Learning Visually Grounded Domain Ontologies via Embodied Conversation and Explanation
This addresses the challenge of building knowledge in AI agents with limited data, though it is incremental as it builds on existing interactive learning approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of learning domain ontologies and visual recognition in low-resource settings by using corrective feedback from a teacher on agent explanations, resulting in improved data efficiency compared to methods without such feedback.
In this paper, we offer a learning framework in which the agent's knowledge gaps are overcome through corrective feedback from a teacher whenever the agent explains its (incorrect) predictions. We test it in a low-resource visual processing scenario, in which the agent must learn to recognize distinct types of toy truck. The agent starts the learning process with no ontology about what types of trucks exist nor which parts they have, and a deficient model for recognizing those parts from visual input. The teacher's feedback to the agent's explanations addresses its lack of relevant knowledge in the ontology via a generic rule (e.g., "dump trucks have dumpers"), whereas an inaccurate part recognition is corrected by a deictic statement (e.g., "this is not a dumper"). The learner utilizes this feedback not only to improve its estimate of the hypothesis space of possible domain ontologies and probability distributions over them, but also to use those estimates to update its visual interpretation of the scene. Our experiments demonstrate that teacher-learner pairs utilizing explanations and corrections are more data-efficient than those without such a faculty.