Human intelligence has the remarkable ability to quickly
adapt to new tasks and environments. Starting from a very young age, humans
acquire new skills and learn how to solve new tasks either by imitating the
behavior of others or by following provided natural language instructions. To
facilitate research in this direction, we propose the NeurIPS IGLU competition: Interactive
Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment.
The primary goal of the IGLU competition is to approach the problem of how to
build interactive agents that learn to solve a task while provided with
grounded natural language instructions in a collaborative environment.
Understanding the complexity of the challenge, we split it into sub-tasks to
make it feasible for participants.
This research challenge is naturally related, but not limited, to two fields of
study: Natural Language Understanding and Generation (NLU/G) and Reinforcement
Learning (RL). Therefore, the suggested challenge can bring two communities
together to approach one of the important challenges in AI. Another important
aspect of the challenge is the dedication to perform a human-in-the-loop
evaluation as a final evaluation for the agents developed by contestants.
The goal of our competition is to approach the following scientific challenge:
How to build interactive agents that learn to solve a task while provided with
grounded natural language instructions in a collaborative environment? By the interactive agent we mean that the agent is able to follow the instructions
correctly, is able to ask for clarification when needed, and is able to quickly
adapt newly acquired skills, just like humans are able to do while
collaboratively interacting with each other.
Tasks and Application Scenarios:
Given the current state of the field, our main research challenge might be too
complex to suggest a reasonable end-to-end solution. Therefore, we split the
problem into the following concrete research tasks:
Architect Task: Given target structure, generate step instructions for the Builder
Builder Task: Given Architect-Builder conversation, build target structure:
Prizes:
1st place - 5K $
2nd place - 1.5k $
3rd place - 500 $
1st place - 5K $
2nd place - 1.5k $
3rd place - 500 $
Timeline:
July 26 – Stage 1 begins;
(Tentative) October 15 – Stage 1 ends;
October 22 – Stage 2 begins by deploying the top-3 performing agents for human
evaluation;
November 26 – The results of Stage 2 are posted, and the list of winning teams
per task is released;
December 6 – NeurIPS 2021 begins.
Upcoming workshops:
To make it even easier for you to onboard, we will arrange workshops per task:
During the workshops, our team will walk you through setup, available baselines, and training environment (for Builder task). You will have a great opportunity to ask any questions, which we probably can answer :-)
Guest Lectures:
If you have missed our guest lectures. Here are the links to recordings:
- IGLU - Guest Lecture by Marc (iglu-contest.net)
- IGLU - Guest Lecture by Jianwei (iglu-contest.net)
For more frequent updates:
- follow us at Twitter @IgluContest
- The news section at our website: IGLU (iglu-contest.net)
- For questions to organizers and mentors use the slack channel: https://join.slack.com/t/igluorg/shared_invite/zt-v7c59x6u-nN7iHN7JQr0xcyBoUrajRA
- Register for the competition at CodaLab:
Please find the attached flyer about the IGLU competition. We would really appreciate it if you can help us to promote the information about the competition!
Thanks,
IGLU Team