United States

Goal-oriented dialog policy learning algorithms aim to learn a dialog policy for selecting language actions based on the current dialog state. Deep reinforcement learning methods have been used for dialog policy learning. This work is motivated by the observation that, although dialog is a domain with rich contextual knowledge, reinforcement learning methods are ill-equipped to incorporate such knowledge into the dialog policy learning process. In this paper, we develop a deep reinforcement learning framework for goal-oriented dialog policy learning that learns user preferences from user goal data, while leveraging commonsense knowledge from people. The developed framework has been evaluated using a realistic dialog simulation platform. Compared with baselines from the literature and the ablations of our approach, we see significant improvements in learning efficiency and the quality of the computed action policies.

AAAI 2022

Efficient Dialog Policy Learning by Reasoning with Contextual Knowledge

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

<iframe style="width:700px;height:400px" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/ceby/"  seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe>

Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

Access is given only to EMNLP upon registration, if you have not registered please do so [here](https://2021.emnlp.org/registration).

Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

technical paper

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. 

We present an approach to incorporating qualitative assertions of conditional irrelevance into belief revision, in order to address the limitations of existing work which considers only unconditional irrelevance. These assertions serve to enforce the requirement of minimal change to existing beliefs, while also suggesting a route to reducing the computational cost of belief revision by excluding irrelevant beliefs from consideration. In our approach, a knowledge engineer specifies a collection of multivalued dependencies that encode domain-dependent assertions of conditional irrelevance in the knowledge base. We consider these as capturing properties of the underlying domain which should be taken into account during belief revision. We introduce two related notions of what it means for a multivalued dependency to be taken into account by a belief revision operator: partial and full compliance. We provide characterisations of partially and fully compliant belief revision operators in terms of semantic conditions on their associated faithful rankings. Using these characterisations, we show that the constraints for partially and fully compliant belief revision operators are compatible with the AGM postulates. Finally, we compare our approach to existing work on unconditional irrelevance in belief revision.

Using Conditional Independence for Belief Revision

Demand for image editing has been increasing as users' desire for expression is also increasing. However, for most users, image editing tools are not easy to use since the tools require certain expertise in photo effects and have complex interfaces. Hence, users might need someone to help edit their images, but having a personal dedicated human assistant for every user is impossible to scale. For that reason, an automated assistant system for image editing is desirable. Additionally, users want more image sources for diverse image editing works, and integrating an image search functionality into the editing tool is a potential remedy for this demand. Thus, we propose a dataset of an automated Conversational Agent for Image Search and Editing (CAISE). To our knowledge, this is the first dataset that provides conversational image search and editing annotations, where the agent holds a grounded conversation with users and helps them to search and edit images according to their requests. To build such a system, we first collect image search and editing conversations between pairs of annotators. The assistant-annotators are equipped with a customized image search and editing tool to address the requests from the user-annotators. The functions that the assistant-annotators conduct with the tool are recorded as executable commands, allowing the trained system to be useful for real-world application execution. We also introduce a generator-extractor baseline model for this task, which can adaptively select the source of the next token (i.e., from the vocabulary or from textual/visual contexts) for the executable command. This serves as a strong starting point while still leaving a large human-machine performance gap for useful future work. Data and code are available: https://github.com/hyounghk/CAISE.

CAISE: Conversational Agent for Image Search and Editing

In humans, perceptual awareness facilitates the fast recognition and extraction of information from sensory input. This awareness largely depends on how the human agent interacts with the environment. In this work, we propose active neural generative coding, a computational framework for learning action-driven generative models without backpropagation of errors (backprop) in dynamic environments. Specifically, we develop an intelligent agent that operates even with sparse rewards, drawing inspiration from the cognitive theory of planning as inference. We demonstrate on several simple control problems that our framework performs competitively with deep Q-learning. The robust performance of our agent offers promising evidence that a backprop-free approach for neural inference and learning can drive goal-directed behavior.

Backprop-Free Reinforcement Learning with Active Neural Generative Coding

There has been significant recent interest in quantum neural networks (QNNs), along with their applications in diverse domains. Current solutions for QNNs pose significant challenges concerning their scalability, ensuring that the postulates of quantum mechanics are satisfied and that the networks are physically realizable. The exponential state space of QNNs poses challenges for the scalability of training procedures. The no-cloning principle prohibits making multiple copies of training samples, and the measurement postulates lead to non-deterministic loss functions. Consequently, the physical realizability and efficiency of existing approaches that rely on repeated measurement of several copies of each sample for training QNNs are unclear. This paper presents a new model for QNNs that relies on band-limited Fourier expansions of transfer functions of quantum perceptrons (QPs) to design scalable training procedures. This training procedure is augmented with a randomized quantum stochastic gradient descent technique that eliminates the need for sample replication. We show that this training procedure converges to the true minima in expectation, even in the presence of non-determinism due to quantum measurement. Our solution has a number of important benefits: (i) using QPs with concentrated Fourier power spectrum, we show that the training procedure for QNNs can be made scalable; (ii) it eliminates the need for resampling, thus staying consistent with the no-cloning rule; and (iii) enhanced data efficiency for the overall training process since each data sample is processed once per epoch. We present a detailed theoretical foundation for our models and methods' scalability, accuracy, and data efficiency. We also validate the utility of our approach through a series of numerical experiments.

Toward Physically Realizable Quantum Neural Networks

Conversational Information Seeking (CIS) is a relatively new research area within conversational AI that attempts to seek information from end-users in order to understand and satisfy the users' needs. If realized, such a CIS system has far-reaching benefits in the real world; for example, CIS systems can assist clinicians in pre-screening or triaging patients in healthcare. A key open sub-problem in CIS that remains unaddressed in the literature is generating Information Seeking Questions (ISQs) based on a short initial query from the end-user. To address this open problem, we propose Information SEEking Question generator (ISEEQ), a novel approach for generating ISQs from just a short user query, given a large text corpus relevant to the user query. Firstly, ISEEQ uses a knowledge graph to enrich the user query. Secondly, ISEEQ uses the knowledge-enriched query to retrieve relevant context passages to ask coherent ISQs adhering to a conceptual flow. Thirdly, ISEEQ introduces a new deep generative-adversarial reinforcement learning-based approach for generating ISQs. We show that ISEEQ can generate high-quality ISQs to promote the development of CIS agents. ISEEQ significantly outperforms comparable baselines on five ISQ evaluation metrics across four datasets having user queries from diverse domains. Further, we argue that ISEEQ is transferable across domains for generating ISQs, as it shows the acceptable performance when trained and tested on different pairs of domains. A qualitative human evaluation confirms that ISEEQ generated ISQs are comparable in quality to human-generated questions, and it outperformed the best comparable baseline.

ISEEQ: Information Seeking Question Generation using Dynamic Meta-Information Retrieval and Knowledge Graphs

Cross-modal person re-identification (Re-ID) is critical for modern video surveillance systems. The key challenge is to align cross-modality representations conforming to semantic information present for a person and ignore background information. This work presents a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) based architecture designed to learn semantically aligned cross-modal visual and textual representations. The underlying building block, named AXM-Block, is a unified multi-layer network that dynamically exploits the multi-scale knowledge from both modalities and re-calibrates each modality according to shared semantics. To complement the convolutional design, contextual attention is applied in the text branch to manipulate long-term dependencies. Moreover, we propose a unique design to enhance visual part-based feature coherence and locality information. Our framework is novel in its ability to implicitly learn aligned semantics between modalities during the feature learning stage. The unified feature learning effectively utilizes textual data as a super-annotation signal for visual representation learning and automatically rejects irrelevant information. The entire AXM-Net is trained end-to-end on CUHK-PEDES data. We report results on two tasks, person search and cross-modal Re-ID. The AXM-Net outperforms the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods and achieves 64.44% Rank@1 on the CUHK-PEDES test set. It also outperforms by >10% for cross-viewpoint text-to-image Re-ID scenarios on CrossRe-ID and CUHK-SYSU datasets.

AXM-Net: Implicit Cross-Modal Feature Alignment for Person Re-Identification

We study the design of autonomous agents that are capable of deceiving outside observers about their intentions while carrying out tasks in stochastic, complex environments. By modeling the agent's behavior as a Markov decision process, we consider a setting where the agent aims to reach one of multiple potential goals while deceiving outside observers about its true goal. We propose a novel approach to model observer predictions based on the principle of maximum entropy and to efficiently generate deceptive strategies via linear programming. The proposed approach enables the agent to exhibit a variety of tunable deceptive behaviors while ensuring the satisfaction of probabilistic constraints on the behavior. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach via comparative user studies and present a case study on the streets of Manhattan, New York, using real travel time distributions.

Deceptive Decision-Making under Uncertainty

In safety-critical machine learning applications, it is crucial to defend models against adversarial attacks --- small modifications of the input that change the predictions. Besides rigorously studied $\ell_p$-bounded additive perturbations, semantic perturbations (e.g. rotation, translation) raise a serious concern on deploying ML systems in real-world. Therefore, it is important to provide provable guarantees for deep learning models against semantically meaningful input transformations. In this paper, we propose a new universal probabilistic certification approach based on Chernoff-Cramer bounds that can be used in general attack settings. We estimate the probability of a model to fail if the attack is sampled from a certain distribution. Our theoretical findings are supported by experimental results on different datasets.

CC-Cert: A Probabilistic Approach to Certify General Robustness of Neural Networks

We present a novel multiple-source unsupervised model for text classification under domain shift. Our model exploits the update rates in document representations to dynamically integrate domain encoders. It also employs a probabilistic heuristic to infer the error rate in the target domain in order to pair source classifiers. Our heuristic exploits data transformation cost and the classifier accuracy in the target feature space. We have used real world scenarios of Domain Adaptation to evaluate the efficacy of our algorithm. We also used pretrained multi-layer transformers as the document encoder in the experiments to demonstrate whether the improvement achieved by domain adaptation models can be delivered by out-of-the-box language model pretraining. The experiments testify that our model is the top performing approach in this setting.

Multiple-Source Domain Adaptation via Coordinated Domain Encoders and Paired Classifiers

Compilation into propositional languages finds a growing number of practical uses, including in constraint programming, diagnosis and machine learning (ML), among others. One concrete example is the use of propositional languages as classifiers, and one natural question is how to explain the predictions made. This paper shows that for classifiers represented with some of the best-known propositional languages, different kinds of explanations can be computed in polynomial time. These languages include deterministic decomposable negation normal form (d-DNNF), and so any propositional language that is strictly less succinct than d-DNNF. Furthermore, the paper describes optimizations, specific to Sentential Decision Diagrams (SDDs), which are shown to yield more efficient algorithms in practice.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2022

Using Conditional Independence for Belief Revision

Similar lecture

Learning to Learn End-to-End Goal-Oriented Dialog From Related Dialog Tasks

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from AAAI 2022

Using Conditional Independence for Belief Revision

Similar lecture

Learning to Learn End-to-End Goal-Oriented Dialog From Related Dialog Tasks

Downloads