Related papers: Learning When to Ask: Simulation-Trained Humanoids…
Proactive task-oriented dialogue (TOD), such as outbound sales, demands a persuasive agent that actively probes the user's concerns and steers the conversation toward acceptance within a bounded number of turns. Yet post-trained LLMs are…
Background: We present a Patient Simulator that leverages real world patient encounters which cover a broad range of conditions and symptoms to provide synthetic test subjects for development and testing of healthcare agentic models. The…
Embodied agents designed to assist users with tasks must engage in natural language interactions, interpret instructions, execute actions, and communicate effectively to resolve issues. However, collecting large-scale, diverse datasets of…
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…
Objective: This paper introduces a patient simulator for scalable, automated evaluation of healthcare conversational agents, generating realistic, controllable interactions that systematically vary across medical, linguistic, and behavioral…
Current conversational AI systems often provide generic, one-size-fits-all interactions that overlook individual user characteristics and lack adaptive dialogue management. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{HumAIne-chatbot}, an…
We present data from two online human-robot interaction experiments where 227 participants viewed videos of a humanoid robot exhibiting faulty or non-faulty behaviours while either remaining mute or speaking. The participants were asked to…
We present EmbodiedHead, a speech-driven talking-head framework that equips LLMs with real-time visual avatars for conversation. A practical embodied avatar must achieve real-time generation, unified listening-speaking behavior, and high…
In this paper, we extended the method proposed in [21] to enable humans to interact naturally with autonomous agents through vocal and textual conversations. Our extended method exploits the inherent capabilities of pre-trained large…
Task-oriented proactive dialogue agents play a pivotal role in recruitment, particularly for steering conversations towards specific business outcomes, such as acquiring social-media contacts for private-channel conversion. Although…
Patients must possess the knowledge necessary to actively participate in their care. We present NoteAid-Chatbot, a conversational AI that promotes patient understanding via a novel 'learning as conversation' framework, built on a…
Conversations with LMs involve two participants: a human user leading the conversation, and an LM assistant responding to the user's request. To satisfy this specific role, LMs are post-trained to be helpful assistants -- optimized to…
Addressing the critical shortage of mental health resources for effective screening, diagnosis, and treatment remains a significant challenge. This scarcity underscores the need for innovative solutions, particularly in enhancing the…
Artificial intelligence systems increasingly involve continual learning to enable flexibility in general situations that are not encountered during system training. Human interaction with autonomous systems is broadly studied, but research…
Interactive virtual humanoid agent is a crucial interface with the physical world. A relatively complete humanoid agent first needs to have face and body, then possess both verbal and non-verbal (such as eye contact, facial expression, lip…
Chatbots via large language models (LLMs) generate fluent responses but often struggle with when to speak, especially for brief, timely listener reactions during ongoing dialogue. We present a multimodal strategy for LLMs, which leverages…
Job interview anxiety is a prevalent challenge among university students and can undermine both performance and confidence in high-stakes evaluative situations. Social robots have shown promise in reducing anxiety through emotional support,…
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…
Demand for mental health support through AI chatbots is surging, though current systems present several limitations, like sycophancy or overvalidation, and reinforcement of maladaptive beliefs. A core obstacle to the creation of better…
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.…