Search Beyond Queries: Training Smaller Language Models for Web Interactions via Reinforcement Learning

Traditional search systems focus on query formulation for effective results but face challenges in scenarios such as product searches where crucial product details (e.g., size, color) remain concealed until users visit specific product pages. This highlights the need for intelligent web navigation agents capable of formulating queries and navigating web pages according to users' high-level intents. In response to this need, this work introduces a Grounded Language Agent for Intelligent Web Interactions, called GLAINTEL. Drawing upon advancements in language modeling and reinforcement learning, GLAINTEL investigates the efficacy of transformer-based models in enhancing the search capabilities of interactive web environments. Given the dynamic action space for each state in web navigation, GLAINTEL employs the Flan-T5 architecture and incorporates language modeling and value estimation heads. This work focuses on training smaller language models as agents across various scenarios, systematically evaluating the impact of human demonstrations on the training process. Specifically, we investigate scenarios where no human demonstrations are available and subsequently assess the effective utilization of such demonstrations. We also explore unsupervised domain adaptation for situations where demonstrations are confined to a specific domain. Experimental evaluations across diverse setups demonstrate the effectiveness of training agents in unsupervised settings, outperforming in-context learning-based approaches that employ larger models with up to 540 billion parameters. Surprisingly, behavioral cloning-based methods that straightforwardly use human demonstrations do not outperform unsupervised learning-based methods. Additionally, combining human demonstrations with Reinforcement Learning-based training yields results comparable to models utilizing GPT-4.

Zero-Shot Generalizable End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog System using Context Summarization and Domain Schema

Task-oriented dialog systems empower users to accomplish their goals by facilitating intuitive and expressive natural language interactions. State-of-the-art approaches in task-oriented dialog systems formulate the problem as a conditional sequence generation task and fine-tune pre-trained causal language models in the supervised setting. This requires labeled training data for each new domain or task, and acquiring such data is prohibitively laborious and expensive, thus making it a bottleneck for scaling systems to a wide range of domains. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel Zero-Shot generalizable end-to-end Task-oriented Dialog system, ZS-ToD, that leverages domain schemas to allow for robust generalization to unseen domains and exploits effective summarization of the dialog history. We employ GPT-2 as a backbone model and introduce a two-step training process where the goal of the first step is to learn the general structure of the dialog data and the second step optimizes the response generation as well as intermediate outputs, such as dialog state and system actions. As opposed to state-of-the-art systems that are trained to fulfill certain intents in the given domains and memorize task-specific conversational patterns, ZS-ToD learns generic task-completion skills by comprehending domain semantics via domain schemas and generalizing to unseen domains seamlessly. We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation on SGD and SGD-X datasets that span up to 20 unique domains and ZS-ToD outperforms state-of-the-art systems on key metrics, with an improvement of +17% on joint goal accuracy and +5 on inform. Additionally, we present a detailed ablation study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed components and training mechanism

Toward Open-domain Slot Filling via Self-supervised Co-training

Slot filling is one of the critical tasks in modern conversational systems. The majority of existing literature employs supervised learning methods, which require labeled training data for each new domain. Zero-shot learning and weak supervision approaches, among others, have shown promise as alternatives to manual labeling. Nonetheless, these learning paradigms are significantly inferior to supervised learning approaches in terms of performance. To minimize this performance gap and demonstrate the possibility of open-domain slot filling, we propose a Self-supervised Co-training framework, called SCot, that requires zero in-domain manually labeled training examples and works in three phases. Phase one acquires two sets of complementary pseudo labels automatically. Phase two leverages the power of the pre-trained language model BERT, by adapting it for the slot filling task using these sets of pseudo labels. In phase three, we introduce a self-supervised cotraining mechanism, where both models automatically select highconfidence soft labels to further improve the performance of the other in an iterative fashion. Our thorough evaluations show that SCot outperforms state-of-the-art models by 45.57% and 37.56% on SGD and MultiWoZ datasets, respectively. Moreover, our proposed framework SCot achieves comparable performance when compared to state-of-the-art fully supervised models.

Personalizing Task-oriented Dialog Systems via Zero-shot Generalizable Reward Function

Task-oriented dialog systems enable users to accomplish tasks using natural language. State-of-the-art systems respond to users in the same way regardless of their personalities, although personalizing dialogues can lead to higher levels of adoption and better user experiences. Building personalized dialog systems is an important, yet challenging endeavor and only a handful of works took on the challenge. Most existing works rely on supervised learning approaches and require laborious and expensive labeled training data for each user profile. Additionally, collecting and labeling data for each user profile is virtually impossible. In this work, we propose a novel framework, P-ToD, to personalize task-oriented dialog systems capable of adapting to a wide range of user profiles in an unsupervised fashion using a zero-shot generalizable reward function. P-ToD uses a pre-trained GPT-2 as a backbone model and works in three phases. Phase one performs task-specific training. Phase two kicks off unsupervised personalization by leveraging the proximal policy optimization algorithm that performs policy gradients guided by the zero-shot generalizable reward function. Our novel reward function can quantify the quality of the generated responses even for unseen profiles. The optional final phase fine-tunes the personalized model using a few labeled training examples. We conduct extensive experimental analysis using the personalized bAbI dialogue benchmark for five tasks and up to 180 diverse user profiles. The experimental results demonstrate that P-ToD, even when it had access to zero labeled examples, outperforms state-of-the-art supervised personalization models and achieves competitive performance on BLEU and ROUGE metrics when compared to a strong fully-supervised GPT-2 baseline

MobileRec: A Large-Scale Dataset for Mobile Apps Recommendation

Recommender systems have become ubiquitous in our digital lives, from recommending products on e-commerce websites to suggesting movies and music on streaming platforms. Existing recommendation datasets, such as Amazon Product Reviews and MovieLens, greatly facilitated the research and development of recommender systems in their respective domains. While the number of mobile users and applications (aka apps) has increased exponentially over the past decade, research in mobile app recommender systems has been significantly constrained, primarily due to the lack of high-quality benchmark datasets, as opposed to recommendations for products, movies, and news. To facilitate research for app recommendation systems, we introduce a large-scale dataset, called MobileRec. We constructed MobileRec from users' activity on the Google play store. MobileRec contains 19.3 million user interactions (i.e., user reviews on apps) with over 10K unique apps across 48 categories. MobileRec records the sequential activity of a total of 0.7 million distinct users. Each of these users has interacted with no fewer than five distinct apps, which stands in contrast to previous datasets on mobile apps that recorded only a single interaction per user. Furthermore, MobileRec presents users' ratings as well as sentiments on installed apps, and each app contains rich metadata such as app name, category, description, and overall rating, among others. We demonstrate that MobileRec can serve as an excellent testbed for app recommendation through a comparative study of several state-of-the-art recommendation approaches. The quantitative results can act as a baseline for other researchers to compare their results against. The MobileRec dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/recmeapp/mobilerec.

Effect of Balancing Data Using Synthetic Data on the Performance of Machine Learning Classifiers for Intrusion Detection in Computer Networks

Attacks on computer networks have increased significantly in recent days, due in part to the availability of sophisticated tools for launching such attacks as well as thriving underground cyber-crime economy to support it. Over the past several years, researchers in academia and industry used machine learning (ML) techniques to design and implement Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSes) for computer networks. Many of these researchers used datasets collected by various organizations to train ML models for predicting intrusions. In many of the datasets used in such systems, data are imbalanced (i.e., not all classes have equal amount of samples). With unbalanced data, the predictive models developed using ML algorithms may produce unsatisfactory classifiers which would affect accuracy in predicting intrusions. Traditionally, researchers used over-sampling and under-sampling for balancing data in datasets to overcome this problem. In this work, in addition to over-sampling, we also use a synthetic data generation method, called Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CTGAN), to balance data and study their effect on various ML classifiers. To the best of our knowledge, no one else has used CTGAN to generate synthetic samples to balance intrusion detection datasets. Based on extensive experiments using a widely used dataset NSL-KDD, we found that training ML models on dataset balanced with synthetic samples generated by CTGAN increased prediction accuracy by up to $8\%$, compared to training the same ML models over unbalanced data. Our experiments also show that the accuracy of some ML models trained over data balanced with random over-sampling decline compared to the same ML models trained over unbalanced data.

Generalized Zero-shot Intent Detection via Commonsense Knowledge

Identifying user intents from natural language utterances is a crucial step in conversational systems that has been extensively studied as a supervised classification problem. However, in practice, new intents emerge after deploying an intent detection model. Thus, these models should seamlessly adapt and classify utterances with both seen and unseen intents -- unseen intents emerge after deployment and they do not have training data. The few existing models that target this setting rely heavily on the scarcely available training data and overfit to seen intents data, resulting in a bias to misclassify utterances with unseen intents into seen ones. We propose RIDE: an intent detection model that leverages commonsense knowledge in an unsupervised fashion to overcome the issue of training data scarcity. RIDE computes robust and generalizable relationship meta-features that capture deep semantic relationships between utterances and intent labels; these features are computed by considering how the concepts in an utterance are linked to those in an intent label via commonsense knowledge. Our extensive experimental analysis on three widely-used intent detection benchmarks shows that relationship meta-features significantly increase the accuracy of detecting both seen and unseen intents and that RIDE outperforms the state-of-the-art model for unseen intents.

Linguistically-Enriched and Context-Aware Zero-shot Slot Filling

Slot filling is identifying contiguous spans of words in an utterance that correspond to certain parameters (i.e., slots) of a user request/query. Slot filling is one of the most important challenges in modern task-oriented dialog systems. Supervised learning approaches have proven effective at tackling this challenge, but they need a significant amount of labeled training data in a given domain. However, new domains (i.e., unseen in training) may emerge after deployment. Thus, it is imperative that these models seamlessly adapt and fill slots from both seen and unseen domains -- unseen domains contain unseen slot types with no training data, and even seen slots in unseen domains are typically presented in different contexts. This setting is commonly referred to as zero-shot slot filling. Little work has focused on this setting, with limited experimental evaluation. Existing models that mainly rely on context-independent embedding-based similarity measures fail to detect slot values in unseen domains or do so only partially. We propose a new zero-shot slot filling neural model, LEONA, which works in three steps. Step one acquires domain-oblivious, context-aware representations of the utterance word by exploiting (a) linguistic features; (b) named entity recognition cues; (c) contextual embeddings from pre-trained language models. Step two fine-tunes these rich representations and produces slot-independent tags for each word. Step three exploits generalizable context-aware utterance-slot similarity features at the word level, uses slot-independent tags, and contextualizes them to produce slot-specific predictions for each word. Our thorough evaluation on four diverse public datasets demonstrates that our approach consistently outperforms the SOTA models by 17.52%, 22.15%, 17.42%, and 17.95% on average for unseen domains on SNIPS, ATIS, MultiWOZ, and SGD datasets, respectively.

AARSynth: App-Aware Response Synthesis for User Reviews

Responding to user reviews promptly and satisfactorily improves application ratings, which is key to application popularity and success. The proliferation of such reviews makes it virtually impossible for developers to keep up with responding manually. To address this challenge, recent work has shown the possibility of automatic response generation. However, because the training review-response pairs are aggregated from many different apps, it remains challenging for such models to generate app-specific responses, which, on the other hand, are often desirable as apps have different features and concerns. Solving the challenge by simply building a model per app (i.e., training with review-response pairs of a single app) may be insufficient because individual apps have limited review-response pairs, and such pairs typically lack the relevant information needed to respond to a new review. To enable app-specific response generation, this work proposes AARSynth: an app-aware response synthesis system. The key idea behind AARSynth is to augment the seq2seq model with information specific to a given app. Given a new user review, it first retrieves the top-K most relevant app reviews and the most relevant snippet from the app description. The retrieved information and the new user review are then fed into a fused machine learning model that integrates the seq2seq model with a machine reading comprehension model. The latter helps digest the retrieved reviews and app description. Finally, the fused model generates a response that is customized to the given app. We evaluated AARSynth using a large corpus of reviews and responses from Google Play. The results show that AARSynth outperforms the state-of-the-art system by 22.2% on BLEU-4 score. Furthermore, our human study shows that AARSynth produces a statistically significant improvement in response quality compared to the state-of-the-art system.