Learning to Play Minecraft with Video PreTraining (VPT)

Learning to Play Minecraft with Video PreTraining (VPT)

We trained a neural network to play Minecraft by Video PreTraining (VPT) on a massive unlabeled video dataset of human Minecraft play, while using only a small amount of labeled contractor data. With fine-tuning, our model can learn to craft diamond tools, a task that usually takes proficient humans over 20 minutes (24,000 actions). Our model uses the native human interface of keypresses and mouse movements, making it quite general, and represents a step towards general computer-using agents.


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MineRL Competition

The internet contains an enormous amount of publicly available videos that we can learn from. You can watch a person make a gorgeous presentation, a digital artist draw a beautiful sunset, and a Minecraft player build an intricate house. However, these videos only provide a record of what happened but not precisely how it was achieved, i.e. you will not know the exact sequence of mouse movements and keys pressed. If we would like to build large-scale foundation models in these domains as we’ve done in language with GPT, this lack of action labels poses a new challenge not present in the language domain, where “action labels” are simply the next words in a sentence.

In order to utilize the wealth of unlabeled video data available on the internet, we introduce a novel, yet simple, semi-supervised imitation learning method: Video PreTraining (VPT). We start by gathering a small dataset from contractors where we record not only their video, but also the actions they took, which in our case are keypresses and mouse movements. With this data we train an inverse dynamics model (IDM), which predicts the action being taken at each step in the video. Importantly, the IDM can use past and future information to guess the action at each step. This task is much easier and thus requires far less data than the behavioral cloning task of predicting actions given past video frames only, which requires inferring what the person wants to do and how to accomplish it. We can then use the trained IDM to label a much larger dataset of online videos and learn to act via behavioral cloning.

Learning to Play Minecraft with Video PreTraining (VPT)
Learning to Play Minecraft with Video PreTraining (VPT)
VPT method overview

VPT Zero-Shot Results

We chose to validate our method in Minecraft because it (1) is one of the most actively played video games in the world and thus has a wealth of freely available video data and (2) is open-ended with a wide variety of things to do, similar to real-world applications such as computer usage. Unlike prior works in Minecraft that use simplified action spaces aimed at easing exploration, our AI uses the much more generally applicable, though also much more difficult, native human interface: 20Hz framerate with the mouse and keyboard.

Trained on 70,000 hours of IDM-labeled online video, our behavioral cloning model (the “VPT foundation model”) accomplishes tasks in Minecraft that are nearly impossible to achieve with reinforcement learning from scratch. It learns to chop down trees to collect logs, craft those logs into planks, and then craft those planks into a crafting table; this sequence takes a human proficient in Minecraft approximately 50 seconds or 1,000 consecutive game actions.

Learning to Play Minecraft with Video PreTraining (VPT)
Learning to Play Minecraft with Video PreTraining (VPT)
Sequence of items required to craft a crafting table, labeled with the median time it takes proficient humans to reach each step
Crafting of a crafting table "zero shot" (i.e. after pre-training only without additional fine-tuning)

Additionally, the model performs other complex skills humans often do in the game, such as swimming, hunting animals for food, and eating that food. It also learned the skill of “pillar jumping”, a common behavior in Minecraft of elevating yourself by repeatedly jumping and placing a block underneath yourself.

Swimming (zero-shot)

Hunting animals (zero-shot)

Eating food (zero-shot)

Pillar jumping (zero-shot)

Fine-tuning with Behavioral Cloning

Foundation models are designed to have a broad behavior profile and be generally capable across a wide variety of tasks. To incorporate new knowledge or allow them to specialize on a narrower task distribution, it is common practice to fine-tune these models to smaller, more specific datasets. As a case study into how well the VPT foundation model can be fine-tuned to downstream datasets, we asked our contractors to play for 10 minutes in brand new Minecraft worlds and build a house from basic Minecraft materials. We hoped that this would amplify the foundation model’s ability to reliably perform “early game” skills such as building crafting tables. When fine-tuning to this dataset, not only do we see a massive improvement in reliably performing the early game skills already present in the foundation model, but the fine-tuned model also learns to go even deeper into the technology tree by crafting both wooden and stone tools. Sometimes we even see some rudimentary shelter construction and the agent searching through villages, including raiding chests.

Learning to Play Minecraft with Video PreTraining (VPT)
Learning to Play Minecraft with Video PreTraining (VPT)
Sequence of items required to craft a stone pickaxe, labeled with the median time it takes proficient humans to reach each step
Improved early game behavior from BC fine-tuning

Crafting a stone pickaxe

Constructing a rudimentary wooden shelter

Searching through a village

Data Scaling

Perhaps the most important hypothesis of our work is that it is far more effective to use labeled contractor data to train an IDM (as part of the VPT pipeline) than it is to directly train a BC foundation model from that same small contractor dataset. To validate this hypothesis we train foundation models on increasing amounts of data from 1 to 70,000 hours. Those trained on under 2,000 hours of data are trained on the contractor data with ground-truth labels that were originally collected to train the IDM, and those trained on over 2,000 hours are trained on internet data labeled with our IDM. We then take each foundation model and fine-tune it to the house building dataset described in the previous section.

Effect of foundation model training data on fine-tuning

As foundation model data increases, we generally see an increase in crafting ability, and only at the largest data scale do we see the emergence of stone tool crafting.

Fine-Tuning with Reinforcement Learning

When it is possible to specify a reward function, reinforcement learning (RL) can be a powerful method for eliciting high, potentially even super-human, performance. However, many tasks require overcoming hard exploration challenges, and most RL methods tackle these with random exploration priors, e.g. models are often incentivized to act randomly via entropy bonuses. The VPT model should be a much better prior for RL because emulating human behavior is likely much more helpful than taking random actions. We set our model the challenging task of collecting a diamond pickaxe, an unprecedented capability in Minecraft made all the more difficult when using the native human interface.

Crafting a diamond pickaxe requires a long and complicated sequence of subtasks. To make this task tractable, we reward agents for each item in the sequence.

Learning to Play Minecraft with Video PreTraining (VPT)
Learning to Play Minecraft with Video PreTraining (VPT)
RL fine-tuned VPT model crafting a diamond pickaxe

We found that an RL policy trained from a random initialization (the standard RL method) barely achieves any reward, never learning to collect logs and only rarely collecting sticks. In stark contrast, fine-tuning from a VPT model not only learns to craft diamond pickaxes (which it does in 2.5% of 10-minute Minecraft episodes), but it even has a human-level success rate at collecting all items leading up to the diamond pickaxe. This is the first time anyone has shown a computer agent capable of crafting diamond tools in Minecraft, which takes humans over 20 minutes (24,000 actions) on average.

Reward over episodes

Conclusion

VPT paves the path toward allowing agents to learn to act by watching the vast numbers of videos on the internet. Compared to generative video modeling or contrastive methods that would only yield representational priors, VPT offers the exciting possibility of directly learning large scale behavioral priors in more domains than just language. While we only experiment in Minecraft, the game is very open-ended and the native human interface (mouse and keyboard) is very generic, so we believe our results bode well for other similar domains, e.g. computer usage.

For more information, please see our paper. We are also open sourcing our contractor data, Minecraft environment, model code, and model weights, which we hope will aid future research into VPT. Furthermore, we have partnered with the MineRL NeurIPS competition this year. Contestants can use and fine-tune our models to try to solve many difficult tasks in Minecraft. Those interested can check out the competition webpage and compete for a blue-sky prize of $100,000 in addition to a regular prize pool of $20,000. Grants are available to self-identified underrepresented groups and individuals.


Acknowledgments
This was a large effort by a dedicated team. Each author made huge contributions on many fronts over long time periods. All members were full time on the project for over six months. BB, IA, PZ, and JC were on the original VPT project team, and thus were involved for even longer (over a year). Aside from those original team members, author order is random. It was also randomized between IA and PZ.


source https://openai.com/blog/vpt/

AI with an EQ

Editor’s Note: This content is sponsored by Marketing AI Institute partner RAD AI.

400 years ago this year, in 1622, the phrase “live and let live” was written by medieval merchants to govern trade throughout Europe, North Africa and Asia Minor.

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AI-Written Critiques Help Humans Notice Flaws

AI-Written Critiques Help Humans Notice Flaws

We trained "critique-writing" models to describe flaws in summaries. Human evaluators find flaws in summaries much more often when shown our model’s critiques. Larger models are better at self-critiquing, with scale improving critique-writing more than summary-writing. This shows promise for using AI systems to assist human supervision of AI systems on difficult tasks.

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We want to ensure that future AI systems performing very difficult tasks remain aligned with human intent. Many previous works on aligning language models rely on human evaluations as a training signal. However, humans struggle at evaluating very difficult tasks—for example, it is hard to spot every bug in a codebase or every factual error in a long essay. Models may then learn to give outputs that look good to humans but have errors we systematically fail to notice.

To mitigate this problem, we want to train AI assistants that help humans provide feedback on hard tasks. These assistants should point out flaws, help humans understand what’s going on, and answer their questions. An example of this is our past work on book summarization: reading the entire book is a lot of work, but humans assisted with chapter summaries have a much easier time evaluating a book summary.

As a proof of concept, we used supervised learning to train language models to write critiques of topic-based summaries of short stories, Wikipedia articles, and other texts from the internet. We use these models to assist human evaluators and study scaling properties of critique writing.

Experiments with AI assistance

We compare human ratings of AI-written summaries between a control group receiving no assistance and an assisted group who get to see 8 AI-written critiques. Summaries are picked from 3 different sources. Assisted humans find about 50% more flaws in summaries than unassisted raters, using model critiques directly for most of the critiques they find.

To see how useful our models are for evaluation assistance, we show labelers 8 model-written critiques of each summary, with a control group that receives no assistance. We use topic-based summaries from three sources: written by our models, written by humans, and written by humans deliberately to have important yet subtle flaws.

New Jersey is in the crosshairs of a major winter storm that could paralyze parts of New England and dump in excess of a foot of snow on the Garden State by Saturday. The forecast remains highly volatile and may change dramatically in the coming 24 hours.

Throughout the day, The Star-Ledger will provide updates here (newest on top) as new information comes in, watches and warnings are issued and the forecast changes.

10:30 P.M. Weather forecasters tonight reiterated warnings for drivers and residents that a potentially dangerous portion of the storm will be hitting much of central and northern New Jersey during Friday’s evening rush-hour. Major travel delays are expected late Friday and Friday night as rain turns into snow, the National Weather Service forecast said.

MORE SNOWSTORM UPDATES

• Friday, Feb. 8: N.J. snowstorm: Live updates on blizzard, traffic, flooding and more

• Saturday, Feb. 9: N.J. snowstorm update: Power outages, snow totals and other storm news

After periods of rain, heavy snow is expected to be falling in many places by late Friday afternoon , the forecast said. In some places north of Interstate 78, snow is expected to come down between 1 and 2 inches per hour. In counties like Sussex, Morris and Warren, expected snow accumulations range from 6 to 16 inches.

For many towns from Jackson in Ocean County to Somerville in Somerset County and out east to Long Beach Island, snow accumulation is expected to range from 4 to 10 inches. High winds are expected throughout the region, topping out in Monmouth County, with gusts up to 45 mph possible.

By daybreak Saturday, flurries will taper off, giving way to a sunny, blustery day, the latest forecast said.

9:12 P.M. With forecasters still predicting a major winter storm to hit New Jersey, many schools throughout the state are preemptively canceling or delaying classes Friday.

8:45 P.M. In advance of the storm, NJ Transit has announced it will be offering full systemwide cross-honoring all day Friday and all day Saturday, enabling customers to use their ticket or pass on an alternate travel mode — rail, bus or light rail.

5 P.M. The signatures of thunder-snow (which is just what it sounds like — thunder and lightning during heavy snow) are showing up on several models, according to NY NJ PA Weather meteorologistSteven DiMartino.

This indicates the potential for extremely heavy snow to fall in eastern New Jersey tomorrow night, and adds to the unpredictability to totals.

”Where you get some of this convective snow, when it comes down, it’s going to come down very, very hard,” he said. “It’s difficult to pinpoint just where these bands are going to occur. You could end up with a situation where one town has 18 inches of snow and the next town over has three.”

DiMartino stressed the volatility that remains in the forecast, and urged state residents to pay close attention to changing conditions. Many of the details of what ultimately will happen in local areas will not be determined until the storm beings to come together tomorrow.

He said the potential for these heavier snow bands to develop may be why some forecast models (like the NAM, above), are predicting much heavier snowfall totals than the National Weather Service.

[]

The North American Model (NAM), released this afternoon, showed well over a foot of snow falling over many areas in New Jersey.

4:13 P.M. The National Weather Service has issued a blizzard warning for parts of northeastern New Jersey, including Newark and Jersey City, and the five boroughs of New York, where upwards of 14 inches of snow are expected along with howling winds and severely reduced visibility.

The blizzard warnings are in effect from 6 a.m. Friday until 1 p.m. Saturday and warn of 10 to 14 inches of snow, with locally higher amounts and white-out conditions with wind gusts of up to 45 miles per hour. Blizzard conditions are expected in coastal northeastern New Jersey, in southern Bergen and Passaic Counties and Eastern Hudson, Essex and Union counties.

Further north and west, 10 to 14 inches of snow are also expected, but winds are not expected to reach blizzard criteria. Winter storm warnings are in effect there.

3:24 P.M. The National Weather Service at Mount Holly has issued Winter Storm warnings for several counties in northern and central New Jersey and extended further them further south than the areas the previously issued watches covered.

The winter storm warnings have been issued for Sussex, Warren, Morris, Hunterdon, Middlesex, Monmouth, Ocean and northwest Burlington counties. In Sussex, Warren and Morris counties, the National Weather Service is expecting between ten to 16 inches of snow to fall, while other counties in the warning areacould receive six to ten inches. The warnings are in effect from 6 a.m. Friday to 6 a.m. Saturday.

Expect the National Weather Service’s Upton, N.Y. office, which covers northeastern N.J., to follow suit shortly.

Further south, winter weather advisories have been issued for the rest of the state, where between two and five inches of snow is anticipated.

3:07 P.M.The private and public sectors in New Jersey are now bracing for major storm impacts.

More than 350 United Airlines flights, many based out of Newark-Liberty International Airport, have already been canceled, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. NJ Transit announced they will cross-honor tickets across its entire system. Utilities like Jersey Central Power & Light and PSE&G say they will have extra crews on hand to deal with potential power issues caused by heavy snow and wind.

Additionally, several events are being postponed across the state, such as two sectional high school track championships. The state Office of Emergency Management has not yet opened its operations center in Trenton, but it remains a possibility. Mary Goepfert, a spokeswoman for OEM, said the state is monitoring the storm closely and has been in contact with local emergency managers in preparation.

2:07 P.M. The European model is in and it looks snowy, much like many of the other models that ran earlier. Were this to verify, a six to 12-inch plus snowfall is definitely in the cards for north and central New Jersey, particularly north of Interstate-195.

Freehold-based meteorologist and owner of NY NJ PA Weather Steven DiMartino said he likes the European solution best, so far, and agrees with totals.

What does the NAM look like, you ask? Well the snowfall printout is posted below, but Eric Holthaus tweeted a picture of the simulated radar produced by the NAM model for tomorrow night. An absolute monster.

1:50 P.M. The most-affected regions of Hurricane Sandy along the New Jersey coast are about to take another hit. With defenses already weakened, coastal communities could see major impacts from coastal flooding, with the worst coming Saturday morning, according to the National Weather Service.

”I’m really worried about the areas worst hit by Sandy,” said NWS meteorologist Gary Szatkowski. “Time is starting to work against us…We could see substantial beach erosion. I know people have been working hard, but there’s less to erode. We could easily see waves and water coming into areas you typically wouldn’t.”

Szatkowski said he is concerned about the Raritan Bay shore in particular, where a three foot storm surge is possible at high tide Saturday morning, with five to seven foot waves breaking over top of it.

1:22 P.M. Tomorrow night’s commute could be awful in northern New Jersey. By 7 p.m., there is a threat that snowfall rates could reach two inches per hour across large swaths of northern and central New Jersey. Snowfall rates of this magnitude could reduce visibility substantially, wreak havoc on roads and make travel dangerous, if not nearly impossible.

Gary Szatkowski, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service’s Mount Holly office, said he is going “very worried” about deteoriorating conditions in the afternoon, and posted a map on Twitter showing where the threat of intense snowfall will be at 7 p.m.

12:34 P.M. An important thing to remember about this storm is the volatility in the forecast remains high, even though models have been trending snowier. State Climatologist David Robinson said the bust potential for this forecast is “tremendous” and the slightest shift in the forecast track could mean the difference between a major snowstorm, and a primarily rain event for much of the state.

Eric Holthaus, of the Wall Street Journal, points out that how much warm air enters region prior to storm will be crucial

12:04 P.M. The National Weather Service at Mount Hollyand Upton, N.Y. both issued briefing packages on the coming storm this morning. Each warned that blizzard conditions may occur Friday night in northern New Jersey. Mount Holly suggested blizzard warnings may be necessary as the storm unfolds.

Blizzard warnings are issued during very specific situations by the National Weather Service. Anticipated winds of at least 35 miles per hour and visibility reduced below a quarter of a mile for a period of three hours is necessary before the agency pulls the trigger on such a warning. Travel would become all but impossible.

11:53 A.M. David Robinson, the state climatologist at Rutgers University, said he does not envy forecasters today, calling this type of storm “the most difficult forecast a New Jersey meteorologist will have to make.” The forecast is complicated for a number of reasons, from New Jersey’s geography to the thermal profile of the atmosphere. More on why New Jersey winter storms are so hard to pin down later.

11:35 A.M. Forecast model guidance on the storm continues to vary but appears to be focusing in on a snowier solution for northern and central New Jersey. Overnight, several reliable models (The European, GFS and NAM) showed very different solutions to the storm, showing everything from minor event to a major winter storm that would have serious impacts on travel in northern sections of the state.

This morning, the GFS and NAM both showed the bulk of New Jersey north of I-195 receiving several inches of snow, perhaps exceeding a foot in some areas. The latest run of the European model, considered one of the most reliable, will be released at approximately 1:30 p.m.

[]

The North American Model (NAM) shows an even snowier solution for New Jersey, with parts of the state easily exceeding a foot of snow.

Keep in mind, each model run is just one of scores of pieces of data the National Weather Service uses to make forecasts and no single model should be viewed as a complete representation of what will happen.

11:30 A.M. A winter storm watch remains in effectfor the vast majority of northern and central New Jersey. Current forecasts call for six to 12 inches of snow, with higher amounts possible in the northern most sections of New Jersey.

Because the storm is highly complex and much remains uncertain, particularly where the rain/snow line will fall, the National Weather Service is holding off on issuing any warnings until this afternoon.

_The Associated Press contributed to this report._

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What does the article say about the storm’s effects on daily life?





Daily events are expected to be heavily disrupted during the storm as the conditions for a blizzard are ripe. Travel is expected to be heavily affected, and NJ Transit announced that commuters will be able to use their tickets for any transit option like buses, ferries, etc. will be able to use it for another method. Visibility is expected to be extremely reduced as well. Furthermore, due to the coastal areas having already been affected by the hurricane Sandy, this storm may push waves and water inland to a degree much further than previously seen. The storm can also end up destroying the roads, making travel impossible. Finally, many schools preemptively canceled schools in addition to several events.
The storm could paralyze parts of New England, and dump a foot of snow on New Jersey. Travel will be impacted. Many flights have already been canceled. Schools are preemptively canceling or delaying classes. Events are being postponed. There is a threat that snowfall rates could reach two inches per hour across large swaths of northern and central New Jersey. Snowfall rates of this magnitude could reduce visibility substantially, wreak havoc on roads and make travel dangerous, if not nearly impossible.




The response inaccurately mentions that the ferry is alternative transit option during the storm.
The last sentence doesn’t make sense
The answer should make some mention of the expected snow
This should point out that the storm will cause major travel delays as rain turns into snow.

Even though summarization isn’t actually a difficult task for humans and our models aren’t more capable than humans, they already provide meaningful assistance: when asked to evaluate model-written summaries, the assisted group finds 50% more flaws than the control group. For deliberately misleading summaries, assistance increases how often humans spot the intended flaw from 27% to 45%.

Scaling properties of critiques

Assistance on model-written summaries only works if they are able to critique themselves. We ask humans to rate the helpfulness of model-written self-critiques, and find larger models are better at self-critiquing.

Larger models are better at self-critiquing in our topic-based summarization domain: Even though larger models have answers that are more difficult to critique, they generate more helpful critiques of their own outputs. In this plot, model scale is measured in log loss (nats) after fine-tuning. Helpfulness is determined by a human judging whether the model-generated critique of the model-generated answer is valid and useful for understanding summary quality. We filter for summaries that humans found a critique for.

We also find that large models are able to directly improve their outputs, using their self-critiques, which small models are unable to do. Using better critiques helps models make better improvements than they do with worse critiques, or with no critiques.

Do models tell us everything they know?

To provide the best evaluation assistance on difficult tasks, we would like models to communicate all problems that they “know about.” Whenever a model correctly predicts that an answer is flawed, can the model also produce a concrete critique that humans understand?

This is particularly important for supervising models that could attempt to mislead human supervisors or hide information. We would like to train equally smart assistance models to point out what humans don’t notice.

Unfortunately, we found that models are better at discriminating than at critiquing their own answers, indicating they know about some problems that they can't or don't articulate. Furthermore, the gap between discrimination and critique ability did not appear to decrease for larger models. Reducing this gap is an important priority for our alignment research.

Next steps

An important limitation of this work is that topic-based summarization is not actually a difficult task: humans understand it quite well and it takes them only about 10 minutes to evaluate a summary. To understand the limits of AI-assisted evaluation better, we need to work with tasks that are much more difficult for humans to evaluate.

Nevertheless, these results make us optimistic that we can train models to provide humans with meaningful feedback assistance. This is an important pillar of our alignment strategy, starting with the work on debate and recursive reward modeling. In the long run, we want to build assistants that can be trusted to take on all of the cognitive labor needed for evaluation, so humans can focus on communicating their preferences.

If you’re interested in this line of research, we’re hiring! Apply for roles under “All teams” and mention your interest in scalable alignment!


source https://openai.com/blog/critiques/