Canada

Retrieving appropriate records from the external knowledge base to generate informative responses is the core capability of end-to-end task-oriented dialogue systems (EToDs). Most of the existing methods additionally train the retrieval model or use the memory network to retrieve the knowledge base, which decouples the knowledge retrieval task from the response generation task, making it difficult to jointly optimize and failing to capture the internal relationship between the two tasks. In this paper, we propose a simple and unified generative model for task-oriented dialogue systems, which recasts the EToDs task as a single sequence generation task and uses maximum likelihood training to train the two tasks in a unified manner. To prevent the generation of non-existent records, we design the prefix trie to constrain the model generation, which ensures consistency between the generated records and the existing records in the knowledge base. Experimental results on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves robust performance on generating system responses and outperforms the baseline systems. To facilitate future research in this area, the code is available at https://github.com/dzy1011/Uni-ToD.

AAAI 2024

From Retrieval to Generation: A Simple and Unified Generative Model for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue | VIDEO

snlp: question answering

snlp: applications

snlp: conversational ai/dialogue systems

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

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-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

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. 

Audio-visual segmentation (AVS) aims to locate and segment the sounding objects in a given video, which demands audio-driven pixel-level scene understanding. The existing methods cannot fully process the fine-grained correlations between audio and visual cues across various situations dynamically. They also face challenges in adapting to complex scenarios, such as evolving audio, the coexistence of multiple objects, and more. In this paper, we propose AVSegFormer, a novel framework for AVS that leverages the transformer architecture. Specifically, It comprises a dense audio-visual mixer, which can dynamically adjust interested visual features, and a sparse audio-visual decoder, which implicitly separates audio sources and automatically matches optimal visual features. Combining both components provides a more robust bidirectional conditional multi-modal representation, improving the segmentation performance in different scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AVSegFormer achieves state-of-the-art results on the AVS benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/vvvb-github/AVSegFormer.

AVSegFormer: Audio-Visual Segmentation with Transformer

Pandora's problem is a fundamental model that studies optimal search under costly inspection. In the classic version, there are $n$ boxes, each associated with a known cost and a known distribution over values. A strategy inspects the boxes sequentially and obtains a utility that equals the difference between the maximum value of an inspected box and the total inspection cost. Weitzman [1979] presented a surprisingly simple strategy that obtains the optimal expected utility.
    
In this work we introduce a new variant of Pandora's problem in which every box is also associated with a publicly known deadline, indicating the final round by which its value may be chosen. This model captures many real-life scenarios where alternatives admit deadlines, such as candidate interviews and college admissions. Our main result is an efficient threshold-based strategy that achieves a constant approximation relative to the performance of the optimal strategy for the deadlines setting.

Pandora’s Problem with Deadlines | VIDEO

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in code generation. However, existing LLMs' decoding strategies are designed for Natural Language (NL) generation, overlooking the differences between NL and programming languages (PL). Due to this oversight, a better decoding strategy for code generation remains an open question. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic study to explore a decoding strategy specialized in code generation. With an analysis of loss distributions of code tokens, we find that code tokens can be divided into two categories: challenging tokens that are difficult to predict and confident tokens that can be easily inferred. Among them, the challenging tokens mainly appear at the beginning of a code block. Inspired by the above findings, we propose a simple yet effective method: Adaptive Temperature (AdapT) sampling, which dynamically adjusts the temperature coefficient when decoding different tokens. We apply a larger temperature when sampling for challenging tokens, allowing LLMs to explore diverse choices. We employ a smaller temperature for confident tokens avoiding the influence of tail randomness noises. We apply AdapT sampling to LLMs with different sizes and conduct evaluations on two popular datasets. Results show that AdapT sampling significantly outperforms state-of-the-art decoding strategy.

Hot or Cold? Adaptive Temperature Sampling for Code Generation with Large Language Models

Compositional zero-shot learning (CZSL) aims to recognize unseen attribute-object compositions by learning from seen compositions. Composing the learned knowledge of seen primitives, \emph{i.e.}, attributes or objects, into novel compositions is critical for CZSL. In this work, we propose to explicitly retrieve knowledge of seen primitives for compositional zero-shot learning. We present a retrieval-augmented method, which augments standard multi-path classification methods with two retrieval modules. Specifically, we construct two databases storing the attribute and object representations of training images, respectively. For an input training/testing image, we use two retrieval modules to retrieve representations of training images with the same attribute and object, respectively. The primitive representations of the input image are augmented by using the retrieved representations, for composition recognition. By referencing semantically similar images, the proposed method is capable of recalling knowledge of seen primitives for compositional generalization. Experiments on three widely-used datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Retrieval-Augmented Primitive Representations for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning | VIDEO

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in exploring dialogues with more complex goals, such as negotiation, persuasion, and emotional support, which go beyond traditional service-focused dialogue systems. Apart from the requirement for much more sophisticated strategic reasoning and communication skills, a significant challenge of these tasks lies in the difficulty of objectively measuring the achievement of their goals in a quantifiable way, making it difficult for existing research to directly optimize the dialogue procedure towards them. In our work, we emphasize the multifaceted nature of complex dialogue goals and argue that it is more feasible to accomplish them by comprehensively considering and jointly promoting their different aspects. To this end, we propose a novel dialogue framework, Cooper, which coordinates multiple specialized agents, each dedicated to a specific dialogue goal aspect separately, to approach the complex objective. Through this divide-and-conquer manner, we make complex dialogue goals more approachable and elicit greater intelligence via the collaboration of individual agents. Experiments on persuasion and emotional support dialogues demonstrate the superiority of our method over a set of competitive baselines.

Cooper: Coordinating Specialized Agents towards a Complex Dialogue Goal

Previous 3D hand pose estimation methods primarily rely on a single modality, either RGB or depth, and the comprehensive utilization of the dual modalities has not been extensively explored. RGB and depth data provide complementary information and thus can be fused to enhance the robustness of 3D hand pose estimation. However, there exist two problems for applying existing fusion methods in 3D hand pose estimation: redundancy of dense feature fusion and ambiguity of visual features. First, pixel-wise feature interactions introduce high computational costs and ineffective calculations of invalid pixels. Second, visual features suffer from ambiguity due to color and texture similarities, as well as depth holes and noise caused by frequent hand movements, which interferes with modeling cross-modal correlations. In this paper, we propose Keypoint-Fusion for RGB-D based 3D hand pose estimation, which leverages the unique advantages of dual modalities to mutually eliminate the feature ambiguity, and performs cross-modal feature fusion in a more efficient way. Specifically, we focus cross-modal fusion on sparse yet informative spatial regions (i.e. keypoints). Meanwhile, by explicitly extracting relatively more reliable information as disambiguation evidence, depth modality provides 3D geometric information for RGB feature pixels, and RGB modality complements the precise edge information lost due to the depth noise. Keypoint-Fusion achieves state-of-the-art performance on two challenging hand datasets, significantly decreasing the error compared with previous single-modal methods.

Keypoint Fusion for RGB-D Based 3D Hand Pose Estimation

Causal effect estimation from observational data is a central problem in causal inference. Methods based on potential outcomes framework solve this problem by exploiting inductive biases and heuristics from causal inference. Each of these methods addresses a specific aspect of causal effect estimation, such as controlling propensity score, enforcing randomization, etc., by designing neural network (NN) architectures and regularizers. In this paper, we propose an adaptive method called Neurosymbolic Causal Effect Estimator (NESTER), a generalized method for causal effect estimation. NESTER integrates the ideas used in existing methods based on multi-head NNs for causal effect estimation into one framework. We design a Domain Specific Language (DSL) tailored for causal effect estimation based on causal inductive biases used in literature. We conduct a theoretical analysis to investigate NESTER's efficacy in estimating causal effects. Our comprehensive empirical results show that NESTER performs better than state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.

NESTER: An Adaptive Neurosymbolic Method for Causal Effect Estimation | VIDEO

Generative methods tackle Multi-Label Classification (MLC) by autoregressively generating label sequences. These methods excel at modeling label correlations and have achieved outstanding performance. However, a key challenge is determining the order of labels, as empirical findings indicate the significant impact of different orders on model learning and inference. Previous works adopt static label-ordering methods, assigning a unified label order for all samples based on label frequencies or co-occurrences. Nonetheless, such static methods neglect the unique semantics of each sample. More critically, these methods can cause the model to rigidly memorize training order, resulting in missing labels during inference. In light of these limitations, this paper proposes a dynamic label-order learning approach that adaptively learns a label order for each sample. Specifically, our approach adopts a difficulty-prioritized principle and iteratively constructs the label sequence based on the sample s semantics. To reduce the additional cost incurred by label-order learning, we use the same SEQ2SEQ model for label-order learning and MLC learning and introduce a unified loss function for joint optimization. Extensive experiments on public datasets reveal that our approach greatly outperforms previous methods. We will release our code at https: //github.com/KagamiBaka/DLOL.

Enhancing Multi-Label Classification via Dynamic Label-Order Learning

Generating realistic human motion sequences from text descriptions is a challenging task that requires capturing the rich expressiveness of both natural language and human motion. Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled significant progress in human motion synthesis. However, existing methods struggle to handle text inputs that describe complex or long motions. In this paper, we propose the Adaptable Motion Diffusion (AMD) model, which leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to parse the input text into a sequence of concise and interpretable anatomical scripts that correspond to the target motion. This process exploits the LLM’s ability to provide anatomical guidance for complex motion synthesis. We then devise a two-branch fusion scheme that balances the influence of the input text and the anatomical scripts on the inverse diffusion process, which adaptively ensures the semantic fidelity and diversity of the synthesized motion. Our method can effectively handle texts with complex or long motion descriptions, where existing methods often fail. Experiments on datasets with relatively more complex motions, such as CLCD1 and CLCD2, demonstrate that our AMD significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models.

AMD: Anatomical Motion Diffusion with Interpretable Motion Decomposition and Fusion | VIDEO

With the rapid development of 3D movie and light-field displays, there is a growing demand for stereo videos. However, generating high-quality stereo videos from planar videos remains a challenging task. Traditional depth-image-based rendering techniques struggle to effectively handle the problem of occlusion exposure, which occurs when the occluded contents  become visible in other views. Recently, the single-view multiplane images (MPI) representation has shown promising performance for planar video stereoscopy. However, the MPI still lacks real details that are occluded in the current frame, resulting in blurry artifacts in occlusion exposure regions. In fact, planar videos can leverage complementary information from adjacent frames to predict a more complete scene representation for the current frame. Therefore, this paper extends the MPI from still frames to the temporal domain, introducing the temporal MPI (TMPI). By extracting complementary information from adjacent frames based on optical flow guidance, obscured regions in the current frame can be effectively repaired. Additionally, a new module called masked optical flow warping (MOFW) is introduced to improve the propagation of pixels along optical flow trajectories.

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AVSegFormer: Audio-Visual Segmentation with Transformer

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