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Interactive Machine Learning is concerned with creating systems that operate in environments alongside humans to achieve a task. A typical use is to extend or amplify the capabilities of a human in cognitive or physical ways, requiring the…
As AI becomes more prevalent throughout society, effective methods of integrating humans and AI systems that leverage their respective strengths and mitigate risk have become an important priority. In this paper, we introduce the paradigm…
Active learning agents typically employ a query selection algorithm which solely considers the agent's learning objectives. However, this may be insufficient in more realistic human domains. This work uses imitation learning to enable an…
Conversational search applications offer the prospect of improved user experience in information seeking via agent support. However, it is not clear how searchers will respond to this mode of engagement, in comparison to a conventional…
Interactive reinforcement learning, where humans actively assist during an agent's learning process, has the promise to alleviate the sample complexity challenges of practical algorithms. However, the inner workings and state of the robot…
In this paper, we consider the recent trend of evaluating progress on reinforcement learning technology by using text-based environments and games as evaluation environments. This reliance on text brings advances in natural language…
Providing Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents with human feedback can dramatically improve various aspects of learning. However, previous methods require human observer to give inputs explicitly (e.g., press buttons, voice interface),…
Online peer-to-peer support platforms enable conversations between millions of people who seek and provide mental health support. If successful, web-based mental health conversations could improve access to treatment and reduce the global…
Reinforcement learning techniques successfully generate convincing agent behaviors, but it is still difficult to tailor the behavior to align with a user's specific preferences. What is missing is a communication method for the system to…
Information retrieval is a cornerstone of modern knowledge acquisition, enabling billions of queries each day across diverse domains. However, traditional keyword-based search engines are increasingly inadequate for handling complex,…
Conversational Tree Search (V\"ath et al., 2023) is a recent approach to controllable dialog systems, where domain experts shape the behavior of a Reinforcement Learning agent through a dialog tree. The agent learns to efficiently navigate…
A goal shared by artificial intelligence and information retrieval is to create an oracle, that is, a machine that can answer our questions, no matter how difficult they are. A more limited, but still instrumental, version of this oracle is…
Exploration in environments with sparse feedback remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning (RL). When the RL agent explores the environment randomly, it results in low exploration efficiency, especially in robotic…
Most prior works on communication in multi-agent reinforcement learning have focused on emergent communication, which often results in inefficient and non-interpretable systems. Inspired by the role of language in natural intelligence, we…
Assistive agents should not only take actions on behalf of a human, but also step out of the way and cede control when there are important decisions to be made. However, current methods for building assistive agents, whether via mimicking…
To support complex search tasks, where the initial information requirements are complex or may change during the search, a search engine must adapt the information delivery as the user's information requirements evolve. To support this…
Personalizing conversational agents can enhance the quality of conversations and increase user engagement. However, they often lack external knowledge to appropriately tend to a user's persona. This is particularly crucial for practical…
We present the first complete attempt at concurrently training conversational agents that communicate only via self-generated language. Using DSTC2 as seed data, we trained natural language understanding (NLU) and generation (NLG) networks…
Machine translation is a natural candidate problem for reinforcement learning from human feedback: users provide quick, dirty ratings on candidate translations to guide a system to improve. Yet, current neural machine translation training…
Building intelligent agents that can communicate with and learn from humans in natural language is of great value. Supervised language learning is limited by the ability of capturing mainly the statistics of training data, and is hardly…