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Search-oriented conversational systems rely on information needs expressed in natural language (NL). We focus here on the understanding of NL expressions for building keyword-based queries. We propose a reinforcement-learning-driven…
Online shopping platforms, such as Amazon and AliExpress, are increasingly prevalent in society, helping customers purchase products conveniently. With recent progress in natural language processing, researchers and practitioners shift…
Understanding an information forager's actions during interaction is very important for the study of interactive information retrieval. Although information spread in uncertain information space is substantially complex due to the high…
A common vision from science fiction is that robots will one day inhabit our physical spaces, sense the world as we do, assist our physical labours, and communicate with us through natural language. Here we study how to design artificial…
Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) reduces hallucinations and factual errors in large language models (LLMs) by conditioning generation on retrieved external knowledge. Recent search agents further cast RAG as an autonomous, multi-turn…
The desire and ability to seek new information strategically are fundamental to human learning but often overlooked in current language agent evaluation. We analyze a popular web shopping task designed to test language agents' ability to…
This paper proposes KB-InfoBot -- a multi-turn dialogue agent which helps users search Knowledge Bases (KBs) without composing complicated queries. Such goal-oriented dialogue agents typically need to interact with an external database to…
Training automated agents to complete complex tasks in interactive environments is challenging: reinforcement learning requires careful hand-engineering of reward functions, imitation learning requires specialized infrastructure and access…
Large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have revolutionized traditional information access, enabling AI agent to search and summarize information on behalf of users during dynamic dialogues. Despite…
Some robots can interact with humans using natural language, and identify service requests through human-robot dialog. However, few robots are able to improve their language capabilities from this experience. In this paper, we develop a…
Large language models (LLMs) excel at knowledge-intensive question answering and reasoning, yet their real-world deployment remains constrained by knowledge cutoff, hallucination, and limited interaction modalities. Augmenting LLMs with…
Instant Search is a paradigm where a search system retrieves answers on the fly while typing. The na\"ive implementation of an Instant Search system would hit the search back-end for results each time a user types a key, imposing a very…
A core interest in building Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents is to let them interact with and assist humans. One example is Dynamic Search (DS), which models the process that a human works with a search engine agent to accomplish a…
The cooperation among AI systems, and between AI systems and humans is becoming increasingly important. In various real-world tasks, an agent needs to cooperate with unknown partner agent types. This requires the agent to assess the…
TAMER has proven to be a powerful interactive reinforcement learning method for allowing ordinary people to teach and personalize autonomous agents' behavior by providing evaluative feedback. However, a TAMER agent planning with UCT---a…
Information retrieval (IR) systems have traditionally been designed and trained for human users, with learning-to-rank methods relying heavily on large-scale human interaction logs such as clicks and dwell time. With the rapid emergence of…
The conversational search task aims to enable a user to resolve information needs via natural language dialogue with an agent. In this paper, we aim to develop a conceptual framework of the actions and intents of users and agents explaining…
Effective human-agent collaboration is increasingly prevalent in real-world applications. Current trends in such collaborations are predominantly unidirectional, with users providing instructions or posing questions to agents, where agents…
Conversational shopping agents represent a critical consumer-facing application of Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents, yet how to effectively apply post-training Reinforcement Learning (RL) to optimize such agents remains…
The next step for intelligent dialog agents is to escape their role as silent bystanders and become proactive. Well-defined proactive behavior may improve human-machine cooperation, as the agent takes a more active role during interaction…