Related papers: GoChat: Goal-oriented Chatbots with Hierarchical R…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise for developing dialogue management (DM) agents that are non-myopic, conduct rich conversations, and maximize overall user satisfaction. Despite recent developments in RL and language…
The development of chatbots requires collecting a large number of human-chatbot dialogues to reflect the breadth of users' sociodemographic backgrounds and conversational goals. However, the resource requirements to conduct the respective…
This paper presents the iterative development of Habit Coach, a GPT-based chatbot designed to support users in habit change through personalized interaction. Employing a user-centered design approach, we developed the chatbot using a…
Neural end-to-end goal-oriented dialog systems showed promise to reduce the workload of human agents for customer service, as well as reduce wait time for users. However, their inability to handle new user behavior at deployment has limited…
How can we train a dialog model to produce better conversations by learning from human feedback, without the risk of humans teaching it harmful chat behaviors? We start by hosting models online, and gather human feedback from real-time,…
Reinforcement learning is a promising framework for solving control problems, but its use in practical situations is hampered by the fact that reward functions are often difficult to engineer. Specifying goals and tasks for autonomous…
In this work, we propose a novel framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) with an RL-based dialogue manager for open-ended dialogue with a specific goal. By leveraging hierarchical reinforcement learning to model the…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for solving various control, optimization, and sequential decision making tasks. However, designing reward functions for complex tasks (e.g., with multiple objectives and safety…
The ability to generate appropriate verbal and non-verbal backchannels by an agent during human-robot interaction greatly enhances the interaction experience. Backchannels are particularly important in applications like tutoring and…
Evaluating the quality of multi-turn chatbot interactions remains challenging, as most existing methods assess interactions at the turn level without addressing whether a user's overarching goal was fulfilled. A ``goal'' here refers to an…
This paper aims to efficiently enable large language models (LLMs) to use external knowledge and goal guidance in conversational recommender system (CRS) tasks. Advanced LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) are limited in domain-specific CRS tasks for 1)…
The ubiquitous nature of chatbots and their interaction with users generate an enormous amount of data. Can we improve chatbots using this data? A self-feeding chatbot improves itself by asking natural language feedback when a user is…
Most chatbot literature that focuses on improving the fluency and coherence of a chatbot, is dedicated to making chatbots more human-like. However, very little work delves into what really separates humans from chatbots -- humans…
Goal-oriented proactive dialogue systems are designed to guide user conversations seamlessly towards specific objectives by planning a goal-oriented path. However, previous research has focused predominantly on optimizing these paths while…
For each goal-oriented dialog task of interest, large amounts of data need to be collected for end-to-end learning of a neural dialog system. Collecting that data is a costly and time-consuming process. Instead, we show that we can use only…
To build open-domain chatbots that are able to use diverse communicative skills, we propose a novel framework BotsTalk, where multiple agents grounded to the specific target skills participate in a conversation to automatically annotate…
Apart from the coherence and fluency of responses, an empathetic chatbot emphasizes more on people's feelings. By considering altruistic behaviors between human interaction, empathetic chatbots enable people to get a better interactive and…
Humans generally use natural language to communicate task requirements to each other. Ideally, natural language should also be usable for communicating goals to autonomous machines (e.g., robots) to minimize friction in task specification.…
In this paper, we present a deep reinforcement learning (RL) framework for iterative dialog policy optimization in end-to-end task-oriented dialog systems. Popular approaches in learning dialog policy with RL include letting a dialog agent…
Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) holds great potential for sample-efficient learning on challenging long-horizon tasks. In particular, letting a higher level assign subgoals to a lower level has been shown to enable fast learning…