We study a collaborative scenario where a user not only instructs a system to complete tasks, but also acts alongside it. This allows the user to adapt to the system abilities by changing their language or deciding to simply accomplish some tasks themselves, and requires the system to effectively recover from errors as the user strategically assigns it new goals. We build a game environment to study this scenario, and learn to map user instructions to system actions. We introduce a learning approach focused on recovery from cascading errors between instructions, and modeling methods to explicitly reason about instructions with multiple goals. We evaluate with a new evaluation protocol using recorded interactions and online games with human users, and observe how users adapt to the system abilities.
African electric fish of a pulse species, Brienomyrus brachyistius (Mormyridae), housed singly in a large, circular arena, were presented with electrical stimuli which mimicked a conspecific intruder. Stimuli were produced with either dipolar or bipolar electrodes in three different geometries. We tracked the unconditioned approach response paths taken by the fish and compared tracks for each of the geometries. The results suggest that B. brachyistius can determine neither the distance nor the direction of an electric dipole from afar, but that they do manage to find the source by maintaining a precise alignment of their body axis parallel to the direction of the local electric field vector (parallel to current lines) while swimming. This behaviour ultimately leads to the current source. We propose that this behaviour may be a simple mechanism mediating the approach response of one electric fish to another.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.