Benjamin A. Spiegel

Benjamin A. Spiegel

PhD Student @ Brown CS

Publications

RLang: A Declarative Language for Expression Prior Knowledge for Reinforcement Learning

Published in arXiv, 2022

Communicating useful background knowledge to reinforcement learning (RL) agents is an important and effective method for accelerating learning. We introduce RLang, a domain-specific language (DSL) for communicating domain knowledge to an RL agent. Unlike other existing DSLs proposed by the RL community that ground to single elements of a decision-making formalism (e.g., the reward function or policy function), RLang can specify information about every element of a Markov decision process. We define precise syntax and grounding semantics for RLang, and provide a parser implementation that grounds RLang programs to an algorithm-agnostic partial world model and policy that can be exploited by an RL agent. We provide a series of example RLang programs, and demonstrate how different RL methods can exploit the resulting knowledge, including model-free and model-based tabular algorithms, hierarchical approaches, and deep RL algorithms (including both policy gradient and value-based methods).

Recommended citation: R Rodriguez-Sanchez, B Spiegel, J Wang, R Patel, S Tellex, G Konidaris. arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.06448 https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.06448

Guided Policy Search for Parameterized Skills using Adverbs

Published in arXiv, 2021

We present a method for using adverb phrases to adjust skill parameters via learned adverb-skill groundings. These groundings allow an agent to use adverb feedback provided by a human to directly update a skill policy, in a manner similar to traditional local policy search methods. We show that our method can be used as a drop-in replacement for these policy search methods when dense reward from the environment is not available but human language feedback is. We demonstrate improved sample efficiency over modern policy search methods in two experiments.

Recommended citation: BA Spiegel, G Konidaris. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.15799 https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.15799

MK-SQuIT: Synthesizing Questions using Iterative Template-filling

Published in arXiv, 2020

The aim of this work is to create a framework for synthetically generating question/query pairs with as little human input as possible. These datasets can be used to train machine translation systems to convert natural language questions into queries, a useful tool that could allow for more natural access to database information. Existing methods of dataset generation require human input that scales linearly with the size of the dataset, resulting in small datasets. Aside from a short initial configuration task, no human input is required during the query generation process of our system. We leverage WikiData, a knowledge base of RDF triples, as a source for generating the main content of questions and queries. Using multiple layers of question templating we are able to sidestep some of the most challenging parts of query generation that have been handled by humans in previous methods; humans never have to modify, aggregate, inspect, annotate, or generate any questions or queries at any step in the process. Our system is easily configurable to multiple domains and can be modified to generate queries in natural languages other than English. We also present an example dataset of 110,000 question/query pairs across four WikiData domains. We then present a baseline model that we train using the dataset which shows promise in a commercial QA setting.

Recommended citation: BA Spiegel, V Cheong, JE Kaplan, A Sanchez. arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.02566 https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.02566