Pinwheel graphic representing the Microsoft Research Summit
Return to Event: Microsoft Research Summit 2021

Microsoft Research Summit 2021 • Videos

Research talk: Evaluating human-like navigation in 3D video games

  • Raluca Georgescu, Ida Momennejad | Microsoft Research Cambridge, Microsoft Research NYC
  • Microsoft Research Summit 2021 | Reinforcement Learning

On the path to developing agents that learn complex human-like behavior, a key challenge is the need to quickly and accurately quantify human-likeness. While human assessments of such behavior can be highly accurate, speed and scalability are limited. The researchers address these limitations through a novel automated Navigation Turing Test (NTT) that learns to predict human judgments of human-likeness. They demonstrate the effectiveness of their automated NTT on a navigation task in a complex 3D environment. They investigated six classification models to shed light on the types of architectures best suited to this task, and they validated them against data collected through a human NTT. The best models achieve high accuracy when distinguishing true human and agent behavior. At the same time, the researchers show that predicting finer-grained human assessment of agents’ progress towards human-like behavior remains unsolved. Their work takes an important step towards agents that more effectively learn complex human-like behavior.

Learn more about the 2021 Microsoft Research Summit: https://Aka.ms/researchsummit (opens in new tab)

Reinforcement Learning