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Speech emotion recognition is the task of recognizing the speaker's emotional state given a recording of their utterance. While most of the current approaches focus on inferring emotion from isolated utterances, we argue that this is not…
In this work, we propose a novel memory-based multi-agent meta-learning architecture and learning procedure that allows for learning of a shared communication policy that enables the emergence of rapid adaptation to new and unseen…
Conversational AI (ConvAI) agents increasingly maintain structured memory to support long-term, task-oriented interactions. In-context memory approaches append the growing history to the model input, which scales poorly under context-window…
Human face-to-face conversation is an ideal model for human-computer dialogue. One of the major features of face-to-face communication is its multiplicity of communication channels that act on multiple modalities. To realize a natural…
This paper introduces a new model to generate rhythmically relevant non-verbal facial behaviors for virtual agents while they speak. The model demonstrates perceived performance comparable to behaviors directly extracted from the data and…
Clinical psychology students frequently report feeling underprepared for the interpersonal demands of therapeutic work, highlighting the need for accessible opportunities to practise core counselling skills before seeing real clients.…
Open-domain dialogue systems have seen remarkable advancements with the development of large language models (LLMs). Nonetheless, most existing dialogue systems predominantly focus on brief single-session interactions, neglecting the…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning has been used as an effective means to study emergent communication between agents, yet little focus has been given to continuous acoustic communication. This would be more akin to human language…
The rapid advancement of chat-based language models has led to remarkable progress in complex task-solving. However, their success heavily relies on human input to guide the conversation, which can be challenging and time-consuming. This…
Today's conversational agents are restricted to simple standalone commands. In this paper, we present Iris, an agent that draws on human conversational strategies to combine commands, allowing it to perform more complex tasks that it has…
People have the ability to make sensible assumptions about other people's emotional states by being sympathetic, and because of our common sense of knowledge and the ability to think visually. Over the years, much research has been done on…
Although neural models have achieved competitive results in dialogue systems, they have shown limited ability in representing core semantics, such as ignoring important entities. To this end, we exploit Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR)…
In this paper, we propose an end-to-end sentiment-aware conversational agent based on two models: a reply sentiment prediction model, which leverages the context of the dialogue to predict an appropriate sentiment for the agent to express…
Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) is an important and active research area. Recent work has shown the benefits of using multiple modalities (e.g., text, audio, and video) for the ERC task. In a conversation, participants tend to…
Modern conversational agents such as Alexa and Google Assistant represent significant progress in speech recognition, natural language processing, and speech synthesis. But as these agents have grown more realistic, concerns have been…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) extends (single-agent) reinforcement learning (RL) by introducing additional agents and (potentially) partial observability of the environment. Consequently, algorithms for solving MARL problems…
Conversational agents, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, have become essential in software development, boosting productivity, collaboration, and automating various tasks. This paper examines the role of adaptive AI-powered…
Recent advances in foundation models have enabled conversational agents that aim for sustained companionship rather than mere task completion. Yet most still remain unable to support natural, long-term companion-like interactions, resulting…
In human communication, both verbal and non-verbal cues play a crucial role in conveying emotions, intentions, and meaning beyond words alone. These non-linguistic information, such as facial expressions, eye contact, voice tone, and pitch,…
Emotion is intrinsic to humans and consequently emotion understanding is a key part of human-like artificial intelligence (AI). Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is becoming increasingly popular as a new research frontier in natural…