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Effective communication is an important skill for enabling information exchange and cooperation in multi-agent settings. Indeed, emergent communication is now a vibrant field of research, with common settings involving discrete cheap-talk channels. One limitation of this setting is that it does not allow for the emergent protocols to generalize beyond the training partners. Furthermore, so far emergent communication has primarily focused on the use of symbolic channels. In this work, we extend this line of work to a new modality, by studying agents that learn to communicate via actuating their joints in a 3D environment. We show that under realistic assumptions, a non-uniform distribution of intents and a commonknowledge energy cost, these agents can find protocols that generalize to novel partners. We also explore and analyze specific difficulties associated with finding these solutions in practice. Finally, we propose and evaluate initial training improvements to address these challenges, involving both specific training curricula and providing the latent feature that can be coordinated on during training.

Active learning agents typically employ a query selection algorithm which solely considers the agent's learning objectives. However, this may be insufficient in more realistic human domains. This work uses imitation learning to enable an agent in a constrained environment to concurrently reason about both its internal learning goals and environmental constraints externally imposed, all within its objective function. Experiments are conducted on a concept learning task to test generalization of the proposed algorithm to different environmental conditions and analyze how time and resource constraints impact efficacy of solving the learning problem. Our findings show the environmentallyaware learning agent is able to statistically outperform all other active learners explored under most of the constrained conditions. A key implication is adaptation for active learning agents to more realistic human environments, where constraints are often externally imposed on the learner.

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Our goal is to develop robots that naturally engage people in social exchanges. In this paper, we focus on the problem of recognizing that a person is responsive to a robot's request for interaction. Inspired by human cognition, our approach is to treat this as a contingency detection problem. We present a simple discriminative Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to compare against previous generative methods introduced in prior work by Lee et al. [1]. We evaluate these methods in two ways. First, by training three separate SVMs with multi-modal sensory input on a set of batch data collected in a controlled setting, where we obtain an average F1 score of 0.82. Second, in an open-ended experiment setting with seven participants, we show that our model is able to perform contingency detection in real-time and generalize to new people with a best F1 score of 0.72.