Systems and methods for interactive language acquisition with one-shot visual concept learning through a conversational game

Abstract

Described herein are systems and methods for interactive language acquisition with one-shot concept learning through a conversational environment. Supervised language learning is limited by the ability of capturing mainly the statistics of training data, and is hardly adaptive to new scenarios or flexible for acquiring new knowledge without inefficient retraining or catastrophic forgetting. In one or more embodiments, conversational interaction serves as a natural interface both for language learning and for novel knowledge acquisition. Embodiments of a joint imitation and reinforcement approach are disclosed for grounded language learning through interactive conversation. An agent trained with this approach is able to actively acquire information by asking questions about novel objects and use the just-learned knowledge in subsequent conversations in a one-shot fashion. Results compared with other methods verified the effectiveness of embodiments disclosed herein.