Visual dialogue is a challenging task since it needs to answer a series of coherent questions on the basis of understanding the visual environment. Previous studies focus on the implicit exploration of multimodal co-reference by implicitly attending to spatial image features or object-level image features but neglect the importance of locating the objects explicitly in the visual content, which is associated with entities in the textual content. Therefore, in this paper we propose a {\bf M}ultimodal {\bf I}ncremental {\bf T}ransformer with {\bf V}isual {\bf G}rounding, named MITVG, which consists of two key parts: visual grounding and multimodal incremental transformer. Visual grounding aims to explicitly locate related objects in the image guided by textual entities, which helps the model exclude the visual content that does not need attention. On the basis of visual grounding, the multimodal incremental transformer encodes the multi-turn dialogue history combined with visual scene step by step according to the order of the dialogue and then generates a contextually and visually coherent response. Experimental results on the VisDial v0.9 and v1.0 datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model, which achieves comparable performance.
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
Conventional phrase grounding aims to localize noun phrases mentioned in a given caption to their corresponding image regions, which has achieved great success recently. Apparently, sole noun phrase grounding is not enough for cross-modal visual language understanding. Here we extend the task by considering pronouns as well. First, we construct a dataset of phrase grounding with both noun phrases and pronouns to image regions. Based on the dataset, we test the performance of phrase grounding by using a state-of-the-art literature model of this line. Then, we enhance the baseline grounding mode…
Object grounding tasks aim to locate the target object in an image through verbal communications. Understanding human command is an important process needed for effective human-robot communication. However, this is challenging because human commands can be ambiguous and erroneous. This paper aims to disambiguate the human's referring expressions by allowing the agent to ask relevant questions based on semantic data obtained from scene graphs. We test if our agent can use relations between objects from a scene graph to ask semantically relevant questions that can disambiguate the original user …
Natural, spontaneous dialogue proceeds incrementally on a word-by-word basis; and it contains many sorts of disfluency such as mid-utterance/sentence hesitations, interruptions, and self-corrections. But training data for machine learning approaches to dialogue processing is often either cleaned-up or wholly synthetic in order to avoid such phenomena. The question then arises of how well systems trained on such clean data generalise to real spontaneous dialogue, or indeed whether they are trainable at all on naturally occurring dialogue data. To answer this question, we created a new corpus ca…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）
Common grounding is the process of creating, repairing and updating mutual understandings, which is a critical aspect of sophisticated human communication. However, traditional dialogue systems have limited capability of establishing common ground, and we also lack task formulations which introduce natural difficulty in terms of common grounding while enabling easy evaluation and analysis of complex models. In this paper, we propose a minimal dialogue task which requires advanced skills of common grounding under continuous and partially-observable context. Based on this task formulation, we co…
Decoding strategies play a crucial role in natural language generation systems. They are usually designed and evaluated in open-ended text-only tasks, and it is not clear how different strategies handle the numerous challenges that goal-oriented multimodal systems face (such as grounding and informativeness). To answer this question, we compare a wide variety of different decoding strategies and hyper-parameter configurations in a Visual Dialogue referential game. Although none of them successfully balance lexical richness, accuracy in the task, and visual grounding, our in-depth analysis allo…
We present an optimised multi-modal dialogue agent for interactive learning of visually grounded word meanings from a human tutor, trained on real human-human tutoring data. Within a life-long interactive learning period, the agent, trained using Reinforcement Learning (RL), must be able to handle natural conversations with human users and achieve good learning performance (accuracy) while minimising human effort in the learning process. We train and evaluate this system in interaction with a simulated human tutor, which is built on the BURCHAK corpus -- a Human-Human Dialogue dataset for the …
Data-driven, knowledge-grounded neural conversation models are capable of generating more informative responses. However, these models have not yet demonstrated that they can zero-shot adapt to updated, unseen knowledge graphs. This paper proposes a new task about how to apply dynamic knowledge graphs in neural conversation model and presents a novel TV series conversation corpus (DyKgChat) for the task. Our new task and corpus aids in understanding the influence of dynamic knowledge graphs on responses generation. Also, we propose a preliminary model that selects an output from two networks a…
Bielefeld University（比勒费尔德大学）；University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）
Building computer systems that can converse about their visual environment is one of the oldest concerns of research in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics (see, for example, Winograd's 1972 SHRDLU system). Only recently, however, have methods from computer vision and natural language processing become powerful enough to make this vision seem more attainable. Pushed especially by developments in computer vision, many data sets and collection environments have recently been published that bring together verbal interaction and visual processing. Here, we argue that these datase…
This paper discusses models for dialogue state tracking using recurrent neural networks (RNN). We present experiments on the standard dialogue state tracking (DST) dataset, DSTC2. On the one hand, RNN models became the state of the art models in DST, on the other hand, most state-of-the-art models are only turn-based and require dataset-specific preprocessing (e.g. DSTC2-specific) in order to achieve such results. We implemented two architectures which can be used in incremental settings and require almost no preprocessing. We compare their performance to the benchmarks on DSTC2 and discuss th…
MILA, Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学MILA）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
We introduce "Talk The Walk", the first large-scale dialogue dataset grounded in action and perception. The task involves two agents (a "guide" and a "tourist") that communicate via natural language in order to achieve a common goal: having the tourist navigate to a given target location. The task and dataset, which are described in detail, are challenging and their full solution is an open problem that we pose to the community. We (i) focus on the task of tourist localization and develop the novel Masked Attention for Spatial Convolutions (MASC) mechanism that allows for grounding tourist utt…
ZING-3D: Zero-shot Incremental 3D Scene Graphs via Vision-Language Models
Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, K.K Birla Goa Campus（比拉理工学院和科学学院，比拉戈阿校园）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore（设计与工程学院机械工程系，新加坡国立大学）
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
The Guesser is a task of visual grounding in GuessWhat?! like visual dialogue. It locates the target object in an image supposed by an Oracle oneself over a question-answer based dialogue between a Questioner and the Oracle. Most existing guessers make one and only one guess after receiving all question-answer pairs in a dialogue with the predefined number of rounds. This paper proposes a guessing state for the Guesser, and regards guess as a process with change of guessing state through a dialogue. A guessing state tracking based guess model is therefore proposed. The guessing state is define…
MM-Snowball: Evaluating and Mitigating Hallucination Snowballing in Multimodal Multi-Turn Dialogue
College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Fudan University（复旦大学智能机器人与先进制造学院）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；TMLR Group, Hong Kong Baptist University（香港 Baptist 大学 TMLR 团体）；MM Lab, CUHK（CUHK 多模态实验室）；RAMS Lab, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.（华为技术有限公司 RAMS 实验室）
Information Sciences Institute（信息科学研究所）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Effective dialogue involves grounding, the process of establishing mutual knowledge that is essential for communication between people. Modern dialogue systems are not explicitly trained to build common ground, and therefore overlook this important aspect of communication. Improvisational theater (improv) intrinsically contains a high proportion of dialogue focused on building common ground, and makes use of the yes-and principle, a strong grounding speech act, to establish coherence and an actionable objective reality. We collect a corpus of more than 26,000 yes-and turns, transcribing them f…
Grounding natural language instructions on the web to perform previously unseen tasks enables accessibility and automation. We introduce a task and dataset to train AI agents from open-domain, step-by-step instructions originally written for people. We build RUSS (Rapid Universal Support Service) to tackle this problem. RUSS consists of two models: First, a BERT-LSTM with pointers parses instructions to ThingTalk, a domain-specific language we design for grounding natural language on the web. Then, a grounding model retrieves the unique IDs of any webpage elements requested in ThingTalk. RUSS …
We investigate an end-to-end method for automatically inducing task-based dialogue systems from small amounts of unannotated dialogue data. It combines an incremental semantic grammar - Dynamic Syntax and Type Theory with Records (DS-TTR) - with Reinforcement Learning (RL), where language generation and dialogue management are a joint decision problem. The systems thus produced are incremental: dialogues are processed word-by-word, shown previously to be essential in supporting natural, spontaneous dialogue. We hypothesised that the rich linguistic knowledge within the grammar should enable a …
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Grounding object properties and relations in 3D scenes is a prerequisite for a wide range of artificial intelligence tasks, such as visually grounded dialogues and embodied manipulation. However, the variability of the 3D domain induces two fundamental challenges: 1) the expense of labeling and 2) the complexity of 3D grounded language. Hence, essential desiderata for models are to be data-efficient, generalize to different data distributions and tasks with unseen semantic forms, as well as ground complex language semantics (e.g., view-point anchoring and multi-object reference). To address th…
We present a method for inducing new dialogue systems from very small amounts of unannotated dialogue data, showing how word-level exploration using Reinforcement Learning (RL), combined with an incremental and semantic grammar - Dynamic Syntax (DS) - allows systems to discover, generate, and understand many new dialogue variants. The method avoids the use of expensive and time-consuming dialogue act annotations, and supports more natural (incremental) dialogues than turn-based systems. Here, language generation and dialogue management are treated as a joint decision/optimisation problem, and …
We present a multi-task learning framework to enable the training of one universal incremental dialogue processing model with four tasks of disfluency detection, language modelling, part-of-speech tagging, and utterance segmentation in a simple deep recurrent setting. We show that these tasks provide positive inductive biases to each other with the optimal contribution of each one relying on the severity of the noise from the task. Our live multi-task model outperforms similar individual tasks, delivers competitive performance, and is beneficial for future use in conversational agents in psych…
Prior approaches to realizing mixed-initiative human--computer referential communication have adopted information-state or collaborative problem-solving approaches. In this paper, we argue for a new approach, inspired by coherence-based models of discourse such as SDRT \cite{asher-lascarides:2003a}, in which utterances attach to an evolving discourse structure and the associated knowledge graph of speaker commitments serves as an interface to real-world reasoning and conversational strategy. As first steps towards implementing the approach, we describe a simple dialogue system in a referential…
University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）；Department of Linguistics（语言学系）；Computational Linguistics（计算语言学）
Where early work on dialogue in Computational Linguistics put much emphasis on dialogue structure and its relation to the mental states of the dialogue participants (e.g., Allen 1979, Grosz & Sidner 1986), current work mostly reduces dialogue to the task of producing at any one time a next utterance; e.g. in neural chatbot or Visual Dialogue settings. As a methodological decision, this is sound: Even the longest journey is a sequence of steps. It becomes detrimental, however, when the tasks and datasets from which dialogue behaviour is to be learned are tailored too much to this framing of the…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Mobvoi（出门问问）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Clarifying user needs is essential for existing task-oriented dialogue systems. However, in real-world applications, developers can never guarantee that all possible user demands are taken into account in the design phase. Consequently, existing systems will break down when encountering unconsidered user needs. To address this problem, we propose a novel incremental learning framework to design task-oriented dialogue systems, or for short Incremental Dialogue System (IDS), without pre-defining the exhaustive list of user needs. Specifically, we introduce an uncertainty estimation module to eva…
Building open-domain dialogue systems capable of rich human-like conversational ability is one of the fundamental challenges in language generation. However, even with recent advancements in the field, existing open-domain generative models fail to capture and utilize external knowledge, leading to repetitive or generic responses to unseen utterances. Current work on knowledge-grounded dialogue generation primarily focuses on persona incorporation or searching a fact-based structured knowledge source such as Wikipedia. Our method takes a broader and simpler approach, which aims to improve the …
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Fraunhofer IAIS（弗劳恩霍夫智能分析与信息系统研究所）
Generating knowledge grounded responses in both goal and non-goal oriented dialogue systems is an important research challenge. Knowledge Graphs (KG) can be viewed as an abstraction of the real world, which can potentially facilitate a dialogue system to produce knowledge grounded responses. However, integrating KGs into the dialogue generation process in an end-to-end manner is a non-trivial task. This paper proposes a novel architecture for integrating KGs into the response generation process by training a BERT model that learns to answer using the elements of the KG (entities and relations)…
Institute for Logic Language and Computation（逻辑、语言与计算研究所）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
We investigate how encoder-decoder models trained on a synthetic dataset of task-oriented dialogues process disfluencies, such as hesitations and self-corrections. We find that, contrary to earlier results, disfluencies have very little impact on the task success of seq-to-seq models with attention. Using visualisation and diagnostic classifiers, we analyse the representations that are incrementally built by the model, and discover that models develop little to no awareness of the structure of disfluencies. However, adding disfluencies to the data appears to help the model create clearer repre…
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Mila（米拉人工智能研究院）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Canada CIFAR AI Chair（加拿大CIFAR人工智能讲席教授）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Dialogue systems powered by large pre-trained language models (LM) exhibit an innate ability to deliver fluent and natural-looking responses. Despite their impressive generation performance, these models can often generate factually incorrect statements impeding their widespread adoption. In this paper, we focus on the task of improving the faithfulness -- and thus reduce hallucination -- of Neural Dialogue Systems to known facts supplied by a Knowledge Graph (KG). We propose Neural Path Hunter which follows a generate-then-refine strategy whereby a generated response is amended using the k-ho…
Affective Multimodal Agents with Proactive Knowledge Grounding for Emotionally Aligned Marketing Dialogue
Hunan Police Academy, Department of Criminal Investigation（湖南警察学院犯罪侦查系）；Business College, California State University（加州州立大学长滩分校商学院）；Northwestern University（西北大学）；AI Agent Lab, Vokram Group（Vokram集团AI代理实验室）；Beijing University of Technology（北京理工大学）；Zheng Zhou University of Light Industry（郑州轻工业大学）
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
Inferring social relations from dialogues is vital for building emotionally intelligent robots to interpret human language better and act accordingly. We model the social network as an And-or Graph, named SocAoG, for the consistency of relations among a group and leveraging attributes as inference cues. Moreover, we formulate a sequential structure prediction task, and propose an $α$-$β$-$γ$ strategy to incrementally parse SocAoG for the dynamic inference upon any incoming utterance: (i) an $α$ process predicting attributes and relations conditioned on the semantics of dialogues, (ii) a $β$ pr…
Context-Driven Incremental Compression for Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；NVIDIA AI Technology Center（NVIDIA AI技术中心）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）
Common grounding is the process of creating, repairing and updating mutual understandings, which is a fundamental aspect of natural language conversation. However, interpreting the process of common grounding is a challenging task, especially under continuous and partially-observable context where complex ambiguity, uncertainty, partial understandings and misunderstandings are introduced. Interpretation becomes even more challenging when we deal with dialogue systems which still have limited capability of natural language understanding and generation. To address this problem, we consider refer…
Korea University（高丽大学）；NCSOFT（NCSOFT公司）；Naver Corporation（Naver公司）
To build a conversational agent that interacts fluently with humans, previous studies blend knowledge or personal profile into the pre-trained language model. However, the model that considers knowledge and persona at the same time is still limited, leading to hallucination and a passive way of using personas. We propose an effective dialogue agent that grounds external knowledge and persona simultaneously. The agent selects the proper knowledge and persona to use for generating the answers with our candidate scoring implemented with a poly-encoder. Then, our model generates the utterance with…
Spontaneous spoken dialogue is often disfluent, containing pauses, hesitations, self-corrections and false starts. Processing such phenomena is essential in understanding a speaker's intended meaning and controlling the flow of the conversation. Furthermore, this processing needs to be word-by-word incremental to allow further downstream processing to begin as early as possible in order to handle real spontaneous human conversational behaviour. In addition, from a developer's point of view, it is highly desirable to be able to develop systems which can be trained from `clean' examples while al…
