We study the problem of continually training an instruction-following agent through feedback provided by users during collaborative interactions. During interaction, human users instruct an agent using natural language, and provide realtime binary feedback as they observe the agent's instruction execution. We cast learning as a contextual bandit problem, converting the user feedback to immediate reward. We evaluate through multiple rounds of human-agent interactions, demonstrating 15.4% absolute improvement in instruction execution over time. We also show our approach is robust to several design variations, and that the feedback signal is roughly equivalent to the learning signal of supervised demonstration data.

We introduce KiloGram, a resource for studying abstract visual reasoning in humans and machines. Drawing on the history of tangram puzzles as stimuli in cognitive science, we build a richly annotated dataset that, with >1k distinct stimuli, is orders of magnitude larger and more diverse than prior resources. It is both visually and linguistically richer, moving beyond whole shape descriptions to include segmentation maps and part labels. We use this resource to evaluate the abstract visual reasoning capacities of recent multi-modal models. We observe that pre-trained weights demonstrate limited abstract reasoning, which dramatically improves with fine-tuning. We also observe that explicitly describing parts aids abstract reasoning for both humans and models, especially when jointly encoding the linguistic and visual inputs. KiloGram is available at https://lil.nlp.cornell.edu/kilogram .

We introduce a new dataset for joint reasoning about natural language and images, with a focus on semantic diversity, compositionality, and visual reasoning challenges. The data contains 107,292 examples of English sentences paired with web photographs. The task is to determine whether a natural language caption is true about a pair of photographs. We crowdsource the data using sets of visually rich images and a compare-and-contrast task to elicit linguistically diverse language. Qualitative analysis shows the data requires compositional joint reasoning, including about quantities, comparisons, and relations. Evaluation using state-of-the-art visual reasoning methods shows the data presents a strong challenge. * Contributed equally. † Work done as an undergraduate at Cornell University. 1 In parts of this paper, we use the term compositional differently than it is commonly used in linguistics to refer to reasoning that requires composition. This type of reasoning often manifests itself in highly compositional language.2 Appendix G contains license information for all photographs used in this paper. 3 The top example is True, while the bottom is False.