DANLI: Deliberative Agent for Following Natural Language Instructions

Abstract

Yichi Zhang, Jianing Yang, Jiayi Pan, Shane Storks, Nikhil Devraj, Ziqiao Ma, Keunwoo Peter Yu, Yuwei Bao, Joyce Chai. EMNLP 2022, Oral.

We propose a neuro-symbolic deliberative agent that, while following language instructions, proactively applies reasoning and planning based on its neural and symbolic representations acquired from past experience. Our deliberative agent achieves 70% improvement over reactive baselines on the challenging TEACh benchmark. Moreover, the underlying reasoning and planning processes, together with our modular framework, offer impressive transparency and explainability to the behaviors of the agent.