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We consider negotiation settings in which two agents use natural language to bargain on goods. Agents need to decide on both high-level strategy (e.g., proposing \$50) and the execution of that strategy (e.g., generating "The bike is brand…
Recent advances in speech large language models (speech LLMs) have enabled seamless spoken interactions, but these systems still struggle with complex reasoning tasks. Previously, chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting or fine-tuning has been to…
Audio-visual automatic speech recognition is a promising approach to robust ASR under noisy conditions. However, up until recently it had been traditionally studied in isolation assuming the video of a single speaking face matches the…
In an era where single large language models have dominated the landscape of artificial intelligence for years, multi-agent systems arise as new protagonists in conversational task-solving. While previous studies have showcased their…
Despite recent advances in natural language understanding and generation, and decades of research on the development of conversational bots, building automated agents that can carry on rich open-ended conversations with humans "in the wild"…
An important aspect of developing conversational agents is to give a bot the ability to improve through communicating with humans and to learn from the mistakes that it makes. Most research has focused on learning from fixed training sets…
Under non-exponential discounting, we develop a dynamic theory for stopping problems in continuous time. Our framework covers discount functions that induce decreasing impatience. Due to the inherent time inconsistency, we look for…
A user faces a list returned by a search system, ordered by a noisy proxy for relevance, and decides sequentially whether to pay a fixed cost to inspect another item or stop with the best she has uncovered. She does not enter the page…
We consider the task of building a dialogue system that can motivate users to adopt positive lifestyle changes: Motivational Interviewing. Addressing such a task requires a system that can infer \textit{how} to motivate a user effectively.…
Latent reasoning represents a new development in Transformer language models that has shown potential in compressing reasoning lengths compared to chain-of-thought reasoning. By directly passing the information-rich previous final latent…
The phenomenon of ellipsis is prevalent in social conversations. Ellipsis increases the difficulty of a series of downstream language understanding tasks, such as dialog act prediction and semantic role labeling. We propose to resolve…
In classic reinforcement learning algorithms, agents make decisions at discrete and fixed time intervals. The duration between decisions becomes a crucial hyperparameter, as setting it too short may increase the problem's difficulty by…
Information seeking conversations between users and Conversational Search Agents (CSAs) consist of multiple turns of interaction. While users initiate a search session, ideally a CSA should sometimes take the lead in the conversation by…
A key operational challenge for call centers is to decide, in real time, which waiting customer should be served by which available agent. This is known as skill-based routing, and the decision becomes especially difficult in large systems…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit knowledge disparities across languages. Encouraging LLMs to \textit{abstain} when faced with knowledge gaps is a promising strategy to reduce hallucinations in multilingual settings. Current…
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…
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…
Collecting human judgements is currently the most reliable evaluation method for natural language generation systems. Automatic metrics have reported flaws when applied to measure quality aspects of generated text and have been shown to…
Effective communication between humans and intelligent agents has promising applications for solving complex problems. One such approach is visual dialogue, which leverages multimodal context to assist humans. However, real-world scenarios…
Deep search agents, which autonomously iterate through multi-turn web-based reasoning, represent a promising paradigm for complex information-seeking tasks. However, current agents suffer from critical inefficiency: they conduct excessive…