Despite the recent advances in open-domain dialogue systems, building a reliable evaluation metric is still a challenging problem. Recent studies proposed learnable metrics based on classification models trained to distinguish the correct response. However, neural classifiers are known to make overly confident predictions for examples from unseen distributions. We propose DEnsity, which evaluates a response by utilizing density estimation on the feature space derived from a neural classifier. Our metric measures how likely a response would appear in the distribution of human conversations. Moreover, to improve the performance of DEnsity, we utilize contrastive learning to further compress the feature space. Experiments on multiple response evaluation datasets show that DEnsity correlates better with human evaluations than the existing metrics. Our code is available at //github.com/ddehun/DEnsity.
With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their ubiquitous deployment in diverse domains, measuring language model behavior on realistic data is imperative. For example, a company deploying a client-facing chatbot must ensure that the model will not respond to client requests with profanity. Current evaluations approach this problem using small, domain-specific datasets with human-curated labels. These evaluation sets are often sampled from a narrow and simplified distribution, and data sources can unknowingly be leaked into the training set which can lead to misleading evaluations. To bypass these drawbacks, we propose a framework for self-supervised evaluation of LLMs by analyzing their sensitivity or invariance to transformations on the input text. Self-supervised evaluation can directly monitor LLM behavior on datasets collected in the wild or streamed during live model deployment. We demonstrate self-supervised evaluation strategies for measuring closed-book knowledge, toxicity, and long-range context dependence, in addition to sensitivity to grammatical structure and tokenization errors. When comparisons to similar human-labeled benchmarks are available, we find strong correlations between self-supervised and human-supervised evaluations. The self-supervised paradigm complements current evaluation strategies that rely on labeled data.
Unlike classical lexical overlap metrics such as BLEU, most current evaluation metrics for machine translation (for example, COMET or BERTScore) are based on black-box large language models. They often achieve strong correlations with human judgments, but recent research indicates that the lower-quality classical metrics remain dominant, one of the potential reasons being that their decision processes are more transparent. To foster more widespread acceptance of novel high-quality metrics, explainability thus becomes crucial. In this concept paper, we identify key properties as well as key goals of explainable machine translation metrics and provide a comprehensive synthesis of recent techniques, relating them to our established goals and properties. In this context, we also discuss the latest state-of-the-art approaches to explainable metrics based on generative models such as ChatGPT and GPT4. Finally, we contribute a vision of next-generation approaches, including natural language explanations. We hope that our work can help catalyze and guide future research on explainable evaluation metrics and, mediately, also contribute to better and more transparent machine translation systems.
We present a novel method to compute the relative pose of multi-camera systems using two affine correspondences (ACs). Existing solutions to the multi-camera relative pose estimation are either restricted to special cases of motion, have too high computational complexity, or require too many point correspondences (PCs). Thus, these solvers impede an efficient or accurate relative pose estimation when applying RANSAC as a robust estimator. This paper shows that the 6DOF relative pose estimation problem using ACs permits a feasible minimal solution, when exploiting the geometric constraints between ACs and multi-camera systems using a special parameterization. We present a problem formulation based on two ACs that encompass two common types of ACs across two views, i.e., inter-camera and intra-camera. Moreover, the framework for generating the minimal solvers can be extended to solve various relative pose estimation problems, e.g., 5DOF relative pose estimation with known rotation angle prior. Experiments on both virtual and real multi-camera systems prove that the proposed solvers are more efficient than the state-of-the-art algorithms, while resulting in a better relative pose accuracy. Source code is available at //github.com/jizhaox/relpose-mcs-depth.
The advent and fast development of neural networks have revolutionized the research on dialogue systems and subsequently have triggered various challenges regarding their automatic evaluation. Automatic evaluation of open-domain dialogue systems as an open challenge has been the center of the attention of many researchers. Despite the consistent efforts to improve automatic metrics' correlations with human evaluation, there have been very few attempts to assess their robustness over multiple domains and dimensions. Also, their focus is mainly on the English language. All of these challenges prompt the development of automatic evaluation metrics that are reliable in various domains, dimensions, and languages. This track in the 11th Dialogue System Technology Challenge (DSTC11) is part of the ongoing effort to promote robust and multilingual automatic evaluation metrics. This article describes the datasets and baselines provided to participants and discusses the submission and result details of the two proposed subtasks.
We propose a robust and reliable evaluation metric for generative models by introducing topological and statistical treatments for rigorous support estimation. Existing metrics, such as Inception Score (IS), Frechet Inception Distance (FID), and the variants of Precision and Recall (P&R), heavily rely on supports that are estimated from sample features. However, the reliability of their estimation has not been seriously discussed (and overlooked) even though the quality of the evaluation entirely depends on it. In this paper, we propose Topological Precision and Recall (TopP&R, pronounced 'topper'), which provides a systematic approach to estimating supports, retaining only topologically and statistically important features with a certain level of confidence. This not only makes TopP&R strong for noisy features, but also provides statistical consistency. Our theoretical and experimental results show that TopP&R is robust to outliers and non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) perturbations, while accurately capturing the true trend of change in samples. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first evaluation metric focused on the robust estimation of the support and provides its statistical consistency under noise.
Human motion prediction has achieved a brilliant performance with the help of CNNs, which facilitates human-machine cooperation. However, currently, there is no work evaluating the potential risk in human motion prediction when facing adversarial attacks, which may cause danger in real applications. The adversarial attack will face two problems against human motion prediction: 1. For naturalness, pose data is highly related to the physical dynamics of human skeletons where Lp norm constraints cannot constrain the adversarial example well; 2. Unlike the pixel value in images, pose data is diverse at scale because of the different acquisition equipment and the data processing, which makes it hard to set fixed parameters to perform attacks. To solve the problems above, we propose a new adversarial attack method that perturbs the input human motion sequence by maximizing the prediction error with physical constraints. Specifically, we introduce a novel adaptable scheme that facilitates the attack to suit the scale of the target pose and two physical constraints to enhance the imperceptibility of the adversarial example. The evaluating experiments on three datasets show that the prediction errors of all target models are enlarged significantly, which means current convolution-based human motion prediction models can be easily disturbed under the proposed attack. The quantitative analysis shows that prior knowledge and semantic information modeling can be the key to the adversarial robustness of human motion predictors. The qualitative results indicate that the adversarial sample is hard to be noticed when compared frame by frame but is relatively easy to be detected when the sample is animated.
Recent advances in open-domain text generation models powered by large pre-trained language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance. However, evaluating and controlling these models for desired attributes remains a challenge, as traditional reference-based metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR are insufficient for open-ended generation tasks. Similarly, while trainable discriminator-based evaluation metrics show promise, obtaining high-quality training data is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to evaluate open-domain generation - the Meta-Distribution Methods (MDM). Drawing on the correlation between the rising parameter counts and the improving performance of LLMs, MDM creates a mapping from the contrast of two probabilistic distributions -- one known to be superior to the other -- to quality measures, which can be viewed as a distribution of distributions i.e. Meta-Distribution. We investigate MDM for open-domain text generation evaluation under two paradigms: 1) \emph{Generative} MDM, which leverages the Meta-Distribution Methods to generate in-domain negative samples for training discriminator-based metrics; 2) \emph{Discriminative} MDM, which directly uses distribution discrepancies between two language models for evaluation. Our experiments on multi-turn dialogue and factuality in abstractive summarization demonstrate that MDMs correlate better with human judgment than existing automatic evaluation metrics on both tasks, highlighting the strong performance and generalizability of such methods.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP) with their impressive language understanding and generation capabilities. However, their performance may be suboptimal for long-tail or domain-specific tasks due to limited exposure to domain-specific knowledge and vocabulary. Additionally, the lack of transparency of most state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs, which can only be accessed via APIs, impedes further fine-tuning with custom data. Moreover, data privacy is a significant concern. To address these challenges, we propose the novel Parametric Knowledge Guiding (PKG) framework, which equips LLMs with a knowledge-guiding module to access relevant knowledge at runtime without altering the LLMs' parameters. Our PKG is based on open-source "white-box" small language models, allowing offline storage of any knowledge that LLMs require. We demonstrate that our PKG framework can enhance the performance of "black-box" LLMs on a range of long-tail and domain-specific downstream tasks requiring factual, tabular, medical, and multimodal knowledge.
Neural network models usually suffer from the challenge of incorporating commonsense knowledge into the open-domain dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-aware dialogue generation model (called TransDG), which transfers question representation and knowledge matching abilities from knowledge base question answering (KBQA) task to facilitate the utterance understanding and factual knowledge selection for dialogue generation. In addition, we propose a response guiding attention and a multi-step decoding strategy to steer our model to focus on relevant features for response generation. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model has robust superiority over compared methods in generating informative and fluent dialogues. Our code is available at //github.com/siat-nlp/TransDG.
User engagement is a critical metric for evaluating the quality of open-domain dialogue systems. Prior work has focused on conversation-level engagement by using heuristically constructed features such as the number of turns and the total time of the conversation. In this paper, we investigate the possibility and efficacy of estimating utterance-level engagement and define a novel metric, {\em predictive engagement}, for automatic evaluation of open-domain dialogue systems. Our experiments demonstrate that (1) human annotators have high agreement on assessing utterance-level engagement scores; (2) conversation-level engagement scores can be predicted from properly aggregated utterance-level engagement scores. Furthermore, we show that the utterance-level engagement scores can be learned from data. These scores can improve automatic evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue systems, as shown by correlation with human judgements. This suggests that predictive engagement can be used as a real-time feedback for training better dialogue models.