the distinct contributions of these knowledge sources and evaluate the performance of different combinations in terms of learning correct task knowledge and human workload. Results show that an agent's online integration of diverse knowledge sources improves one-shot task learning overall, reducing human feedback needed for rapid and reliable task learning.

Robert E. Wray, Steven J. Jones, John E. Laird

Human behavior is conditioned by codes and norms that constrain action. Rules, ``manners,'' laws, and moral imperatives are examples of classes of constraints that govern human behavior. These systems of constraints are "messy:" individual constraints are often poorly defined, what constraints are relevant in a particular situation may be unknown or ambiguous, constraints interact and conflict with one another, and determining how to act within the bounds of the relevant constraints may be a significant challenge, especially when rapid decisions are needed. Despite such messiness, humans incorporate constraints in their decisions robustly and rapidly. General, artificially-intelligent agents must also be able to navigate the messiness of systems of real-world constraints in order to behave predictability and reliably. In this paper, we characterize sources of complexity in constraint processing for general agents and describe a computational-level analysis for such constraint compliance. We identify key algorithmic requirements based on the computational-level analysis and outline an initial, exploratory implementation of a general approach to constraint compliance.

James R. Kirk, Robert E. Wray, Peter Lindes et al.

Large language models (LLMs) offer significant promise as a knowledge source for task learning. Prompt engineering has been shown to be effective for eliciting knowledge from an LLM, but alone it is insufficient for acquiring relevant, situationally grounded knowledge for an embodied agent learning novel tasks. We describe a cognitive-agent approach, STARS, that extends and complements prompt engineering, mitigating its limitations and thus enabling an agent to acquire new task knowledge matched to its native language capabilities, embodiment, environment, and user preferences. The STARS approach is to increase the response space of LLMs and deploy general strategies, embedded within the autonomous agent, to evaluate, repair, and select among candidate responses produced by the LLM. We describe the approach and experiments that show how an agent, by retrieving and evaluating a breadth of responses from the LLM, can achieve 77-94% task completion in one-shot learning without user oversight. The approach achieves 100% task completion when human oversight (such as an indication of preference) is provided. Further, the type of oversight largely shifts from explicit, natural language instruction to simple confirmation/discomfirmation of high-quality responses that have been vetted by the agent before presentation to a user.

James R. Kirk, Robert E. Wray, John E. Laird

Large language models (LLMs) provide capabilities far beyond sentence completion, including question answering, summarization, and natural-language inference. While many of these capabilities have potential application to cognitive systems, our research is exploiting language models as a source of task knowledge for cognitive agents, that is, agents realized via a cognitive architecture. We identify challenges and opportunities for using language models as an external knowledge source for cognitive systems and possible ways to improve the effectiveness of knowledge extraction by integrating extraction with cognitive architecture capabilities, highlighting with examples from our recent work in this area.

Steven J. Jones, Robert E. Wray, John E. Laird

Deployed, autonomous AI systems must often evaluate multiple plausible courses of action (extended sequences of behavior) in novel or under-specified contexts. Despite extensive training, these systems will inevitably encounter scenarios where no available course of action fully satisfies all operational constraints (e.g., operating procedures, rules, laws, norms, and goals). To achieve goals in accordance with human expectations and values, agents must go beyond their trained policies and instead construct, evaluate, and justify candidate courses of action. These processes require contextual "knowledge" that may lie outside prior (policy) training. This paper characterizes requirements for agent decision making in these contexts. It also identifies the types of knowledge agents require to make decisions robust to agent goals and aligned with human expectations. Drawing on both analysis and empirical case studies, we examine how agents need to integrate normative, pragmatic, and situational understanding to select and then to pursue more aligned courses of action in complex, real-world environments.

Robert E. Wray, James R. Kirk, John E. Laird

Cognitive systems generally require a human to translate a problem definition into some specification that the cognitive system can use to attempt to solve the problem or perform the task. In this paper, we illustrate that large language models (LLMs) can be utilized to map a problem class, defined in natural language, into a semi-formal specification that can then be utilized by an existing reasoning and learning system to solve instances from the problem class. We present the design of LLM-enabled cognitive task analyst agent(s). Implemented with LLM agents, this system produces a definition of problem spaces for tasks specified in natural language. LLM prompts are derived from the definition of problem spaces in the AI literature and general problem-solving strategies (Polya's How to Solve It). A cognitive system can then use the problem-space specification, applying domain-general problem solving strategies ("weak methods" such as search), to solve multiple instances of problems from the problem class. This result, while preliminary, suggests the potential for speeding cognitive systems research via disintermediation of problem formulation while also retaining core capabilities of cognitive systems, such as robust inference and online learning.

Robert E. Wray, James R. Kirk, John E. Laird

One goal of AI (and AGI) is to identify and understand specific mechanisms and representations sufficient for general intelligence. Often, this work manifests in research focused on architectures and many cognitive architectures have been explored in AI/AGI. However, different research groups and even different research traditions have somewhat independently identified similar/common patterns of processes and representations or "cognitive design patterns" that are manifest in existing architectures. Today, AI systems exploiting large language models (LLMs) offer a relatively new combination of mechanisms and representations available for exploring the possibilities of general intelligence. This paper outlines a few recurring cognitive design patterns that have appeared in various pre-transformer AI architectures. We then explore how these patterns are evident in systems using LLMs, especially for reasoning and interactive ("agentic") use cases. Examining and applying these recurring patterns enables predictions of gaps or deficiencies in today's Agentic LLM Systems and identification of subjects of future research towards general intelligence using generative foundation models.

Robert E. Wray, Steven J. Jones, John E. Laird

Regardless of past learning, an agent in an open world will face unfamiliar events outside of prior experience, existing models, or policies. Further, the agent will sometimes lack relevant knowledge and/or sufficient time to assess the situation and evaluate response options. How can an agent respond reasonably to situations that are outside of its original design scope? How can it recognize such situations sufficiently quickly and reliably to determine reasonable, adaptive courses of action? We identify key characteristics needed for solutions, review the state-of-the-art, and outline a proposed, novel approach that combines domain-general meta-knowledge (inspired by human cognition) and metareasoning. This approach offers potential for fast, adaptive responses to unfamiliar situations, more fully meeting the performance characteristics required for open-world, general agents.

Steven J. Jones, Robert E. Wray

One part of complying with norms, rules, and preferences is incorporating constraints (such as knowledge of ethics) into one's goal formulation and planning processing. We explore in a simple domain how the encoding of knowledge in different ethical frameworks influences an agent's goal formulation and planning processing and demonstrate ability of an agent to satisfy and satisfice when its collection of relevant constraints includes a mix of "hard" and "soft" constraints of various types. How the agent attempts to comply with ethical constraints depends on the ethical framing and we investigate tradeoffs between deontological framing and utilitarian framing for complying with an ethical norm. Representative scenarios highlight how performing the same task with different framings of the same norm leads to different behaviors. Our explorations suggest an important role for metacognitive judgments in resolving ethical conflicts during goal formulation and planning.