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Giving Feedback on Interactive Student Programs with Meta-Exploration
Evan Liu · Moritz Stephan · Allen Nie · Chris Piech · Emma Brunskill · Chelsea Finn

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in Decision Awareness in Reinforcement Learning »
Event URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=ixjQB2SmVXA »

Creating interactive software, such as websites or games, is a particularly engaging way to learn computer science. However, teaching and giving feedback on such software is hard — standard approaches require instructors to hand grade student-implemented interactive programs. As a result, online platforms that serve millions, like Code.org, are unable to provide any feedback on assignments for implementing interactive programs, which critically hinders students’ ability to learn. Recent work proposes to train reinforcement learning agents to interact with a student’s program, aiming to explore states indicative of errors. However, this approach only provides binary feedback of whether a program is correct or not, while students require finer-grained feedback on the specific errors in their programs to understand their mistakes. In this work, we show that exploring to discover errors can be cast as a meta-exploration problem. This enables us to construct a principled objective for discovering errors and an algorithm for optimizing this objective, which provides fine-grained feedback. We evaluate our approach on a set of 700K real anonymized student programs from a Code.org interactive assignment. Our approach provides feedback with 94.3% accuracy, improving over existing approaches by over 17.7% and coming within 1.5% of human-level accuracy.

Author Information

Evan Liu (Stanford University)
Moritz Stephan (Stanford University)
Allen Nie (Stanford University)
Chris Piech (Stanford University)
Emma Brunskill (Stanford University)
Emma Brunskill

Emma Brunskill is an associate tenured professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. Brunskill’s lab aims to create AI systems that learn from few samples to robustly make good decisions and is part of the Stanford AI Lab, the Stanford Statistical ML group, and AI Safety @Stanford. Brunskill has received a NSF CAREER award, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, a Microsoft Faculty Fellow award and an alumni impact award from the computer science and engineering department at the University of Washington. Brunskill and her lab have received multiple best paper nominations and awards both for their AI and machine learning work (UAI best paper, Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making Symposium best paper twice) and for their work in Ai of education (Intelligent Tutoring Systems Conference, Educational Data Mining conference x3, CHI).

Chelsea Finn (Stanford)

Chelsea Finn is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Finn's research interests lie in the capability of robots and other agents to develop broadly intelligent behavior through learning and interaction. To this end, her work has included deep learning algorithms for concurrently learning visual perception and control in robotic manipulation skills, inverse reinforcement methods for learning reward functions underlying behavior, and meta-learning algorithms that can enable fast, few-shot adaptation in both visual perception and deep reinforcement learning. Finn received her Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and her PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Her research has been recognized through the ACM doctoral dissertation award, the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, the C.V. Ramamoorthy Distinguished Research Award, and the MIT Technology Review 35 under 35 Award, and her work has been covered by various media outlets, including the New York Times, Wired, and Bloomberg. Throughout her career, she has sought to increase the representation of underrepresented minorities within CS and AI by developing an AI outreach camp at Berkeley for underprivileged high school students, a mentoring program for underrepresented undergraduates across four universities, and leading efforts within the WiML and Berkeley WiCSE communities of women researchers.

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