Situational Grounding within Multimodal Simulations

Abstract: In this paper, we argue that simulation platforms enable a novel type of embodied spatial reasoning, one facilitated by a formal model of object and event semantics that renders the continuous quantitative search space of an open-world, real-time environment tractable. We provide examples for how a semantically-informed AI system can exploit the precise, numerical information provided by a game engine to perform qualitative reasoning about objects and events, facilitate learning novel concepts from data, and communicate with a human to improve its models and demonstrate its understanding. We argue that simulation environments, and game engines in particular, bring together many different notions of "simulation" and many different technologies to provide a highly-effective platform for developing both AI systems and tools to experiment in both machine and human intelligence.