Background: Glycosylation is one of the most complex post-translational modifications (PTMs) of proteins in eukaryotic cells. Glycosylation plays an important role in biological processes ranging from protein folding and subcellular localization, to ligand recognition and cell-cell interactions. Experimental identification of glycosylation sites is expensive and laborious. Hence, there is significant interest in the development of computational methods for reliable prediction of glycosylation sites from amino acid sequences.

In this work, we present methods for using human-robot dialog to improve language understanding for a mobile robot agent. The agent parses natural language to underlying semantic meanings and uses robotic sensors to create multi-modal models of perceptual concepts like red and heavy. The agent can be used for showing navigation routes, delivering objects to people, and relocating objects from one location to another. We use dialog clari_cation questions both to understand commands and to generate additional parsing training data. The agent employs opportunistic active learning to select questions about how words relate to objects, improving its understanding of perceptual concepts. We evaluated this agent on Amazon Mechanical Turk. After training on data induced from conversations, the agent reduced the number of dialog questions it asked while receiving higher usability ratings. Additionally, we demonstrated the agent on a robotic platform, where it learned new perceptual concepts on the y while completing a real-world task.

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Transfer learning is a method where an agent reuses knowledge learned in a source task to improve learning on a target task. Recent work has shown that transfer learning can be extended to the idea of curriculum learning, where the agent incrementally accumulates knowledge over a sequence of tasks (i.e. a curriculum). In most existing work, such curricula have been constructed manually. Furthermore, they are fixed ahead of time, and do not adapt to the progress or abilities of the agent. In this paper, we formulate the design of a curriculum as a Markov Decision Process, which directly models the accumulation of knowledge as an agent interacts with tasks, and propose a method that approximates an execution of an optimal policy in this MDP to produce an agent-specific curriculum. We use our approach to automatically sequence tasks for 3 agents with varying sensing and action capabilities in an experimental domain, and show that our method produces curricula customized for each agent that improve performance relative to learning from scratch or using a different agent's curriculum.

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