Related papers: DialFRED: Dialogue-Enabled Agents for Embodied Ins…
Large-scale language technologies are increasingly used in various forms of communication with humans across different contexts. One particular use case for these technologies is conversational agents, which output natural language text in…
We propose and deploy an approach to continually train an instruction-following agent from feedback provided by users during collaborative interactions. During interaction, human users instruct an agent using natural language, and provide…
Current speech agent interactions are typically user-initiated, limiting the interactions they can deliver. Future functionality will require agents to be proactive, sometimes interrupting users. Little is known about how these spoken…
When deployed, AI agents will encounter problems that are beyond their autonomous problem-solving capabilities. Leveraging human assistance can help agents overcome their inherent limitations and robustly cope with unfamiliar situations. We…
Recent advances in explainable recommendations have explored the integration of language models to analyze natural language rationales for user-item interactions. Despite their potential, existing methods often rely on ID-based…
Task-oriented dialogue systems are essential for applications ranging from customer service to personal assistants and are widely used across various industries. However, developing effective multi-domain systems remains a significant…
We create a new task-oriented dialog platform (MEEP) where agents are given considerable freedom in terms of utterances and API calls, but are constrained to work within a push-button environment. We include facilities for collecting…
Neural network-based systems can now learn to locate the referents of words and phrases in images, answer questions about visual scenes, and execute symbolic instructions as first-person actors in partially-observable worlds. To achieve…
Assistive agents should make humans' lives easier. Classically, such assistance is studied through the lens of inverse reinforcement learning, where an assistive agent (e.g., a chatbot, a robot) infers a human's intention and then selects…
Understanding the continuous states of objects is essential for task learning and planning in the real world. However, most existing task learning benchmarks assume discrete (e.g., binary) object goal states, which poses challenges for the…
While the English virtual assistants have achieved exciting performance with an enormous amount of training resources, the needs of non-English-speakers have not been satisfied well. Up to Dec 2021, Alexa, one of the most popular smart…
The number of robots deployed in our daily surroundings is ever-increasing. Even in the industrial set-up, the use of coworker robots is increasing rapidly. These cohabitant robots perform various tasks as instructed by co-located human…
Recent advances in Embodied AI have enabled agents to perform increasingly complex tasks and adapt to diverse environments. However, deploying such agents in realistic human-centered scenarios, such as domestic households, remains…
Whereas machine learning models typically learn language by directly training on language tasks (e.g., next-word prediction), language emerges in human children as a byproduct of solving non-language tasks (e.g., acquiring food). Motivated…
Despite advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), their integration into language-grounded, human-like embodied agents remains incomplete, hindering complex real-life task performance in physical…
The majority of voice-based conversational agents still rely on pause-and-respond turn-taking, leaving interactions sounding stiff and robotic. We present RESPOND (Responsive Engagement Strategy for Predictive Orchestration and Dialogue), a…
Existing conversational systems are mostly agent-centric, which assumes the user utterances would closely follow the system ontology (for NLU or dialogue state tracking). However, in real-world scenarios, it is highly desirable that the…
Technologies for enhancing well-being, healthcare vigilance and monitoring are on the rise. However, despite patient interest, such technologies suffer from low adoption. One hypothesis for this limited adoption is loss of human interaction…
Several approaches have been presented, which aim to extract models from natural language specifications. These approaches have inherent weaknesses for they assume an initial problem understanding that is perfect, and they leave no room for…
Classroom dialogue plays a crucial role in fostering student engagement and deeper learning. However, analysing dialogue sequences has traditionally relied on either theoretical frameworks or empirical descriptions of practice, with limited…