arXiv subjects

Nicholas Waytowich

Publications and source records attributed to Nicholas Waytowich.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Mil-SCORE: Benchmarking Long-Context Geospatial Reasoning and Planning in Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) are applied to increasingly longer and more complex tasks, there is a growing need for realistic long-context benchmarks that require selective reading and integration of heterogeneous, multi-modal information sources. This need is especially acute for geospatial planning problems, such as those found in planning for large-scale military operations, which demand fast and accurate reasoning over maps, orders, intelligence reports, and other distributed data. To address this gap, we present MilSCORE (Military Scenario Contextual Reasoning), to our knowledge the first scenario-level dataset of expert-authored, multi-hop questions grounded in a complex, simulated military planning scenario used for training. MilSCORE is designed to evaluate high-stakes decision-making and planning, probing LLMs' ability to combine tactical and spatial reasoning across multiple sources and to reason over long-horizon, geospatially rich context. The benchmark includes a diverse set of question types across seven categories targeting both factual recall and multi-step reasoning about constraints, strategy, and spatial analysis. We provide an evaluation protocol and report baseline results for a range of contemporary vision-language models. Our findings highlight substantial headroom on MilSCORE, indicating that current systems struggle with realistic, scenario-level long-context planning, and positioning MilSCORE as a challenging testbed for future work.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

R2BC: Multi-Agent Imitation Learning from Single-Agent Demonstrations

Imitation Learning (IL) is a natural way for humans to teach robots, particularly when high-quality demonstrations are easy to obtain. While IL has been widely applied to single-robot settings, relatively few studies have addressed the extension of these methods to multi-agent systems, especially in settings where a single human must provide demonstrations to a team of collaborating robots. In this paper, we introduce and study Round-Robin Behavior Cloning (R2BC), a method that enables a single human operator to effectively train multi-robot systems through sequential, single-agent demonstrations. Our approach allows the human to teleoperate one agent at a time and incrementally teach multi-agent behavior to the entire system, without requiring demonstrations in the joint multi-agent action space. We show that R2BC methods match, and in some cases surpass, the performance of an oracle behavior cloning approach trained on privileged synchronized demonstrations across four multi-agent simulated tasks. Finally, we deploy R2BC on two physical robot tasks trained using real human demonstrations.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

EDEN: Entorhinal Driven Egocentric Navigation Toward Robotic Deployment

Deep reinforcement learning agents are often fragile while humans remain adaptive and flexible to varying scenarios. To bridge this gap, we present EDEN, a biologically inspired navigation framework that integrates learned entorhinal-like grid cell representations and reinforcement learning to enable autonomous navigation. Inspired by the mammalian entorhinal-hippocampal system, EDEN allows agents to perform path integration and vector-based navigation using visual and motion sensor data. At the core of EDEN is a grid cell encoder that transforms egocentric motion into periodic spatial codes, producing low-dimensional, interpretable embeddings of position. To generate these activations from raw sensory input, we combine fiducial marker detections in the lightweight MiniWorld simulator and DINO-based visual features in the high-fidelity Gazebo simulator. These spatial representations serve as input to a policy trained with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), enabling dynamic, goal-directed navigation. We evaluate EDEN in both MiniWorld, for rapid prototyping, and Gazebo, which offers realistic physics and perception noise. Compared to baseline agents using raw state inputs (e.g., position, velocity) or standard convolutional image encoders, EDEN achieves a 99% success rate, within the simple scenarios, and >94% within complex floorplans with occluded paths with more efficient and reliable step-wise navigation. In addition, as a replacement of ground truth activations, we present a trainable Grid Cell encoder enabling the development of periodic grid-like patterns from vision and motion sensor data, emulating the development of such patterns within biological mammals. This work represents a step toward biologically grounded spatial intelligence in robotics, bridging neural navigation principles with reinforcement learning for scalable deployment.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Memento: Augmenting Personalized Memory via Practical Multimodal Wearable Sensing in Visual Search and Wayfinding Navigation

Working memory involves the temporary retention of information over short periods. It is a critical cognitive function that enables humans to perform various online processing tasks, such as dialing a phone number, recalling misplaced items' locations, or navigating through a store. However, inherent limitations in an individual's capacity to retain information often result in forgetting important details during such tasks. Although previous research has successfully utilized wearable and assistive technologies to enhance long-term memory functions (e.g., episodic memory), their application to supporting short-term recall in daily activities remains underexplored. To address this gap, we present Memento, a framework that uses multimodal wearable sensor data to detect significant changes in cognitive state and provide intelligent in situ cues to enhance recall. Through two user studies involving 15 and 25 participants in visual search navigation tasks, we demonstrate that participants receiving visual cues from Memento achieved significantly better route recall, improving approximately 20-23% compared to free recall. Furthermore, Memento reduced cognitive load and review time by 46% while also substantially reducing computation time (3.86 seconds vs. 15.35 seconds), offering an average of 75% effectiveness compared to computer vision-based cue selection approaches.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

"New" Challenges for Future C2: Commanding Soldier-Machine Partnerships

Future warfare will occur in more complex, fast-paced, ill-structured, and demanding conditions that will stress current Command and Control (C2) systems. Without modernization, these C2 systems may fail to maintain overmatch against adversaries. We previously proposed robust partnerships between humans and artificial intelligence systems, and directly focusing on C2, we introduced how intelligent technologies could provide future overmatch through streamlining the C2 operations process, maintaining unity of effort across formations, and developing collective knowledge systems that adapt to battlefield dynamics across missions. Future C2 systems must seamlessly integrate human and machine intelligence to achieve decision advantage over adversaries while overcoming "new" challenges due to the technological advances driving fundamental changes in effective teaming, unity of effort, and meaningful human control. Here, we describe "new" C2 challenges and discuss pathways to transcend them, such as AI-enabled systems with effective human machine interfaces.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Adversarial Attacks on Reinforcement Learning Agents for Command and Control

Given the recent impact of Deep Reinforcement Learning in training agents to win complex games like StarCraft and DoTA(Defense Of The Ancients) - there has been a surge in research for exploiting learning based techniques for professional wargaming, battlefield simulation and modeling. Real time strategy games and simulators have become a valuable resource for operational planning and military research. However, recent work has shown that such learning based approaches are highly susceptible to adversarial perturbations. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of an agent trained for a Command and Control task in an environment that is controlled by an active adversary. The C2 agent is trained on custom StarCraft II maps using the state of the art RL algorithms - A3C and PPO. We empirically show that an agent trained using these algorithms is highly susceptible to noise injected by the adversary and investigate the effects these perturbations have on the performance of the trained agent. Our work highlights the urgent need to develop more robust training algorithms especially for critical arenas like the battlefield.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Scalable Interactive Machine Learning for Future Command and Control

Future warfare will require Command and Control (C2) personnel to make decisions at shrinking timescales in complex and potentially ill-defined situations. Given the need for robust decision-making processes and decision-support tools, integration of artificial and human intelligence holds the potential to revolutionize the C2 operations process to ensure adaptability and efficiency in rapidly changing operational environments. We propose to leverage recent promising breakthroughs in interactive machine learning, in which humans can cooperate with machine learning algorithms to guide machine learning algorithm behavior. This paper identifies several gaps in state-of-the-art science and technology that future work should address to extend these approaches to function in complex C2 contexts. In particular, we describe three research focus areas that together, aim to enable scalable interactive machine learning (SIML): 1) developing human-AI interaction algorithms to enable planning in complex, dynamic situations; 2) fostering resilient human-AI teams through optimizing roles, configurations, and trust; and 3) scaling algorithms and human-AI teams for flexibility across a range of potential contexts and situations.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

COA-GPT: Generative Pre-trained Transformers for Accelerated Course of Action Development in Military Operations

The development of Courses of Action (COAs) in military operations is traditionally a time-consuming and intricate process. Addressing this challenge, this study introduces COA-GPT, a novel algorithm employing Large Language Models (LLMs) for rapid and efficient generation of valid COAs. COA-GPT incorporates military doctrine and domain expertise to LLMs through in-context learning, allowing commanders to input mission information - in both text and image formats - and receive strategically aligned COAs for review and approval. Uniquely, COA-GPT not only accelerates COA development, producing initial COAs within seconds, but also facilitates real-time refinement based on commander feedback. This work evaluates COA-GPT in a military-relevant scenario within a militarized version of the StarCraft II game, comparing its performance against state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms. Our results demonstrate COA-GPT's superiority in generating strategically sound COAs more swiftly, with added benefits of enhanced adaptability and alignment with commander intentions. COA-GPT's capability to rapidly adapt and update COAs during missions presents a transformative potential for military planning, particularly in addressing planning discrepancies and capitalizing on emergent windows of opportunities.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Rating-based Reinforcement Learning

This paper develops a novel rating-based reinforcement learning approach that uses human ratings to obtain human guidance in reinforcement learning. Different from the existing preference-based and ranking-based reinforcement learning paradigms, based on human relative preferences over sample pairs, the proposed rating-based reinforcement learning approach is based on human evaluation of individual trajectories without relative comparisons between sample pairs. The rating-based reinforcement learning approach builds on a new prediction model for human ratings and a novel multi-class loss function. We conduct several experimental studies based on synthetic ratings and real human ratings to evaluate the effectiveness and benefits of the new rating-based reinforcement learning approach.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

DIP-RL: Demonstration-Inferred Preference Learning in Minecraft

In machine learning for sequential decision-making, an algorithmic agent learns to interact with an environment while receiving feedback in the form of a reward signal. However, in many unstructured real-world settings, such a reward signal is unknown and humans cannot reliably craft a reward signal that correctly captures desired behavior. To solve tasks in such unstructured and open-ended environments, we present Demonstration-Inferred Preference Reinforcement Learning (DIP-RL), an algorithm that leverages human demonstrations in three distinct ways, including training an autoencoder, seeding reinforcement learning (RL) training batches with demonstration data, and inferring preferences over behaviors to learn a reward function to guide RL. We evaluate DIP-RL in a tree-chopping task in Minecraft. Results suggest that the method can guide an RL agent to learn a reward function that reflects human preferences and that DIP-RL performs competitively relative to baselines. DIP-RL is inspired by our previous work on combining demonstrations and pairwise preferences in Minecraft, which was awarded a research prize at the 2022 NeurIPS MineRL BASALT competition, Learning from Human Feedback in Minecraft. Example trajectory rollouts of DIP-RL and baselines are located at https://sites.google.com/view/dip-rl.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Towards Solving Fuzzy Tasks with Human Feedback: A Retrospective of the MineRL BASALT 2022 Competition

To facilitate research in the direction of fine-tuning foundation models from human feedback, we held the MineRL BASALT Competition on Fine-Tuning from Human Feedback at NeurIPS 2022. The BASALT challenge asks teams to compete to develop algorithms to solve tasks with hard-to-specify reward functions in Minecraft. Through this competition, we aimed to promote the development of algorithms that use human feedback as channels to learn the desired behavior. We describe the competition and provide an overview of the top solutions. We conclude by discussing the impact of the competition and future directions for improvement.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Towards an Interpretable Hierarchical Agent Framework using Semantic Goals

Learning to solve long horizon temporally extended tasks with reinforcement learning has been a challenge for several years now. We believe that it is important to leverage both the hierarchical structure of complex tasks and to use expert supervision whenever possible to solve such tasks. This work introduces an interpretable hierarchical agent framework by combining planning and semantic goal directed reinforcement learning. We assume access to certain spatial and haptic predicates and construct a simple and powerful semantic goal space. These semantic goal representations are more interpretable, making expert supervision and intervention easier. They also eliminate the need to write complex, dense reward functions thereby reducing human engineering effort. We evaluate our framework on a robotic block manipulation task and show that it performs better than other methods, including both sparse and dense reward functions. We also suggest some next steps and discuss how this framework makes interaction and collaboration with humans easier.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Multiple View Performers for Shape Completion

We propose the Multiple View Performer (MVP) - a new architecture for 3D shape completion from a series of temporally sequential views. MVP accomplishes this task by using linear-attention Transformers called Performers. Our model allows the current observation of the scene to attend to the previous ones for more accurate infilling. The history of past observations is compressed via the compact associative memory approximating modern continuous Hopfield memory, but crucially of size independent from the history length. We compare our model with several baselines for shape completion over time, demonstrating the generalization gains that MVP provides. To the best of our knowledge, MVP is the first multiple view voxel reconstruction method that does not require registration of multiple depth views and the first causal Transformer based model for 3D shape completion.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

TagTeam: Towards Wearable-Assisted, Implicit Guidance for Human--Drone Teams

The availability of sensor-rich smart wearables and tiny, yet capable, unmanned vehicles such as nano quadcopters, opens up opportunities for a novel class of highly interactive, attention-shared human--machine teams. Reliable, lightweight, yet passive exchange of intent, data and inferences within such human--machine teams make them suitable for scenarios such as search-and-rescue with significantly improved performance in terms of speed, accuracy and semantic awareness. In this paper, we articulate a vision for such human--drone teams and key technical capabilities such teams must encompass. We present TagTeam, an early prototype of such a team and share promising demonstration of a key capability (i.e., motion awareness).

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Learning to Guide Multiple Heterogeneous Actors from a Single Human Demonstration via Automatic Curriculum Learning in StarCraft II

Traditionally, learning from human demonstrations via direct behavior cloning can lead to high-performance policies given that the algorithm has access to large amounts of high-quality data covering the most likely scenarios to be encountered when the agent is operating. However, in real-world scenarios, expert data is limited and it is desired to train an agent that learns a behavior policy general enough to handle situations that were not demonstrated by the human expert. Another alternative is to learn these policies with no supervision via deep reinforcement learning, however, these algorithms require a large amount of computing time to perform well on complex tasks with high-dimensional state and action spaces, such as those found in StarCraft II. Automatic curriculum learning is a recent mechanism comprised of techniques designed to speed up deep reinforcement learning by adjusting the difficulty of the current task to be solved according to the agent's current capabilities. Designing a proper curriculum, however, can be challenging for sufficiently complex tasks, and thus we leverage human demonstrations as a way to guide agent exploration during training. In this work, we aim to train deep reinforcement learning agents that can command multiple heterogeneous actors where starting positions and overall difficulty of the task are controlled by an automatically-generated curriculum from a single human demonstration. Our results show that an agent trained via automated curriculum learning can outperform state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning baselines and match the performance of the human expert in a simulated command and control task in StarCraft II modeled over a real military scenario.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Retrospective on the 2021 BASALT Competition on Learning from Human Feedback

We held the first-ever MineRL Benchmark for Agents that Solve Almost-Lifelike Tasks (MineRL BASALT) Competition at the Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021). The goal of the competition was to promote research towards agents that use learning from human feedback (LfHF) techniques to solve open-world tasks. Rather than mandating the use of LfHF techniques, we described four tasks in natural language to be accomplished in the video game Minecraft, and allowed participants to use any approach they wanted to build agents that could accomplish the tasks. Teams developed a diverse range of LfHF algorithms across a variety of possible human feedback types. The three winning teams implemented significantly different approaches while achieving similar performance. Interestingly, their approaches performed well on different tasks, validating our choice of tasks to include in the competition. While the outcomes validated the design of our competition, we did not get as many participants and submissions as our sister competition, MineRL Diamond. We speculate about the causes of this problem and suggest improvements for future iterations of the competition.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2021

Combining Learning from Human Feedback and Knowledge Engineering to Solve Hierarchical Tasks in Minecraft

Real-world tasks of interest are generally poorly defined by human-readable descriptions and have no pre-defined reward signals unless it is defined by a human designer. Conversely, data-driven algorithms are often designed to solve a specific, narrowly defined, task with performance metrics that drives the agent's learning. In this work, we present the solution that won first place and was awarded the most human-like agent in the 2021 NeurIPS Competition MineRL BASALT Challenge: Learning from Human Feedback in Minecraft, which challenged participants to use human data to solve four tasks defined only by a natural language description and no reward function. Our approach uses the available human demonstration data to train an imitation learning policy for navigation and additional human feedback to train an image classifier. These modules, combined with an estimated odometry map, become a powerful state-machine designed to utilize human knowledge in a natural hierarchical paradigm. We compare this hybrid intelligence approach to both end-to-end machine learning and pure engineered solutions, which are then judged by human evaluators. Codebase is available at https://github.com/viniciusguigo/kairos_minerl_basalt.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Automatic Goal Generation using Dynamical Distance Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents can learn to solve complex sequential decision making tasks by interacting with the environment. However, sample efficiency remains a major challenge. In the field of multi-goal RL, where agents are required to reach multiple goals to solve complex tasks, improving sample efficiency can be especially challenging. On the other hand, humans or other biological agents learn such tasks in a much more strategic way, following a curriculum where tasks are sampled with increasing difficulty level in order to make gradual and efficient learning progress. In this work, we propose a method for automatic goal generation using a dynamical distance function (DDF) in a self-supervised fashion. DDF is a function which predicts the dynamical distance between any two states within a markov decision process (MDP). With this, we generate a curriculum of goals at the appropriate difficulty level to facilitate efficient learning throughout the training process. We evaluate this approach on several goal-conditioned robotic manipulation and navigation tasks, and show improvements in sample efficiency over a baseline method which only uses random goal sampling.

cs.AI↗