Hierarchical Generation of Human-Object Interactions with Diffusion Probabilistic Models

This paper presents a novel approach to generating the 3D motion of a human interacting with a target object, with a focus on solving the challenge of synthesizing long-range and diverse motions, which could not be fulfilled by existing auto-regressive models or path planning-based methods. We propose a hierarchical generation framework to solve this challenge. Specifically, our framework first generates a set of milestones and then synthesizes the motion along them. Therefore, the long-range motion generation could be reduced to synthesizing several short motion sequences guided by milestones. The experiments on the NSM, COUCH, and SAMP datasets show that our approach outperforms previous methods by a large margin in both quality and diversity. The source code is available on our project page https://zju3dv.github.io/hghoi.

Multi-view Hypergraph Contrastive Policy Learning for Conversational Recommendation

Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) aim to interactively acquire user preferences and accordingly recommend items to users. Accurately learning the dynamic user preferences is of crucial importance for CRS. Previous works learn the user preferences with pairwise relations from the interactive conversation and item knowledge, while largely ignoring the fact that factors for a relationship in CRS are multiplex. Specifically, the user likes/dislikes the items that satisfy some attributes (Like/Dislike view). Moreover social influence is another important factor that affects user preference towards the item (Social view), while is largely ignored by previous works in CRS. The user preferences from these three views are inherently different but also correlated as a whole. The user preferences from the same views should be more similar than that from different views. The user preferences from Like View should be similar to Social View while different from Dislike View. To this end, we propose a novel model, namely Multi-view Hypergraph Contrastive Policy Learning (MHCPL). Specifically, MHCPL timely chooses useful social information according to the interactive history and builds a dynamic hypergraph with three types of multiplex relations from different views. The multiplex relations in each view are successively connected according to their generation order.

Towards Hierarchical Policy Learning for Conversational Recommendation with Hypergraph-based Reinforcement Learning

Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) aim to timely and proactively acquire user dynamic preferred attributes through conversations for item recommendation. In each turn of CRS, there naturally have two decision-making processes with different roles that influence each other: 1) director, which is to select the follow-up option (i.e., ask or recommend) that is more effective for reducing the action space and acquiring user preferences; and 2) actor, which is to accordingly choose primitive actions (i.e., asked attribute or recommended item) that satisfy user preferences and give feedback to estimate the effectiveness of the director's option. However, existing methods heavily rely on a unified decision-making module or heuristic rules, while neglecting to distinguish the roles of different decision procedures, as well as the mutual influences between them. To address this, we propose a novel Director-Actor Hierarchical Conversational Recommender (DAHCR), where the director selects the most effective option, followed by the actor accordingly choosing primitive actions that satisfy user preferences. Specifically, we develop a dynamic hypergraph to model user preferences and introduce an intrinsic motivation to train from weak supervision over the director. Finally, to alleviate the bad effect of model bias on the mutual influence between the director and actor, we model the director's option by sampling from a categorical distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DAHCR outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

SLSG: Industrial Image Anomaly Detection by Learning Better Feature Embeddings and One-Class Classification

Industrial image anomaly detection under the setting of one-class classification has significant practical value. However, most existing models struggle to extract separable feature representations when performing feature embedding and struggle to build compact descriptions of normal features when performing one-class classification. One direct consequence of this is that most models perform poorly in detecting logical anomalies which violate contextual relationships. Focusing on more effective and comprehensive anomaly detection, we propose a network based on self-supervised learning and self-attentive graph convolution (SLSG) for anomaly detection. SLSG uses a generative pre-training network to assist the encoder in learning the embedding of normal patterns and the reasoning of position relationships. Subsequently, SLSG introduces the pseudo-prior knowledge of anomaly through simulated abnormal samples. By comparing the simulated anomalies, SLSG can better summarize the normal features and narrow down the hypersphere used for one-class classification. In addition, with the construction of a more general graph structure, SLSG comprehensively models the dense and sparse relationships among elements in the image, which further strengthens the detection of logical anomalies. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that SLSG achieves superior anomaly detection performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.

MemSeg: A semi-supervised method for image surface defect detection using differences and commonalities

Under the semi-supervised framework, we propose an end-to-end memory-based segmentation network (MemSeg) to detect surface defects on industrial products. Considering the small intra-class variance of products in the same production line, from the perspective of differences and commonalities, MemSeg introduces artificially simulated abnormal samples and memory samples to assist the learning of the network. In the training phase, MemSeg explicitly learns the potential differences between normal and simulated abnormal images to obtain a robust classification hyperplane. At the same time, inspired by the mechanism of human memory, MemSeg uses a memory pool to store the general patterns of normal samples. By comparing the similarities and differences between input samples and memory samples in the memory pool to give effective guesses about abnormal regions; In the inference phase, MemSeg directly determines the abnormal regions of the input image in an end-to-end manner. Through experimental validation, MemSeg achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on MVTec AD datasets with AUC scores of 99.56% and 98.84% at the image-level and pixel-level, respectively. In addition, MemSeg also has a significant advantage in inference speed benefiting from the end-to-end and straightforward network structure, which better meets the real-time requirement in industrial scenarios.

AdaCoach: A Virtual Coach for Training Customer Service Agents

With the development of online business, customer service agents gradually play a crucial role as an interface between the companies and their customers. Most companies spend a lot of time and effort on hiring and training customer service agents. To this end, we propose AdaCoach: A Virtual Coach for Training Customer Service Agents, to promote the ability of newly hired service agents before they get to work. AdaCoach is designed to simulate real customers who seek help and actively initiate the dialogue with the customer service agents. Besides, AdaCoach uses an automated dialogue evaluation model to score the performance of the customer agent in the training process, which can provide necessary assistance when the newly hired customer service agent encounters problems. We apply recent NLP technologies to ensure efficient run-time performance in the deployed system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system that trains the customer service agent through human-computer interaction. Until now, the system has already supported more than 500,000 simulation training and cultivated over 1000 qualified customer service agents.

Utterance Rewriting with Contrastive Learning in Multi-turn Dialogue

Context modeling plays a significant role in building multi-turn dialogue systems. In order to make full use of context information, systems can use Incomplete Utterance Rewriting(IUR) methods to simplify the multi-turn dialogue into single-turn by merging current utterance and context information into a self-contained utterance. However, previous approaches ignore the intent consistency between the original query and rewritten query. The detection of omitted or coreferred locations in the original query can be further improved. In this paper, we introduce contrastive learning and multi-task learning to jointly model the problem. Our method benefits from carefully designed self-supervised objectives, which act as auxiliary tasks to capture semantics at both sentence-level and token-level. The experiments show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on several public datasets.

A Dialogue-based Information Extraction System for Medical Insurance Assessment

In the Chinese medical insurance industry, the assessor's role is essential and requires significant efforts to converse with the claimant. This is a highly professional job that involves many parts, such as identifying personal information, collecting related evidence, and making a final insurance report. Due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the previous offline insurance assessment has to be conducted online. However, for the junior assessor often lacking practical experience, it is not easy to quickly handle such a complex online procedure, yet this is important as the insurance company needs to decide how much compensation the claimant should receive based on the assessor's feedback. In order to promote assessors' work efficiency and speed up the overall procedure, in this paper, we propose a dialogue-based information extraction system that integrates advanced NLP technologies for medical insurance assessment. With the assistance of our system, the average time cost of the procedure is reduced from 55 minutes to 35 minutes, and the total human resources cost is saved 30% compared with the previous offline procedure. Until now, the system has already served thousands of online claim cases.