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Intelligent systems need to be able to recover from mistakes, resolve uncertainty, and adapt to novel concepts not seen during training. Dialog interaction can enable this by the use of clarifications for correction and resolving uncertainty, and active learning queries to learn new concepts encountered during operation. Prior work on dialog systems has either focused on exclusively learning how to perform clarification/ information seeking, or to perform active learning. In this work, we train a hierarchical dialog policy to jointly perform {\it both} clarification and active learning in the context of an interactive language-based image retrieval task motivated by an online shopping application, and demonstrate that jointly learning dialog policies for clarification and active learning is more effective than the use of static dialog policies for one or both of these functions.

AAAI 2021

Dialog Policy Learning for Joint Clarification and Active Learning Queries

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2022

technical paper

For natural language understanding tasks, either machine reading comprehension or natural language inference, both semantics-aware and inference are favorable features of the concerned modeling for better understanding performance. Thus we propose a Semantics-Aware Inferential Network (SAIN) to meet such a motivation. Taking explicit contextualized semantics as a complementary input, the inferential module of SAIN enables a series of reasoning steps over semantic clues through an attention mechanism. By stringing these steps, the inferential network effectively learns to perform iterative reasoning which incorporates both explicit semantics and contextualized representations. In terms of well pre-trained language models as front-end encoder, our model achieves significant improvement on 11 tasks including machine reading comprehension and natural language inference.

Semantics-Aware Inferential Network for Natural Language Understanding

In the retrieval-based multi-turn dialogue modeling, it remains a challenge to select the most appropriate response according to extracting salient features in context utterances. As a conversation goes on, topic shift at discourse-level naturally happens through the continuous multi-turn dialogue context. However, all known retrieval-based systems are satisfied with exploiting local topic words for context utterance representation but fail to capture such essential global topic-aware clues at discourse-level. Instead of taking topic-agnostic n-gram utterance as processing unit for matching purpose in existing systems, this paper presents a novel topic-aware solution for multi-turn dialogue modeling, which segments and extracts topic-aware utterances in an unsupervised way, so that the resulted model is capable of capturing salient topic shift at discourse-level in need and thus effectively track topic flow during multi-turn conversation. Our topic-aware modeling is implemented by a newly proposed unsupervised topic-aware segmentation algorithm and Topic-Aware Dual-attention Matching (TADAM) Network, which matches each topic segment with the response in a dual cross-attention way. Experimental results on three public datasets show TADAM can outperform the state-of-the-art method, especially by 3.3% on E-commerce dataset that has an obvious topic shift.

Topic-Aware Multi-Turn Dialogue Modeling

Modifying the reward-biased maximum likelihood method originally proposed in the adaptive control literature, we propose novel learning algorithms to handle the explore-exploit trade-off in linear bandits problems as well as generalized linear bandits problems. We develop novel index policies that we prove achieve order-optimality, and show that they achieve empirical performance competitive with the state-of-the-art benchmark methods in extensive experiments. The new policies achieve this with low computation time per pull for linear bandits, and thereby resulting in both favorable regret as well as computational efficiency.

Reward-Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Linear Stochastic Bandits

Generating stylized responses is essential to build intelligent and engaging dialogue systems. However, this task is far from well-explored due to the difficulties of rendering a particular style in coherent responses, especially when the target style is embedded only in unpaired texts that cannot be directly used to train the dialogue model. This paper proposes a stylized dialogue generation method that can capture stylistic features embedded in unpaired texts. Specifically, our method can produce dialogue responses that are both coherent to the given context and conform to the target style. In this study, an inverse dialogue model is first introduced to predict possible posts for the input responses. Then this inverse model is used to generate stylized pseudo dialogue pairs based on these stylized unpaired texts. Further, these pseudo pairs are employed to train the stylized dialogue model with a joint training process. A style routing approach is proposed to intensify stylistic features in the decoder. Automatic and manual evaluations on two datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms competitive baselines in producing coherent and style-intensive dialogue responses.

Stylized Dialogue Response Generation Using Stylized Unpaired Texts

Human perceives rich auditory experience with distinct sound heard by ears. Videos recorded with binaural audio particular simulate how human receives ambient sound. However, a large number of videos are with monaural audio only, which would degrade the user experience due to the lack of ambient information. To address this issue, we propose an audio spatialization framework to convert a monaural video into a binaural one exploiting the relationship across audio and visual components. By preserving the left-right consistency in both audio and visual modalities, our learning strategy can be viewed as a self-supervised learning technique, and alleviates the dependency on a large amount of video data with ground truth binaural audio data during training. Experiments on benchmark datasets confirm the effectiveness of our proposed framework in both semi-supervised and fully supervised scenarios, with ablation studies and visualization further support the use of our model for audio spatialization.

Exploiting Audio-Visual Consistency with Partial Supervision for Spatial Audio Generation

Though deep learning has been applied successfully in many scenarios, malicious inputs with human-imperceptible perturbations can make it vulnerable in real applications. This paper proposes an error-correcting neural network (ECNN) that combines a set of binary classifiers to combat adversarial examples in the multi-class classification problem. To build an ECNN, we propose to design a code matrix so that the minimum Hamming distance between any two rows (i.e., two codewords) and the minimum shared information distance between any two columns (i.e., two partitions of class labels) are simultaneously maximized. Maximizing row distances can increase the system fault tolerance while maximizing column distances helps increase the diversity between binary classifiers. We propose an end-to-end training method for our ECNN, which allows further improvement of the diversity between binary classifiers. The end-to-end training renders our proposed ECNN different from the traditional error-correcting output code (ECOC) based methods that train binary classifiers independently. ECNN is complementary to other existing defense approaches such as adversarial training and can be applied in conjunction with them. We empirically demonstrate that our proposed ECNN is effective against the state-of-the-art white-box and black-box attacks on several datasets while maintaining good classification accuracy on normal examples.

Error-Correcting Output Codes with Ensemble Diversity for Robust Learning in Neural Networks

Kernel approximation is widely used to scale up kernel SVM training and prediction. However, the memory and computation costs of kernel approximation models are still too large if we want to deploy them on memory-limited devices such as mobile phones, smart watches and IoT devices. To address this challenge, we propose a novel memory and computation-efficient kernel SVM model by using both binary embedding and binary model coefficients. First, we propose an efficient way to generate compact binary embedding of the data which can preserve the kernel similarity. Second, we propose a simple but effective algorithm to learn a linear classification model with binary coefficients which can support different types of loss function and regularizer. Our algorithm can achieve better generalization accuracy than existing works on learning binary coefficients since we allow coefficient to be -1, 0 or 1 during the training stage and coefficient 0 can be removed during model inference. Moreover, we provide detailed analysis on the convergence of our algorithm and the inference complexity of our model. The analysis shows that the convergence to a local optimum is guaranteed and the inference complexity of our model is much lower than other competing methods. Our experimental results on five large real-world datasets have demonstrated that our proposed method can build accurate nonlinear SVM model with memory cost less than 30KB.

Memory and Computation-Efficient Kernel SVM via Binary Embedding and Ternary Coefficients

The past two decades have seen the significant improvements of the scalability of practical model counters, which have been quite influential in many applications from artificial intelligence to formal verification.  While most of exact counters fall into two categories, search-based and compilation-based, Huang and Darwiche's remarkable observation ties these two categories: the trace of a search-based exact model counter corresponds to a Decision-DNNF formula.  Taking advantage of literal equivalences, this paper designs an efficient model counting technique such that its trace is a generalization of Decision-DNNF formula.  We first propose a generalization of Decision-DNNF, called CCDD, to capture literal equivalences, then show that CCDD supports model counting in linear time, and finally design a model counter, called ExactMC, whose trace corresponds to CCDD.  We perform an extensive experimental evaluation over a comprehensive set of benchmarks and conduct performance comparison of ExactMC vis-a-vis the state of the art counters, c2d, Dsharp, miniC2D, D4, ADDMC, and Ganak. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates ExactMC can solve 885 instances while the prior state of the art could solve only 843 instances, representing a significant improvement of 42 instances.

The Power of Literal Equivalence in Model Counting

Video generation models often operate under the assumption of fixed frame rates, which leads to suboptimal performance when it comes to handling flexible frame rates (e.g., increasing the frame rate of the more dynamic portion of the video as well as handling missing video frames). To resolve the restricted nature of existing video generation models' ability to handle arbitrary timesteps, we propose continuous-time video generation by combining neural ODE (Vid-ODE) with pixel-level video processing techniques. Using ODE-ConvGRU as an encoder, a convolutional version of the recently proposed neural ODE, which enables us to learn continuous-time dynamics, Vid-ODE can learn the spatio-temporal dynamics of input videos of flexible frame rates. The decoder integrates the learned dynamics function to synthesize video frames at any given timesteps, where the pixel-level composition technique is used to maintain the sharpness of individual frames. With extensive experiments on four real-world video datasets, we verify that the proposed Vid-ODE outperforms state-of-the-art approaches under various video generation settings, both within the trained time range (interpolation) and beyond the range (extrapolation). To the best of our knowledge, Vid-ODE is the first work successfully performing continuous-time video generation using real-world videos.

Vid-ODE: Continuous-Time Video Generation with Neural Ordinary Differential Equation

One-bit matrix completion is an important class of positive-unlabeled (PU) learning problems where the observations consist of only positive examples, e.g., in top-N recommender systems. For the first time, we show that 1-bit matrix completion can be formulated as the problem of recovering clean graph signals from noise-corrupted signals in hypergraphs. This makes it possible to enjoy recent advances in graph signal learning. Then, we propose the spectral graph matrix completion (SGMC) method, which can recover the underlying matrix in distributed systems by filtering the noisy data in the graph frequency domain. Meanwhile, it can provide micro- and macro-level explanations by following vertex-frequency analysis. To tackle the computational and memory issue of performing graph signal operations on large graphs, we construct a scalable Nystrom algorithm which can efficiently compute orthonormal eigenvectors. Furthermore, we also develop polynomial and sparse frequency filters to remedy the accuracy loss caused by the approximations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms on top-N recommendation tasks, and the results on three large-scale real-world datasets show that SGMC can outperform state-of-the-art top-N recommendation algorithms in accuracy while only requiring a small fraction of training time compared to the baselines.

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