Till Örebro universitet

In this position paper, we argue for the need for deliberation in communication for artificial agents that perform tasks together with humans. Existing works use a set of terms and concepts with different meanings, resulting in ambiguity which does not allow for a general framework. As an initial step towards such a framework, we propose the notion of deliberative communication, clarify the necessary concepts and terminology, highlight the capabilities required in using deliberation for agents that communicate with human users, and discuss the main challenges.

In many robotic applications, especially those involving humans and the environment, linguistic and visual information must be processed jointly and bound together. Existing works either encode the image or the language into a subsymbolic space, like the CLIP model, or create a symbolic space of extracted information, like the object detection models. In this paper, we propose to describe images by nouns and modifiers and introduce a new embedded binding space where the linguistic and visual cues can effectively be bound. We investigate how state-of-the-art models perform in recognizing nouns and modifiers from images, and propose our method by introducing a dataset and CLIP-like recognition techniques based on transfer learning and metric learning. We show real-world experiments that demonstrate the practical applicability of our approach to robotics applications. Our results indicate that our method can surpass the state-of-the-art in recognizing nouns and modifiers from images. Interestingly, our method exhibits a language characteristic related to context sensitivity.

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gained increasing popularity in the area of art creation, by demonstrating its great potential. Research in this topic has developed AI systems able to generate creative outputs in fields such as music, painting, games, design and scientific discovery, either autonomously or in collaboration with humans. Therefore, AI also helped to analyze and study the mechanisms of creativity from a broader perspective: from the socio-anthropological to psychological, as well as cognitive impact of the autonomous creative processes of artificial intelligence. These advances are leading to new opportunities research perspectives, while also posing challenging questions related to authorship, integrity, bias and evaluation of AI artistic outputs. CREAI, the workshop on AI and creativity, tries to address these research lines and aims to provide a forum for the AI community to discuss problems, challenges and innovative approaches in the various sub-fields of AI and creativity.

One of the difficulties of using AI planners in industrial applications pertains to the complexity of writing planning domain models. These models are typically constructed by domain planning experts and can become increasingly difficult to codify for large applications. In this paper, we describe our ongoing research on a novel approach to automatically learn planning domains from previously executed traces using Behavior Trees as an intermediate human-readable structure. By involving human planning experts in the learning phase, our approach can benefit from their validation. This paper outlines the initial steps we have taken in this research, and presents the challenges we face in the future.

Autonomous agents embedded in a physical environment need the ability to correctly perceive the state of the environment from sensory data. In partially observable environments, certain properties can be perceived only in specific situations and from certain viewpoints that can be reached by the agent by planning and executing actions. For instance, to understand whether a cup is full of coffee, an agent, equipped with a camera, needs to turn on the light and look at the cup from the top. When the proper situations to perceive the desired properties are unknown, an agent needs to learn them and plan to get in such situations. In this paper, we devise a general method to solve this problem by evaluating the confidence of a neural network online and by using symbolic planning. We experimentally evaluate the proposed approach on several synthetic datasets, and show the feasibility of our approach in a real-world scenario that involves noisy perceptions and noisy actions on a real robot.

Behavior Trees (BTs) are a formalism increasingly used to control the execution of robotic systems. The strength of BTs resides in their compact, hierarchical and transparent representation. However, when used in practical applications transparency is often hindered by the introduction of implicit run-time relations between nodes, e.g., because of data dependencies or hardware-related ordering constraints. Manually verifying the correctness of a BT with respect to these hidden relations is a tedious and error-prone task. This paper presents a modular planning-based approach for automatically testing BTs offline at design time, to identify possible executions that may violate given data and ordering constraints and to exhibit traces of these executions to help debugging. Our approach supports both basic and advanced BT node types, e.g., supporting parallel behaviors, and can be extended with other node types as needed. We evaluate our approach on BTs used in a commercially deployed robotics system and on a large set of randomly generated trees showing that our approach scales to realistic sizes of more than 3000 nodes. 

Autonomous agents embedded in a physical environment need the ability to recognize objects and their properties from sensory data. Such a perceptual ability is often implemented by supervised machine learning models, which are pre-trained using a set of labelled data. In real-world, open-ended deployments, however, it is unrealistic to assume to have a pre-trained model for all possible environments. Therefore, agents need to dynamically learn/adapt/extend their perceptual abilities online, in an autonomous way, by exploring and interacting with the environment where they operate. This paper describes a way to do so, by exploiting symbolic planning. Specifically, we formalize the problem of automatically training a neural network to recognize object properties as a symbolic planning problem (using PDDL). We use planning techniques to produce a strategy for automating the training dataset creation and the learning process. Finally, we provide an experimental evaluation in both a simulated and a real environment, which shows that the proposed approach is able to successfully learn how to recognize new object properties.

Robots sharing their space with humans need to be proactive to be helpful. Proactive robots can act on their own initiatives in an anticipatory way to benefit humans. In this work, we investigate two ways to make robots proactive. One way is to recognize human intentions and to act to fulfill them, like opening the door that you are about to cross. The other way is to reason about possible future threats or opportunities and to act to prevent or to foster them, like recommending you to take an umbrella since rain has been forecast. In this article, we present approaches to realize these two types of proactive behavior. We then present an integrated system that can generate proactive robot behavior by reasoning on both factors: intentions and predictions. We illustrate our system on a sample use case including a domestic robot and a human. We first run this use case with the two separate proactive systems, intention-based and prediction-based, and then run it with our integrated system. The results show that the integrated system is able to consider a broader variety of aspects that are required for proactivity.

A volunteer effort by Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers has shown it can deliver significant research outcomes rapidly to help tackle COVID-19. Within two months, CLAIRE's self-organising volunteers delivered the World's first comprehensive curated repository of COVID-19-related datasets useful for drug-repurposing, drafted review papers on the role CT/X-ray scan analysis and robotics could play, and progressed research in other areas. Given the pace required and nature of voluntary efforts, the teams faced a number of challenges. These offer insights in how better to prepare for future volunteer scientific efforts and large scale, data-dependent AI collaborations in general. We offer seven recommendations on how to best leverage such efforts and collaborations in the context of managing future crises.

Joint artistic performance, like music, dance or acting, provides an excellent domain to observe the mechanisms of human-human collaboration. In this paper, we use this domain to study human-robot collaboration and co-creation. We propose a general model in which an AI system mediates the interaction between a human performer and a robotic performer. We then instantiate this model in a case study, implemented using fuzzy logic techniques, in which a human pianist performs jazz improvisations, and a robot dancer performs classical dancing patterns in harmony with the artistic moods expressed by the human. The resulting system has been evaluated in an extensive user study, and successfully demonstrated in public live performances.