United States

A critical challenge for open-domain dialogue agents is to generate persona-relevant and consistent responses. Due to the nature of persona sparsity in conversation scenarios, previous persona-based dialogue agents trained with Maximum Likelihood Estimation tend to overlook the given personas and generate responses irrelevant or inconsistent with personas. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage coarse-to-fine persona-aware training framework to improve the persona consistency of a dialogue agent progressively. Specifically, our framework first trains the dialogue agent to answer the constructed persona-aware questions, making it highly sensitive to the personas to generate persona-relevant responses. Then the dialogue agent is further trained with a contrastive learning paradigm by explicitly perceiving the difference between the consistent and the generated inconsistent responses, forcing it to pay more attention to the key persona information to generate consistent responses. By applying our proposed training framework to several representative baseline models, experimental results show significant boosts on both automatic and human evaluation metrics, especially the consistency of generated responses.

AAAI 2023

Learning to Know Myself: A Coarse-to-Fine Persona-aware Training Framework for Personalized Dialogue Generation

conversational ai/dialogue systems

personalization

generation

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

poster

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

Positive Unlabeled (PU) learning, which has a wide range of applications, is becoming increasingly prevalent. However, it suffers from problems such as data imbalance, selection bias, and prior agnostic in real scenarios. Existing studies focus on addressing part of these problems, which fail to provide a unified perspective to understand these problems. In this paper, we first rethink these problems by analyzing a typical PU scenario and come up with an insightful point of view that all these problems are inherently connected to one problem, i.e., positive distribution pollution, which refers to the inaccuracy in estimating positive data distribution. Then, inspired by this insight, we devise a variational model named CoVPU, which addresses all three problems in a unified perspective by targeting the positive distribution pollution problem. CoVPU not only accurately separates the positive data from the unlabeled data based on discrete normalizing flows, but also effectively approximates the positive distribution based on our derived unbiased rebalanced risk estimator and supervise the approximation based on a novel prior-free variational loss. Rigorous theoretical analysis proves the convergence of CoVPU to an optimal Bayesian classifier. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of CoVPU over the state-of-the-art PU learning methods under these problems. 

Positive Distribution Pollution: Rethinking Positive Unlabeled Learning From a Unified Perspective

As the functionality of dialogue systems evolves, hybrid dialogue systems that accomplish user-specific goals and participate in open-topic chitchat with users are attracting growing attention. Existing research learns both tasks concurrently utilizing a multi-task fusion technique but ignores the negative transfer phenomenon induced by the unique textual style differences. Therefore, contrastive learning based on the latent variable model is used to decouple the various textual genres in the latent space. We devise supervised and self-supervised positive and negative sample constructions for diverse datasets. In addition, to capitalize on the style information contained in the decoupled latent variables, we employ a style prefix that incorporates latent variables further to control the generation of responses with varying styles. We performed extensive experiments on three dialogue datasets, including a hybrid dialogue dataset and two task-oriented dialogue datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can mitigate the negative style transfer issue and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple dialogue datasets.

Mitigating Negative Style Transfer in Hybrid Dialogue System

Vision-Language (VL) models with the Two-Tower architecture have dominated visual-language representation learning in recent years. Current VL models either use lightweight uni-modal encoders and learn to extract, align and fuse both modalities simultaneously in a deep cross-modal encoder, or feed the last-layer uni-modal representations from the deep pre-trained uni-modal encoders into the top cross-modal encoder. Both approaches potentially restrict vision-language representation learning and limit model performance. In this paper, we propose BridgeTower, which introduces multiple bridge layers that build a connection between the top layers of uni-modal encoders and each layer of the cross-modal encoder. This enables effective bottom-up cross-modal alignment and fusion between visual and textual representations of different semantic levels of pre-trained uni-modal encoders in the cross-modal encoder. Pre-trained with only 4M images, BridgeTower achieves state-of-the-art performance on various downstream vision-language tasks. In particular, on the VQAv2 test-std set, BridgeTower achieves an accuracy of 78.73%, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art model METER by 1.09% with the same pre-training data and almost negligible additional parameters and computational costs. Notably, when further scaling the model, BridgeTower achieves an accuracy of 81.15%, surpassing models that are pre-trained on orders-of-magnitude larger datasets. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/microsoft/BridgeTower.

BridgeTower: Building Bridges Between Encoders in Vision-Language Representation Learning

The computation of short paths in graphs with arc lengths is a pillar of graph algorithmics and network science. In a more diverse world, however, not every short path is equally valuable. For the setting where each vertex is assigned to a group (color), we provide a framework to model multiple natural fairness aspects. We seek to find short paths in which the number of occurrences of each color is within some given lower and upper bounds. Among other results, we prove the introduced problems to be computationally intractable (NP-hard and parameterized hard with respect to the number of colors) even in very restricted settings (such as each color should appear with exactly the same frequency), while also presenting an encouraging algorithmic result ("fixed-parameter tractability") related to the length of the sought solution path for the general problem.


Fair Short Paths in Vertex-Colored Graphs

Partial label learning (PLL) aims to learn from inexact data annotations where each training example is associated with a coarse candidate label set. Due to its practicability, many PLL algorithms have been proposed in recent literature. Most prior PLL works attempt to identify the ground-truth labels from candidate sets and the classifier is trained afterward by fitting the features of examples and their exact ground-truth labels. From a different perspective, we propose to enrich the feature space and raise the question ``Can label-specific features help PLL?'' rather than learning from examples with identical features for all classes. Despite its benefits, previous label-specific feature approaches rely on ground-truth labels to split positive and negative examples of each class and then conduct clustering analysis, which is not directly applicable in PLL. To remedy this problem, we propose an uncertainty-aware confidence region to accommodate false positive labels. We first employ graph-based label enhancement to yield smooth pseudo-labels and facilitate the confidence region split. After acquiring label-specific features, a family of binary classifiers is induced. Extensive experiments on both synthesized and real-world datasets are conducted and the results show that our method consistently outperforms eight baselines.

Can Label-Specific Feature Help Partial-Label Learning?

Reward shaping (RS) is a powerful method in reinforcement learning (RL) for overcoming the problem of sparse or uninformative rewards. However, RS typically relies on manually engineered shaping-reward functions whose construc- tion is time-consuming and error-prone. It also requires domain knowledge which runs contrary to the goal of autonomous learning. We introduce Reinforcement Learning Optimising Shaping Algorithm (ROSA), an automated reward shaping framework in which the shaping-reward function is constructed in a Markov game between two agents. A reward-shaping agent (Shaper) uses switching controls to determine which states to add shaping rewards for more efficient learning while the other agent (Controller) learns the optimal policy for the task using these shaped rewards. We prove that ROSA, which adopts existing RL algorithms, learns to construct a shaping-reward function that is beneficial to the task thus ensuring efficient convergence to high performance policies. We demonstrate ROSA’s properties in three didactic experiments and show its superior performance against state-of-the-art RS algorithms in challenging sparse reward environments.

Learning to Shape Rewards using a Game of Two Partners

Dynamic heterogeneous graph neural networks (DHGNNs) have been shown to be effective in handling the ubiquitous dynamic heterogeneous graphs. However, the existing DHGNNs are hand-designed, requiring extensive human efforts and failing to adapt to diverse dynamic heterogeneous graph scenarios. In this paper, we propose to automate the design of DHGNN, which faces two major challenges: 1) how to design the search space to jointly consider the spatial-temporal dependencies and heterogeneous interactions in graphs; 2) how to design an efficient search algorithm in the potentially large and complex search space. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel Dynamic Heterogeneous Graph Attention Search (DHGAS) method. Our proposed method can automatically discover the optimal DHGNN architecture and adapt to various dynamic heterogeneous graph scenarios without human guidance. In particular, we first propose a unified dynamic heterogeneous graph attention (DHGA) framework, which enables each node to jointly attend its heterogeneous and dynamic neighbors. Based on the framework, we design a localization space to determine where the attention should be applied and a parameterization space to determine how the attention should be parameterized. Lastly, we design a multi-stage differentiable search algorithm to efficiently explore the search space. Extensive experiments on real-world dynamic heterogeneous graph datasets demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for tasks including link prediction, node classification and node regression. To the best of our knowledge, DHGAS is the first dynamic heterogeneous graph neural architecture search method.

Dynamic Heterogeneous Graph Attention Neural Architecture Search

Exploiting pseudo labels (e.g., categories and bounding boxes) of unannotated objects produced by a teacher detector have underpinned much of recent progress in semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). However, due to the limited generalization capacity of the teacher detector caused by the scarce annotations, the produced pseudo labels often deviate from ground truth, especially those with relatively low classification confidences, thus limiting the generalization performance of SSOD. To mitigate this problem, we propose a dual pseudo-label polishing framework for SSOD. Instead of directly exploiting the pseudo labels produced by the teacher detector, we take the first attempt at reducing their deviation from ground truth using dual polishing learning, where two differently structured polishing networks are elaborately developed and trained using synthesized paired pseudo labels and the corresponding ground truth for categories and bounding boxes on the given annotated objects, respectively. By doing this, both polishing networks can infer more accurate pseudo labels for unannotated objects through sufficiently exploiting their context knowledge based on the initially produced pseudo labels, and thus improve the generalization performance of SSOD. Moreover, such a scheme can be seamlessly plugged into the existing SSOD framework for joint end-to-end learning. In addition, we propose to disentangle the polished pseudo categories and bounding boxes of unannotated objects for separate category classification and bounding box regression in SSOD, which enables introducing more unannotated objects during model training and thus further improves the performance. Experiments on both PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over existing state-of-the-art baselines. The code can be found at https://github.com/snowdusky/DualPolishLearning.

Mind the Gap: Polishing Pseudo Labels for Accurate Semi-Supervised Object Detection

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to adversarial geometric transformation. This paper aims to verify the robustness of large-scale DNNs against the combination of multiple geometric transformations with a provable guarantee.  Given a set of transformations (e.g., rotation, scaling, etc.), we develop GeoRobust, a black-box robustness analyser built upon a novel global optimisation strategy, for locating the worst-case combination of transformations that affect and even alter a network's output.  GeoRobust can provide provable guarantees on finding the worst-case combination based on recent advances in Lipschitzian theory. Due to its black-box nature, GeoRobust can be deployed on large-scale DNNs regardless of their architectures, activation functions, and the number of neurons. In practice, GeoRobust can locate the worst-case geometric transformation with high precision for the ResNet50 model on ImageNet in a few seconds on average. We examined 18 ImageNet classifiers, including the ResNet family and vision transformers, and found a positive correlation between the geometric robustness of the networks and the parameter numbers. We also observe that increasing the depth of DNN is more beneficial than increasing its width in terms of improving its geometric robustness. Our tool GeoRobust is available at https://github.com/TrustAI/GeoRobust.


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Positive Distribution Pollution: Rethinking Positive Unlabeled Learning From a Unified Perspective

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