Goals as Reward-Producing Programs

Understand

People are remarkably capable of generating their own goals, beginning with child's play and continuing into adulthood.

• Despite considerable empirical and computational work on goals and goal-oriented behavior, models are still far from capturing the richness of everyday human goals.
• Here, we bridge this gap by collecting a dataset of human-generated playful goals (in the form of scorable, single-player games), modeling them as reward-producing programs, and generating novel human-like goals through program synthesis.
• Reward-producing programs capture the rich semantics of goals through symbolic operations that compose, add temporal constraints, and allow for program execution on behavioral traces to evaluate progress.