Related papers: Open-Domain Conversational Agents: Current Progres…
Despite widespread interests in reinforcement-learning for task-oriented dialogue systems, several obstacles can frustrate research and development progress. First, reinforcement learners typically require interaction with the environment,…
Recent advances on large language models (LLMs) enable researchers and developers to build autonomous language agents that can automatically solve various tasks and interact with environments, humans, and other agents using natural language…
The ability of a machine to communicate with humans has long been associated with the general success of AI. This dates back to Alan Turing's epoch-making work in the early 1950s, which proposes that a machine's intelligence can be tested…
Agents and agent systems are becoming more and more important in the development of a variety of fields such as ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, autonomous computing, intelligent systems and intelligent robotics. The need for…
To cooperate with humans effectively, virtual agents need to be able to understand and execute language instructions. A typical setup to achieve this is with a scripted teacher which guides a virtual agent using language instructions.…
The rapid development of large language and multimodal models has sparked significant interest in using proprietary models, such as GPT-4o, to develop autonomous agents capable of handling real-world scenarios like web navigation. Although…
The development of autonomous agents which can interact with other agents to accomplish a given task is a core area of research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Towards this goal, the Autonomous Agents Research Group…
User engagement is a critical metric for evaluating the quality of open-domain dialogue systems. Prior work has focused on conversation-level engagement by using heuristically constructed features such as the number of turns and the total…
One challenge for evaluating current sequence- or dialogue-level chatbots, such as Empathetic Open-domain Conversation Models, is to determine whether the chatbot performs in an emotionally consistent way. The most recent work only…
During the past decade, several areas of speech and language understanding have witnessed substantial breakthroughs from the use of data-driven models. In the area of dialogue systems, the trend is less obvious, and most practical systems…
With the growing humanlike nature of dialog agents, people are now engaging in extended conversations that can stretch from brief moments to substantial periods of time. Understanding the factors that contribute to sustaining these…
This chapter presents perspectives for challenges and future development in building reliable AI systems, particularly, agentic AI systems. Several open research problems related to mitigating the risks of cascading failures are discussed.…
The goal of building dialogue agents that can converse with humans naturally has been a long-standing dream of researchers since the early days of artificial intelligence. The well-known Turing Test proposed to judge the ultimate validity…
Developing domain-specific conversational agents (CAs) has been challenged by the need for extensive domain-focused data. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) make them a viable option as a knowledge backbone. LLMs behaviour…
We introduce a dynamic benchmarking system for conversational agents that evaluates their performance through a single, simulated, and lengthy user$\leftrightarrow$agent interaction. The interaction is a conversation between the user and…
Building an open-domain conversational agent is a challenging problem. Current evaluation methods, mostly post-hoc judgments of static conversation, do not capture conversation quality in a realistic interactive context. In this paper, we…
Continual learning in task-oriented dialogue systems can allow us to add new domains and functionalities through time without incurring the high cost of a whole system retraining. In this paper, we propose a continual learning benchmark for…
Building a dialogue system that can communicate naturally with humans is a challenging yet interesting problem of agent-based computing. The rapid growth in this area is usually hindered by the long-standing problem of data scarcity as…
We study the problem of imposing conversational goals/keywords on open-domain conversational agents, where the agent is required to lead the conversation to a target keyword smoothly and fast. Solving this problem enables the application of…
Creating effective dialogue systems for mental health support requires high-quality multi-turn counseling dialogue data, yet collecting real counselor-client conversations presents significant challenges, including privacy concerns, high…