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.

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.

Proactive Prioritization of App Issues via Contrastive Learning

Mobile app stores produce a tremendous amount of data in the form of user reviews, which is a huge source of user requirements and sentiments; such reviews allow app developers to proactively address issues in their apps. However, only a small number of reviews capture common issues and sentiments which creates a need for automatically identifying prominent reviews. Unfortunately, most existing work in text ranking and popularity prediction focuses on social contexts where other signals are available, which renders such works ineffective in the context of app reviews. In this work, we propose a new framework, PPrior, that enables proactive prioritization of app issues through identifying prominent reviews (ones predicted to receive a large number of votes in a given time window). Predicting highly-voted reviews is challenging given that, unlike social posts, social network features of users are not available. Moreover, there is an issue of class imbalance, since a large number of user reviews receive little to no votes. PPrior employs a pre-trained T5 model and works in three phases. Phase one adapts the pre-trained T5 model to the user reviews data in a self-supervised fashion. In phase two, we leverage contrastive training to learn a generic and task-independent representation of user reviews. Phase three uses radius neighbors classifier t o m ake t he final predictions. This phase also uses FAISS index for scalability and efficient search. To conduct extensive experiments, we acquired a large dataset of over 2.1 million user reviews from Google Play. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework when compared against several state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, the accuracy of PPrior in predicting prominent reviews is comparable to that of experienced app developers.