Meet VAL, an AI Teammate That Can Adapt to Your Tendencies

admin — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 13:51:41 +0000

Meet VAL, an AI Teammate That Can Adapt to Your Tendencies admin Fri, 07/12/2024 - 09:51

A team’s success in any competitive environment often hinges on how well each member can anticipate the actions of their teammates.

Assistant Professor Christopher MacLellan thinks teachable artificial intelligence (AI) agents are uniquely suited for this role and make ideal teammates for video gamers.

With the help of funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, MacLellan hopes to prove his theory with a conversational, task-performing agent he co-engineered called the Verbal Apprentice Learner (VAL).

“You need the ability to adapt to what your teammates are doing to be an effective teammate,” MacLellan said. “We’re exploring this capability for AI agents in the context of video games.”

Unlike generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, VAL uses an interactive task-learning approach.

“VAL learns how you do things in the way you want them done,” MacLellan said. “When you tell it to do something, it will do it the way you taught it instead of some generic random way from the internet.”

A key difference between VAL and a chatbot is that VAL can perceive and act within the gaming world. A chatbot, like ChatGPT, only perceives and acts within the chat dialog.

MacLellan immersed VAL into an open-sourced, simplified version of the popular Nintendo cooperative video game Overcooked to discover how well the agent can function as a teammate. In Overcooked, up to four players work together to prepare dishes in a kitchen while earning points for every completed order.

How Fast Can Val Learn?

In a study with 12 participants, MacLellan found that users could often correctly teach VAL new tasks with only a few examples.

First, the user must teach VAL how to play the game. Knowing that a single human error could compromise results, MacLellan designed three precautionary features:

When VAL receives a command such as "cook an onion," it asks clarifying questions to understand and confirm its task. As VAL continues to learn, clarification prompts decrease.
An “undo” button to ensure users can reverse an errant command.
VAL contains GPT subcomponents to interpret user input, allowing it to adapt to ambiguous commands and typos. The GPT subcomponents drive changes in VAL’s task knowledge, which it uses to perform tasks without additional guidance.

The participants in MacLellan’s study used these features to ensure VAL learned the tasks correctly.

The high volume of prompts creates a more tedious experience. Still, MacLellan said it provides detailed data on system performance and user experience. That insight should make designing a more seamless experience in future versions of VAL possible.

The prompts also require the AI to be explainable.

“When VAL learns something, it uses the language model to label each node in the task knowledge graph that the system constructs,” MacLellan said. “You can see what it learned and how it breaks tasks down into actions.”

Beyond Gaming

MacLellan’s Teachable AI Lab is devoted to developing AI that inexperienced users can train.

“We are trying to come up with a more usable system where anyone, including people with limited expertise, could come in and interact with the agent and be able to teach it within just five minutes of interacting with it for the first time,” he said.

His work caught the attention of the Department of Defense, which awarded MacLellan multiple grants to fund several of his projects, including VAL. The possibilities of how the DoD could use VAL, on and off the battlefield, are innumerable.

“(The DoD) envisions a future in which people and AI agents jointly work together to solve problems,” MacLellan said. “You need the ability to adapt to what your teammates are doing to be an effective teammate.

“We look at the dynamics of different teaming circumstances and consider what are the right ways to team AI agents with people. The key hypothesis for our project is agents that can learn on the fly and adapt to their users will make better teammates than those that are pre-trained like GPT.”

Design Your Own Agent

MacLellan is co-organizing a gaming agent design competition sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 2024 Conference on Games in Milan, Italy.

The Dice Adventure Competition invites participants to design their own AI agent to play a multi-player, turn-based dungeon crawling game or to play the game as a human teammate. The competition this month and in July offers $1,000 in prizes for players and agent developers in the top three teams.

Summary sentence

A new AI teammate developed by Assistant Professor Christopher MacLellan could be the ideal co-opt video game partner.

Summary

A team’s success in any competitive environment often hinges on how well each member can anticipate the actions of their teammates.

Assistant Professor Christopher MacLellan thinks teachable artificial intelligence (AI) agents are uniquely suited for this role and make ideal teammates for video gamers.

Dateline

Thu, 06/27/2024 - 12:00

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Nathan Deen

Communications Officer

School of Interactive Computing

Associated importer

Keywords

go-ai

artificial intelligence (AI)

Video gaming

gaming

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Science and Technology

The Importance of Inclusive Gaming

admin — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 23:54:42 +0000

The Importance of Inclusive Gaming admin Thu, 10/26/2023 - 19:54

"By nature, humans are storytellers," says Lee Hibbard, a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. "And since people have been people, we have found ways to entertain ourselves."

Hibbard studies how people talk about their identities and share them with others. Much of this comes down to storytelling, he explains. Humans love to share stories because it's how we relate to each other and find common ground. In video games, role-playing, and tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), storytelling comes to life in an interactive way that movies, TV shows, and books just don't match.

"Games are such a huge marker of identity formation, especially for young people, because they give you the chance to pick up and play with things and try stuff out for fun," Hibbard says. "It's a lower stakes opportunity to experiment with yourself and with other people, and it's a cool way to learn about yourself."

Interest in these kinds of games has exploded since the Covid-19 pandemic, with one study reporting that online searches for D&D have increased by 85% since 2020. Beyond playing the games themselves, fans spend millions of hours a year on Twitch and YouTube watching players adventure in these fantasy worlds. Rising interest and a growing gamer base spur discussion about the importance of inclusion in such spaces, Hibbard says.

In the following Q&A, Hibbard discusses why inclusive gaming is so important and how it can help people in marginalized communities claim space in the real world.

Read the full article on the Ivan Allen College website.

Subtitle

The Importance of Inclusive Gaming

Summary sentence

Interest in role-playing games has exploded since the Covid-19 pandemic. A growing gamer base spurs discussion about why inclusive gaming is important and how it can help people claim space in the real world.

Summary

Dateline

Thu, 10/26/2023 - 12:00

michael.pearson@iac.gatech.edu

Contact

Michael Pearson

Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts

Keywords

gaming

Inclusive gaming

video games

dungeons and dragons

storytelling

table top games

Diversity and Inclusion

LGBTQIA

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Society and Culture

gaming

Meet VAL, an AI Teammate That Can Adapt to Your Tendencies

How Fast Can Val Learn?

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