Related papers: Beyond "How may I help you?": Assisting Customer S…
More than twenty-five years ago, first ideas were developed on how to design a system that can provide recommendations to groups of users instead of individual users. Since then, a rich variety of algorithmic proposals were published, e.g.,…
Airbnb is an online marketplace that connects hosts and guests to unique stays and experiences. When guests stay at homes booked on Airbnb, there are a small fraction of stays that lead to support needed from Airbnb's Customer Support (CS),…
In an era where AI is evolving from a passive tool into an active and adaptive companion, we introduce AI for Service (AI4Service), a new paradigm that enables proactive and real-time assistance in daily life. Existing AI services remain…
Many businesses and consumers are extending the capabilities of voice-based services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri to create custom voice experiences (also known as skills). As the number of these…
Live streaming commerce has become a prominent form of broadcasting in the modern era. To facilitate more efficient and convenient product promotions for streamers, we present Click-to-Ask, an AI-driven assistant for live streaming commerce…
While AI agents demonstrate remarkable capabilities in reasoning and tool use, they remain fundamentally reactive: they compute responses only after explicit user prompts. This paradigm ignores a critical opportunity: the idle time between…
During job recruitment, traditional applicant selection methods often lack transparency. Candidates are rarely given sufficient justifications for recruiting decisions, whether they are made manually by human recruiters or through the use…
Various studies have been conducted on human-supporting robot systems. These systems have been put to practical use over the years and are now seen in our daily lives. In particular, robots communicating smoothly with people are expected to…
Digital assistants have become ubiquitous in e-commerce applications, following the recent advancements in Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, customers are…
Building agents with adaptive behavior in cooperative tasks stands as a paramount goal in the realm of multi-agent systems. Current approaches to developing cooperative agents rely primarily on learning-based methods, whose policy…
Online, people often recount their experiences turning to conversational AI agents (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot) for mental health support -- going so far as to replace their therapists. These anecdotes suggest that AI agents have great…
Modern analytics systems are fundamentally reactive, requiring users to define queries over increasingly complex and continuously evolving data. In real-time streaming environments, this paradigm breaks down, as the space of potential…
In-person small-group conversations play a crucial role in everyday life; however, facilitating effective group interaction can be challenging, as the real-time nature demands full attention, offers no opportunity for revision, and requires…
Recent advancements in LLM agents are gradually shifting from reactive, text-based paradigms toward proactive, multimodal interaction. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on reactive responses, overlooking the complexities of…
This paper introduces the task of product demand clarification within an e-commercial scenario, where the user commences the conversation with ambiguous queries and the task-oriented agent is designed to achieve more accurate and tailored…
Proactive and real-time interactive experiences are essential for human-like AI companions, yet face three key challenges: (1) achieving low-latency inference under continuous streaming inputs, (2) autonomously deciding when to respond, and…
Leveraging multiple large language model (LLM) agents has shown to be a promising approach for tackling complex tasks, while the effective design of multiple agents for a particular application remains an art. It is thus intriguing to…
Evaluating and iterating upon recommender systems is crucial, yet traditional A/B testing is resource-intensive, and offline methods struggle with dynamic user-platform interactions. While agent-based simulation is promising, existing…
We will demonstrate a conversational products recommendation agent. This system shows how we combine research in personalized recommendation systems with research in dialogue systems to build a virtual sales agent. Based on new deep…
Conversational agents have become ubiquitous, ranging from goal-oriented systems for helping with reservations to chit-chat models found in modern virtual assistants. In this survey paper, we explore this fascinating field. We look at some…