A dialogue policy module is an essential part of task-completion dialogue systems. Recently, increasing interest has focused on reinforcement learning (RL)-based dialogue policy. Its favorable performance and wise action decisions rely on an accurate estimation of action values. The overestimation problem is a widely known issue of RL since its estimate of the maximum action value is larger than the ground truth, which results in an unstable learning process and suboptimal policy. This problem is detrimental to RL-based dialogue policy learning. To mitigate this problem, this paper proposes a dynamic partial average estimator (DPAV) of the ground truth maximum action value. DPAV calculates the partial average between the predicted maximum action value and minimum action value, where the weights are dynamically adaptive and problem-dependent. We incorporate DPAV into a deep Q-network as the dialogue policy and show that our method can achieve better or comparable results compared to top baselines on three dialogue datasets of different domains with a lower computational load. In addition, we also theoretically prove the convergence and derive the upper and lower bounds of the bias compared with those of other methods.
Semantic segmentation is a challenging computer vision task demanding a significant amount of pixel-level annotated data. Producing such data is a time-consuming and costly process, especially for domains with a scarcity of experts, such as medicine or forensic anthropology. While numerous semi-supervised approaches have been developed to make the most from the limited labeled data and ample amount of unlabeled data, domain-specific real-world datasets often have characteristics that both reduce the effectiveness of off-the-shelf state-of-the-art methods and also provide opportunities to create new methods that exploit these characteristics. We propose and evaluate a semi-supervised method that reuses available labels for unlabeled images of a dataset by exploiting existing similarities, while dynamically weighting the impact of these reused labels in the training process. We evaluate our method on a large dataset of human decomposition images and find that our method, while conceptually simple, outperforms state-of-the-art consistency and pseudo-labeling-based methods for the segmentation of this dataset. This paper includes graphic content of human decomposition.
Sequential recommendation aims to recommend the next item of users' interest based on their historical interactions. Recently, the self-attention mechanism has been adapted for sequential recommendation, and demonstrated state-of-the-art performance. However, in this manuscript, we show that the self-attention-based sequential recommendation methods could suffer from the localization-deficit issue. As a consequence, in these methods, over the first few blocks, the item representations may quickly diverge from their original representations, and thus, impairs the learning in the following blocks. To mitigate this issue, in this manuscript, we develop a recursive attentive method with reused item representations (RAM) for sequential recommendation. We compare RAM with five state-of-the-art baseline methods on six public benchmark datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that RAM significantly outperforms the baseline methods on benchmark datasets, with an improvement of as much as 11.3%. Our stability analysis shows that RAM could enable deeper and wider models for better performance. Our run-time performance comparison signifies that RAM could also be more efficient on benchmark datasets.
Recently, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been widely introduced into Collaborative Filtering (CF) to produce more accurate recommendation results due to their capability of capturing the complex nonlinear relationships between items and users.However, the DNNs-based models usually suffer from high computational complexity, i.e., consuming very long training time and storing huge amount of trainable parameters. To address these problems, we propose a new broad recommender system called Broad Collaborative Filtering (BroadCF), which is an efficient nonlinear collaborative filtering approach. Instead of DNNs, Broad Learning System (BLS) is used as a mapping function to learn the complex nonlinear relationships between users and items, which can avoid the above issues while achieving very satisfactory recommendation performance. However, it is not feasible to directly feed the original rating data into BLS. To this end, we propose a user-item rating collaborative vector preprocessing procedure to generate low-dimensional user-item input data, which is able to harness quality judgments of the most similar users/items. Extensive experiments conducted on seven benchmark datasets have confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed BroadCF algorithm
When a natural language generation (NLG) component is implemented in a real-world task-oriented dialogue system, it is necessary to generate not only natural utterances as learned on training data but also utterances adapted to the dialogue environment (e.g., noise from environmental sounds) and the user (e.g., users with low levels of understanding ability). Inspired by recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) for language generation tasks, we propose ANTOR, a method for Adaptive Natural language generation for Task-Oriented dialogue via Reinforcement learning. In ANTOR, a natural language understanding (NLU) module, which corresponds to the user's understanding of system utterances, is incorporated into the objective function of RL. If the NLG's intentions are correctly conveyed to the NLU, which understands a system's utterances, the NLG is given a positive reward. We conducted experiments on the MultiWOZ dataset, and we confirmed that ANTOR could generate adaptive utterances against speech recognition errors and the different vocabulary levels of users.
Contextual information in search sessions is important for capturing users' search intents. Various approaches have been proposed to model user behavior sequences to improve document ranking in a session. Typically, training samples of (search context, document) pairs are sampled randomly in each training epoch. In reality, the difficulty to understand user's search intent and to judge document's relevance varies greatly from one search context to another. Mixing up training samples of different difficulties may confuse the model's optimization process. In this work, we propose a curriculum learning framework for context-aware document ranking, in which the ranking model learns matching signals between the search context and the candidate document in an easy-to-hard manner. In so doing, we aim to guide the model gradually toward a global optimum. To leverage both positive and negative examples, two curricula are designed. Experiments on two real query log datasets show that our proposed framework can improve the performance of several existing methods significantly, demonstrating the effectiveness of curriculum learning for context-aware document ranking.
Training machines to understand natural language and interact with humans is an elusive and essential task of artificial intelligence. A diversity of dialogue systems has been designed with the rapid development of deep learning techniques, especially the recent pre-trained language models (PrLMs). Among these studies, the fundamental yet challenging type of task is dialogue comprehension whose role is to teach the machines to read and comprehend the dialogue context before responding. In this paper, we review the previous methods from the technical perspective of dialogue modeling for the dialogue comprehension task. We summarize the characteristics and challenges of dialogue comprehension in contrast to plain-text reading comprehension. Then, we discuss three typical patterns of dialogue modeling. In addition, we categorize dialogue-related pre-training techniques which are employed to enhance PrLMs in dialogue scenarios. Finally, we highlight the technical advances in recent years and point out the lessons from the empirical analysis and the prospects towards a new frontier of researches.
Dialogue systems are a popular Natural Language Processing (NLP) task as it is promising in real-life applications. It is also a complicated task since many NLP tasks deserving study are involved. As a result, a multitude of novel works on this task are carried out, and most of them are deep learning-based due to the outstanding performance. In this survey, we mainly focus on the deep learning-based dialogue systems. We comprehensively review state-of-the-art research outcomes in dialogue systems and analyze them from two angles: model type and system type. Specifically, from the angle of model type, we discuss the principles, characteristics, and applications of different models that are widely used in dialogue systems. This will help researchers acquaint these models and see how they are applied in state-of-the-art frameworks, which is rather helpful when designing a new dialogue system. From the angle of system type, we discuss task-oriented and open-domain dialogue systems as two streams of research, providing insight into the hot topics related. Furthermore, we comprehensively review the evaluation methods and datasets for dialogue systems to pave the way for future research. Finally, some possible research trends are identified based on the recent research outcomes. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and up-to-date one at present in the area of dialogue systems and dialogue-related tasks, extensively covering the popular frameworks, topics, and datasets.
The Q-learning algorithm is known to be affected by the maximization bias, i.e. the systematic overestimation of action values, an important issue that has recently received renewed attention. Double Q-learning has been proposed as an efficient algorithm to mitigate this bias. However, this comes at the price of an underestimation of action values, in addition to increased memory requirements and a slower convergence. In this paper, we introduce a new way to address the maximization bias in the form of a "self-correcting algorithm" for approximating the maximum of an expected value. Our method balances the overestimation of the single estimator used in conventional Q-learning and the underestimation of the double estimator used in Double Q-learning. Applying this strategy to Q-learning results in Self-correcting Q-learning. We show theoretically that this new algorithm enjoys the same convergence guarantees as Q-learning while being more accurate. Empirically, it performs better than Double Q-learning in domains with rewards of high variance, and it even attains faster convergence than Q-learning in domains with rewards of zero or low variance. These advantages transfer to a Deep Q Network implementation that we call Self-correcting DQN and which outperforms regular DQN and Double DQN on several tasks in the Atari 2600 domain.
Graph convolutional neural networks have recently shown great potential for the task of zero-shot learning. These models are highly sample efficient as related concepts in the graph structure share statistical strength allowing generalization to new classes when faced with a lack of data. However, multi-layer architectures, which are required to propagate knowledge to distant nodes in the graph, dilute the knowledge by performing extensive Laplacian smoothing at each layer and thereby consequently decrease performance. In order to still enjoy the benefit brought by the graph structure while preventing dilution of knowledge from distant nodes, we propose a Dense Graph Propagation (DGP) module with carefully designed direct links among distant nodes. DGP allows us to exploit the hierarchical graph structure of the knowledge graph through additional connections. These connections are added based on a node's relationship to its ancestors and descendants. A weighting scheme is further used to weigh their contribution depending on the distance to the node to improve information propagation in the graph. Combined with finetuning of the representations in a two-stage training approach our method outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot learning approaches.
Collaborative filtering often suffers from sparsity and cold start problems in real recommendation scenarios, therefore, researchers and engineers usually use side information to address the issues and improve the performance of recommender systems. In this paper, we consider knowledge graphs as the source of side information. We propose MKR, a Multi-task feature learning approach for Knowledge graph enhanced Recommendation. MKR is a deep end-to-end framework that utilizes knowledge graph embedding task to assist recommendation task. The two tasks are associated by cross&compress units, which automatically share latent features and learn high-order interactions between items in recommender systems and entities in the knowledge graph. We prove that cross&compress units have sufficient capability of polynomial approximation, and show that MKR is a generalized framework over several representative methods of recommender systems and multi-task learning. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that MKR achieves substantial gains in movie, book, music, and news recommendation, over state-of-the-art baselines. MKR is also shown to be able to maintain a decent performance even if user-item interactions are sparse.