Timezone: »
Given the impressive capabilities demonstrated by pre-trained foundation models, we must now grapple with how to harness these capabilities towards useful tasks. Since many such tasks are hard to specify programmatically, researchers have turned towards a different paradigm: fine-tuning from human feedback. The MineRL BASALT competition aims to spur research on this important class of techniques, in the domain of the popular video game Minecraft.The competition consists of a suite of four tasks with hard-to-specify reward functions.We define these tasks by a paragraph of natural language: for example, "create a waterfall and take a scenic picture of it", with additional clarifying details. Participants train a separate agent for each task, using any method they want; we expect participants will choose to fine-tune the provided pre-trained models. Agents are then evaluated by humans who have read the task description. To help participants get started, we provide a dataset of human demonstrations of the four tasks, as well as an imitation learning baseline that leverages these demonstrations.We believe this competition will improve our ability to build AI systems that do what their designers intend them to do, even when intent cannot be easily formalized. This achievement will allow AI to solve more tasks, enable more effective regulation of AI systems, and make progress on the AI alignment problem.
Tue 3:00 a.m. - 3:20 a.m.
|
Competition results and highlights
(
Presentation
)
A quick reminder on what BASALT competition was about, followed by the preliminary competition results and highlights from the evaluation so far (e.g., surprising decision human evaluators take). |
🔗 |
Tue 3:20 a.m. - 4:45 a.m.
|
Solutions for solving BASALT's fuzzy tasks by participants
(
Presentation
)
Join to learn what methods were successful, effective and/or simple from the submission developers themselves. The invited participants will be presenting their solutions in 5-10min slots. |
🔗 |
Tue 4:45 a.m. - 5:00 a.m.
|
Break
|
🔗 |
Tue 5:00 a.m. - 5:30 a.m.
|
Retrospective reminiscing with organizers and participants
(
Panel discussion
)
With results and methods gone over, organizers and participants join together to discuss what went well, what went less well, what was unexpected and freeform from participants on what it was like to compete. |
🔗 |
Tue 5:30 a.m. - 6:00 a.m.
|
Prospective envisioning with advisors
(
Panel discussion
)
Instead of dwelling on the past, our advisors and invited speakers will join together to ponder the impact of the BASALT competition, as well as what might lay ahead of us in the future editions. |
🔗 |
-
|
Fifteen-minute Competition Overview Video
(
Overview
)
SlidesLive Video » |
Byron Galbraith · Anssi Kanervisto · Steven Wang · Stephanie Milani · Sharada Mohanty · Rohin Shah · Karolis Ramanauskas · Brandon Houghton 🔗 |
Author Information
Anssi Kanervisto (Microsoft Research)
Stephanie Milani (Carnegie Mellon University)
Karolis Ramanauskas (University of Bath)

PhD Student in Reinforcement Learning
Byron Galbraith (Seva)
Byron Galbraith is the CTO of Seva, where he works to translate the latest advancements in machine learning and natural language processing to build AI-powered conversational agents. Byron has a PhD in Cognitive and Neural Systems from Boston University and an MS in Bioinformatics from Marquette University. His research expertise includes brain-computer interfaces, neuromorphic robotics, spiking neural networks, high-performance computing, and natural language processing. Byron has also held several software engineering roles including back-end system engineer, full stack web developer, office automation consultant, and game engine developer at companies ranging in size from a two-person startup to a multi-national enterprise.
Steven Wang (UC Berkeley)
Brandon Houghton (OpenAI)
Sharada Mohanty (AIcrowd SA)
Rohin Shah (DeepMind)
More from the Same Authors
-
2021 : The Multi-Agent Behavior Dataset: Mouse Dyadic Social Interactions »
Jennifer J Sun · Tomomi Karigo · Dipam Chakraborty · Sharada Mohanty · Benjamin Wild · Quan Sun · Chen Chen · David Anderson · Pietro Perona · Yisong Yue · Ann Kennedy -
2021 Spotlight: Optimal Policies Tend To Seek Power »
Alex Turner · Logan Smith · Rohin Shah · Andrew Critch · Prasad Tadepalli -
2021 : An Empirical Investigation of Representation Learning for Imitation »
Cynthia Chen · Sam Toyer · Cody Wild · Scott Emmons · Ian Fischer · Kuang-Huei Lee · Neel Alex · Steven Wang · Ping Luo · Stuart Russell · Pieter Abbeel · Rohin Shah -
2021 : General Characterization of Agents by States they Visit »
Anssi Kanervisto · Ville Hautamäki -
2022 : Fifteen-minute Competition Overview Video »
Byron Galbraith · Anssi Kanervisto · Steven Wang · Stephanie Milani · Sharada Mohanty · Rohin Shah · Karolis Ramanauskas · Brandon Houghton -
2022 : Imitating Human Behaviour with Diffusion Models »
Tim Pearce · Tabish Rashid · Anssi Kanervisto · David Bignell · Mingfei Sun · Raluca Georgescu · Sergio Valcarcel Macua · Shan Zheng Tan · Ida Momennejad · Katja Hofmann · Sam Devlin -
2022 Competition: The CityLearn Challenge 2022 »
Zoltan Nagy · Kingsley Nweye · Sharada Mohanty · Siva Sankaranarayanan · Jan Drgona · Tianzhen Hong · Sourav Dey · Gregor Henze -
2022 Poster: Video PreTraining (VPT): Learning to Act by Watching Unlabeled Online Videos »
Bowen Baker · Ilge Akkaya · Peter Zhokov · Joost Huizinga · Jie Tang · Adrien Ecoffet · Brandon Houghton · Raul Sampedro · Jeff Clune -
2021 : NeurIPS RL Competitions Results Presentations »
Rohin Shah · Liam Paull · Tabitha Lee · Tim Rocktäschel · Heinrich Küttler · Sharada Mohanty · Manuel Wuethrich -
2021 : AI Driving Olympics + Q&A »
Andrea Censi · Liam Paull · Jacopo Tani · Emilio Frazzoli · Holger Caesar · Matthew Walter · Andrea Daniele · Sahika Genc · Sharada Mohanty -
2021 : BASALT: A MineRL Competition on Solving Human-Judged Task + Q&A »
Rohin Shah · Cody Wild · Steven Wang · Neel Alex · Brandon Houghton · William Guss · Sharada Mohanty · Stephanie Milani · Nicholay Topin · Pieter Abbeel · Stuart Russell · Anca Dragan -
2021 : The NetHack Challenge + Q&A »
Eric Hambro · Sharada Mohanty · Dipam Chakrabroty · Edward Grefenstette · Minqi Jiang · Robert Kirk · Vitaly Kurin · Heinrich Kuttler · Vegard Mella · Nantas Nardelli · Jack Parker-Holder · Roberta Raileanu · Tim Rocktäschel · Danielle Rothermel · Mikayel Samvelyan -
2021 : Diamond: A MineRL Competition on Training Sample-Efficient Agents + Q&A »
William Guss · Alara Dirik · Byron Galbraith · Brandon Houghton · Anssi Kanervisto · Noboru Kuno · Stephanie Milani · Sharada Mohanty · Karolis Ramanauskas · Ruslan Salakhutdinov · Rohin Shah · Nicholay Topin · Steven Wang · Cody Wild -
2021 Poster: Optimal Policies Tend To Seek Power »
Alex Turner · Logan Smith · Rohin Shah · Andrew Critch · Prasad Tadepalli -
2020 : Concluding Remarks »
Sharada Mohanty -
2020 : Sample Efficiency & Generalization in RL : An assortment of tricks (talks by top participants) »
Sharada Mohanty -
2020 : Winner Announcements & Analysis of top submissions »
Sharada Mohanty -
2020 : NeurIPS 2020 Procgen Challenge Design »
Sharada Mohanty -
2020 : Introduction - Procgen »
Sharada Mohanty -
2020 : Concluding Remarks »
Sharada Mohanty -
2020 : "Real world applications of Flatland" : Panel Discussion with SBB, DeutschBahn, SNCF »
Sharada Mohanty -
2020 : Winner Talks : Team ai-team-flatland »
Sharada Mohanty -
2020 : Winner Talks : Team JBR_HSE »
Sharada Mohanty -
2020 : Winner Talks : Team An Old Driver »
Sharada Mohanty -
2020 : Flatland Competition Design & Results »
Sharada Mohanty -
2020 : Introduction - Flatland »
Sharada Mohanty -
2020 : Spotlight Talk: Benefits of Assistance over Reward Learning »
Rohin Shah -
2020 : NeurIPS RL Competitions: Procgen challenge »
Sharada Mohanty -
2020 : NeurIPS RL Competitions: Flatland challenge »
Sharada Mohanty -
2020 Poster: The MAGICAL Benchmark for Robust Imitation »
Sam Toyer · Rohin Shah · Andrew Critch · Stuart Russell -
2019 : The MineRL competition »
Misa Ogura · Joe Booth · Sophia Sun · Nicholay Topin · Brandon Houghton · William Guss · Stephanie Milani · Oriol Vinyals · Katja Hofmann · JIA KIM · Karolis Ramanauskas · Florian Laurent · Daichi Nishio · Anssi Kanervisto · Alexey Skrynnik · Artemij Amiranashvili · Christian Scheller · KAIXIN WANG · Yanick Schraner -
2019 Poster: On the Utility of Learning about Humans for Human-AI Coordination »
Micah Carroll · Rohin Shah · Mark Ho · Tom Griffiths · Sanjit Seshia · Pieter Abbeel · Anca Dragan