Most existing dialogue systems fail to respond properly to potentially unsafe user utterances by either ignoring or passively agreeing with them. To address this issue, we introduce ProsocialDialog, the first large-scale multi-turn dialogue dataset to teach conversational agents to respond to problematic content following social norms. Covering diverse unethical, problematic, biased, and toxic situations, ProsocialDialog contains responses that encourage prosocial behavior, grounded in commonsense social rules (i.e., rules-of-thumb, RoTs). Created via a human-AI collaborative framework, ProsocialDialog consists of 58K dialogues, with 331K utterances, 160K unique RoTs, and 497K dialogue safety labels accompanied by free-form rationales. With this dataset, we introduce a dialogue safety detection module, Canary, capable of generating RoTs given conversational context, and a socially-informed dialogue agent, Prost. Empirical results show that Prost generates more socially acceptable dialogues compared to other state-of-the-art language and dialogue models in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings. Additionally, Canary effectively guides conversational agents and off-the-shelf language models to generate significantly more prosocial responses. Our work highlights the promise and importance of creating and steering conversational AI to be socially responsible.
We present in this paper a novel denoising training method to speedup DETR (DEtection TRansformer) training and offer a deepened understanding of the slow convergence issue of DETR-like methods. We show that the slow convergence results from the instability of bipartite graph matching which causes inconsistent optimization goals in early training stages. To address this issue, except for the Hungarian loss, our method additionally feeds ground-truth bounding boxes with noises into Transformer decoder and trains the model to reconstruct the original boxes, which effectively reduces the bipartite graph matching difficulty and leads to a faster convergence. Our method is universal and can be easily plugged into any DETR-like methods by adding dozens of lines of code to achieve a remarkable improvement. As a result, our DN-DETR results in a remarkable improvement ($+1.9$AP) under the same setting and achieves the best result (AP $43.4$ and $48.6$ with $12$ and $50$ epochs of training respectively) among DETR-like methods with ResNet-$50$ backbone. Compared with the baseline under the same setting, DN-DETR achieves comparable performance with $50\%$ training epochs. Code is available at \url{//github.com/FengLi-ust/DN-DETR}.
Accurate recognition of food items along with quality assessment is of paramount importance in the agricultural industry. Such automated systems can speed up the wheel of the food processing sector and save tons of manual labor. In this connection, the recent advancement of Deep learning-based architectures has introduced a wide variety of solutions offering remarkable performance in several classification tasks. In this work, we have exploited the concept of Densely Connected Convolutional Neural Networks (DenseNets) for fruit quality assessment. The feature propagation towards the deeper layers has enabled the network to tackle the vanishing gradient problems and ensured the reuse of features to learn meaningful insights. Evaluating on a dataset of 19,526 images containing six fruits having three quality grades for each, the proposed pipeline achieved a remarkable accuracy of 99.67%. The robustness of the model was further tested for fruit classification and quality assessment tasks where the model produced a similar performance, which makes it suitable for real-life applications.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have constantly achieved better performance over years by introducing more complex topology, and enlarging the capacity towards deeper and wider CNNs. This makes the manual design of CNNs extremely difficult, so the automated design of CNNs has come into the research spotlight, which has obtained CNNs that outperform manually-designed CNNs. However, the computational cost is still the bottleneck of automatically designing CNNs. In this paper, inspired by transfer learning, a new evolutionary computation based framework is proposed to efficiently evolve CNNs without compromising the classification accuracy. The proposed framework leverages multi-source domains, which are smaller datasets than the target domain datasets, to evolve a generalised CNN block only once. And then, a new stacking method is proposed to both widen and deepen the evolved block, and a grid search method is proposed to find optimal stacking solutions. The experimental results show the proposed method acquires good CNNs faster than 15 peer competitors within less than 40 GPU-hours. Regarding the classification accuracy, the proposed method gains its strong competitiveness against the peer competitors, which achieves the best error rates of 3.46%, 18.36% and 1.76% for the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and SVHN datasets, respectively.
The long-standing theory that a colour-naming system evolves under the dual pressure of efficient communication and perceptual mechanism is supported by more and more linguistic studies including the analysis of four decades' diachronic data from the Nafaanra language. This inspires us to explore whether artificial intelligence could evolve and discover a similar colour-naming system via optimising the communication efficiency represented by high-level recognition performance. Here, we propose a novel colour quantisation transformer, CQFormer, that quantises colour space while maintaining the accuracy of machine recognition on the quantised images. Given an RGB image, Annotation Branch maps it into an index map before generating the quantised image with a colour palette, meanwhile the Palette Branch utilises a key-point detection way to find proper colours in palette among whole colour space. By interacting with colour annotation, CQFormer is able to balance both the machine vision accuracy and colour perceptual structure such as distinct and stable colour distribution for discovered colour system. Very interestingly, we even observe the consistent evolution pattern between our artificial colour system and basic colour terms across human languages. Besides, our colour quantisation method also offers an efficient quantisation method that effectively compresses the image storage while maintaining a high performance in high-level recognition tasks such as classification and detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method with extremely low bit-rate colours. We will release the source code soon.
Any organization needs to improve their products, services, and processes. In this context, engaging with customers and understanding their journey is essential. Organizations have leveraged various techniques and technologies to support customer engagement, from call centres to chatbots and virtual agents. Recently, these systems have used Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze large volumes of customer feedback and engagement data. The goal is to understand customers in context and provide meaningful answers across various channels. Despite multiple advances in Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Recommender Systems (RS), it is still challenging to understand the intent behind customer questions during the customer journey. To address this challenge, in this paper, we study and analyze the recent work in Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) in general and, more specifically, in chatbot-based CRS. We introduce a pipeline to contextualize the input utterances in conversations. We then take the next step towards leveraging reverse feature engineering to link the contextualized input and learning model to support intent recognition. Since performance evaluation is achieved based on different ML models, we use transformer base models to evaluate the proposed approach using a labelled dialogue dataset (MSDialogue) of question-answering interactions between information seekers and answer providers.
Breakthroughs in machine learning in the last decade have led to `digital intelligence', i.e. machine learning models capable of learning from vast amounts of labeled data to perform several digital tasks such as speech recognition, face recognition, machine translation and so on. The goal of this thesis is to make progress towards designing algorithms capable of `physical intelligence', i.e. building intelligent autonomous navigation agents capable of learning to perform complex navigation tasks in the physical world involving visual perception, natural language understanding, reasoning, planning, and sequential decision making. Despite several advances in classical navigation methods in the last few decades, current navigation agents struggle at long-term semantic navigation tasks. In the first part of the thesis, we discuss our work on short-term navigation using end-to-end reinforcement learning to tackle challenges such as obstacle avoidance, semantic perception, language grounding, and reasoning. In the second part, we present a new class of navigation methods based on modular learning and structured explicit map representations, which leverage the strengths of both classical and end-to-end learning methods, to tackle long-term navigation tasks. We show that these methods are able to effectively tackle challenges such as localization, mapping, long-term planning, exploration and learning semantic priors. These modular learning methods are capable of long-term spatial and semantic understanding and achieve state-of-the-art results on various navigation tasks.
Recent developments in image classification and natural language processing, coupled with the rapid growth in social media usage, have enabled fundamental advances in detecting breaking events around the world in real-time. Emergency response is one such area that stands to gain from these advances. By processing billions of texts and images a minute, events can be automatically detected to enable emergency response workers to better assess rapidly evolving situations and deploy resources accordingly. To date, most event detection techniques in this area have focused on image-only or text-only approaches, limiting detection performance and impacting the quality of information delivered to crisis response teams. In this paper, we present a new multimodal fusion method that leverages both images and texts as input. In particular, we introduce a cross-attention module that can filter uninformative and misleading components from weak modalities on a sample by sample basis. In addition, we employ a multimodal graph-based approach to stochastically transition between embeddings of different multimodal pairs during training to better regularize the learning process as well as dealing with limited training data by constructing new matched pairs from different samples. We show that our method outperforms the unimodal approaches and strong multimodal baselines by a large margin on three crisis-related tasks.
In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which can naturally integrate node information and topological structure, have been demonstrated to be powerful in learning on graph data. These advantages of GNNs provide great potential to advance social recommendation since data in social recommender systems can be represented as user-user social graph and user-item graph; and learning latent factors of users and items is the key. However, building social recommender systems based on GNNs faces challenges. For example, the user-item graph encodes both interactions and their associated opinions; social relations have heterogeneous strengths; users involve in two graphs (e.g., the user-user social graph and the user-item graph). To address the three aforementioned challenges simultaneously, in this paper, we present a novel graph neural network framework (GraphRec) for social recommendations. In particular, we provide a principled approach to jointly capture interactions and opinions in the user-item graph and propose the framework GraphRec, which coherently models two graphs and heterogeneous strengths. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework GraphRec. Our code is available at \url{//github.com/wenqifan03/GraphRec-WWW19}
There is a resurgent interest in developing intelligent open-domain dialog systems due to the availability of large amounts of conversational data and the recent progress on neural approaches to conversational AI. Unlike traditional task-oriented bots, an open-domain dialog system aims to establish long-term connections with users by satisfying the human need for communication, affection, and social belonging. This paper reviews the recent works on neural approaches that are devoted to addressing three challenges in developing such systems: semantics, consistency, and interactiveness. Semantics requires a dialog system to not only understand the content of the dialog but also identify user's social needs during the conversation. Consistency requires the system to demonstrate a consistent personality to win users trust and gain their long-term confidence. Interactiveness refers to the system's ability to generate interpersonal responses to achieve particular social goals such as entertainment, conforming, and task completion. The works we select to present here is based on our unique views and are by no means complete. Nevertheless, we hope that the discussion will inspire new research in developing more intelligent dialog systems.
The present paper surveys neural approaches to conversational AI that have been developed in the last few years. We group conversational systems into three categories: (1) question answering agents, (2) task-oriented dialogue agents, and (3) chatbots. For each category, we present a review of state-of-the-art neural approaches, draw the connection between them and traditional approaches, and discuss the progress that has been made and challenges still being faced, using specific systems and models as case studies.