Faceless robot developed a "failure"

(Original title: The robot developed by Facebook has a "failure" and begins to talk nonsense.)

In the past month or so, the dialogue robot developed by Facebook has adopted some strange words.

Bob and Alice are conversational robots developed by Facebook

The two dialogue robots were developed by Facebook's internal artificial intelligence research laboratory (FAIR). Researchers used machine learning to train the two robots for dialogue and negotiation. They hoped that they could negotiate with people in English to obtain the corresponding target products.

The training material is a negotiation dialogue between 5808 groups of people. There are a total of 2236 different scenarios. The so-called storyline differs according to the negotiated goods and the corresponding value.

For example, in one of the plots, the product is three books, and the corresponding value of each book is two; two hats, one hat corresponds to a value of one; one ball, one ball corresponds to a value of two. The judging criteria of the negotiating parties are based on the corresponding value of the goods obtained.

Progress is relatively smooth. The robot developed by Facebook can talk to common people in relatively smooth English. The other party didn't realize how he actually was negotiating with the robot.

However, the development of things exceeded expectations. Researchers at Facebook hope to take these robots a step further. They have developed two pre-trained, supervised models, Alice and Bob, to serve as reinforcement learning for the negotiating parties, that is, negotiating between robots. So there was a seemingly meaningless conversation at the beginning.

But for robots, these seemingly grammatically uninteresting conversations still take on a certain role. The Facebook labâ€™s spokesperson told the â€œAtlantic Monthlyâ€ that Facebookâ€™s data showed that these conversations can still help the two parties reach a final agreement. Researchers at Facebook believe that this dialogue is closer to language. According to ç‡šhruv Batra, a visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech and the FAIR laboratory, Facebook has observed similar scenes many times.

In addition to Facebook, non-profit organization OpenAI, founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and well-known incubator YC Chairman Sam Altman, has also studied robot languages. They set up a virtual environment that allows a group of robots marked with different colors to complete specific goals, such as moving them to a specific location, which requires the robots to collaborate and talk on their own. The end result is that these robots can complete a sentence like "Did you end up getting to the green can or not?"

But Mark Liberman, professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, holds a different opinion. He thinks this is still far from the language gap. He said: "First of all, this is entirely based on textual characters, but human language is basically accomplished through verbal expressions or gestures, and the text acts as a virtual surface."

However, whether this is a robotic language or just a string, as a result of a research in the Facebook lab, the researchers finally decided to set the robot to use plain English.

The reason they gave was: Our interest is that some robots can talk to people.