Psychology-guided Controllable Story Generation

Controllable story generation is a challenging task in the field of NLP, which has attracted increasing research interest in recent years. However, most existing works generate a whole story conditioned on the appointed keywords or emotions, ignoring the psychological changes of the protagonist. Inspired by psychology theories, we introduce global psychological state chains, which include the needs and emotions of the protagonists, to help a story generation system create more controllable and well-planned stories. In this paper, we propose a Psychology-guIded Controllable Story Generation System (PICS) to generate stories that adhere to the given leading context and desired psychological state chains for the protagonist. Specifically, psychological state trackers are employed to memorize the protagonist's local psychological states to capture their inner temporal relationships. In addition, psychological state planners are adopted to gain the protagonist's global psychological states for story planning. Eventually, a psychology controller is designed to integrate the local and global psychological states into the story context representation for composing psychology-guided stories. Automatic and manual evaluations demonstrate that PICS outperforms baselines, and each part of PICS shows effectiveness for writing stories with more consistent psychological changes.

FNeVR: Neural Volume Rendering for Face Animation

Face animation, one of the hottest topics in computer vision, has achieved a promising performance with the help of generative models. However, it remains a critical challenge to generate identity preserving and photo-realistic images due to the sophisticated motion deformation and complex facial detail modeling. To address these problems, we propose a Face Neural Volume Rendering (FNeVR) network to fully explore the potential of 2D motion warping and 3D volume rendering in a unified framework. In FNeVR, we design a 3D Face Volume Rendering (FVR) module to enhance the facial details for image rendering. Specifically, we first extract 3D information with a well-designed architecture, and then introduce an orthogonal adaptive ray-sampling module for efficient rendering. We also design a lightweight pose editor, enabling FNeVR to edit the facial pose in a simple yet effective way. Extensive experiments show that our FNeVR obtains the best overall quality and performance on widely used talking-head benchmarks.

COMMA: Modeling Relationship among Motivations, Emotions and Actions in Language-based Human Activities

Motivations, emotions, and actions are inter-related essential factors in human activities. While motivations and emotions have long been considered at the core of exploring how people take actions in human activities, there has been relatively little research supporting analyzing the relationship between human mental states and actions. We present the first study that investigates the viability of modeling motivations, emotions, and actions in language-based human activities, named COMMA (Cognitive Framework of Human Activities). Guided by COMMA, we define three natural language processing tasks (emotion understanding, motivation understanding and conditioned action generation), and build a challenging dataset Hail through automatically extracting samples from Story Commonsense. Experimental results on NLP applications prove the effectiveness of modeling the relationship. Furthermore, our models inspired by COMMA can better reveal the essential relationship among motivations, emotions and actions than existing methods.

Positively transitioned sentiment dialogue corpus for developing emotion-affective open-domain chatbots

In this paper, we describe a data enhancement method for developing Emily, an emotion-affective open-domain chatbot. The proposed method is based on explicitly modeling positively transitioned (PT) sentiment data from multi-turn dialogues. We construct a dialogue corpus with PT sentiment data and will release it for public use. By fine-tuning a pretrained dialogue model using the produced PT-enhanced dialogues, we are able to develop an emotion-affective open-domain chatbot exhibiting close-to-human performance in various emotion-affective metrics. We evaluate Emily against a few state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-domain chatbots and show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The corpus is made publicly available.

ASR Error Correction with Constrained Decoding on Operation Prediction

Error correction techniques remain effective to refine outputs from automatic speech recognition (ASR) models. Existing end-to-end error correction methods based on an encoder-decoder architecture process all tokens in the decoding phase, creating undesirable latency. In this paper, we propose an ASR error correction method utilizing the predictions of correction operations. More specifically, we construct a predictor between the encoder and the decoder to learn if a token should be kept ("K"), deleted ("D"), or changed ("C") to restrict decoding to only part of the input sequence embeddings (the "C" tokens) for fast inference. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in reducing the latency of the decoding process in ASR correction. It enhances the inference speed by at least three times (3.4 and 5.7 times) while maintaining the same level of accuracy (with WER reductions of 0.53% and 1.69% respectively) for our two proposed models compared to a solid encoder-decoder baseline. In the meantime, we produce and release a benchmark dataset contributing to the ASR error correction community to foster research along this line.

Rethinking Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning with Open-Set Hypothesis in Hyperbolic Geometry

Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) aims at incrementally learning novel classes from a few labeled samples by avoiding the overfitting and catastrophic forgetting simultaneously. The current protocol of FSCIL is built by mimicking the general class-incremental learning setting, while it is not totally appropriate due to the different data configuration, i.e., novel classes are all in the limited data regime. In this paper, we rethink the configuration of FSCIL with the open-set hypothesis by reserving the possibility in the first session for incoming categories. To assign better performances on both close-set and open-set recognition to the model, Hyperbolic Reciprocal Point Learning module (Hyper-RPL) is built on Reciprocal Point Learning (RPL) with hyperbolic neural networks. Besides, for learning novel categories from limited labeled data, we incorporate a hyperbolic metric learning (Hyper-Metric) module into the distillation-based framework to alleviate the overfitting issue and better handle the trade-off issue between the preservation of old knowledge and the acquisition of new knowledge. The comprehensive assessments of the proposed configuration and modules on three benchmark datasets are executed to validate the effectiveness concerning three evaluation indicators.

Do You Know My Emotion? Emotion-Aware Strategy Recognition towards a Persuasive Dialogue System

Persuasive strategy recognition task requires the system to recognize the adopted strategy of the persuader according to the conversation. However, previous methods mainly focus on the contextual information, little is known about incorporating the psychological feedback, i.e. emotion of the persuadee, to predict the strategy. In this paper, we propose a Cross-channel Feedback memOry Network (CFO-Net) to leverage the emotional feedback to iteratively measure the potential benefits of strategies and incorporate them into the contextual-aware dialogue information. Specifically, CFO-Net designs a feedback memory module, including strategy pool and feedback pool, to obtain emotion-aware strategy representation. The strategy pool aims to store historical strategies and the feedback pool is to obtain updated strategy weight based on feedback emotional information. Furthermore, a cross-channel fusion predictor is developed to make a mutual interaction between the emotion-aware strategy representation and the contextual-aware dialogue information for strategy recognition. Experimental results on \textsc{PersuasionForGood} confirm that the proposed model CFO-Net is effective to improve the performance on M-F1 from 61.74 to 65.41.

CogIntAc: Modeling the Relationships between Intention, Emotion and Action in Interactive Process from Cognitive Perspective

Intention, emotion and action are important psychological factors in human activities, which play an important role in the interaction between individuals. How to model the interaction process between individuals by analyzing the relationship of their intentions, emotions, and actions at the cognitive level is challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel cognitive framework of individual interaction. The core of the framework is that individuals achieve interaction through external action driven by their inner intention. Based on this idea, the interactions between individuals can be constructed by establishing relationships between the intention, emotion and action. Furthermore, we conduct analysis on the interaction between individuals and give a reasonable explanation for the predicting results. To verify the effectiveness of the framework, we reconstruct a dataset and propose three tasks as well as the corresponding baseline models, including action abduction, emotion prediction and action generation. The novel framework shows an interesting perspective on mimicking the mental state of human beings in cognitive science.

Bayesian Physics-Informed Extreme Learning Machine for Forward and Inverse PDE Problems with Noisy Data

Physics-informed extreme learning machine (PIELM) has recently received significant attention as a rapid version of physics-informed neural network (PINN) for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). The key characteristic is to fix the input layer weights with random values and use Moore-Penrose generalized inverse for the output layer weights. The framework is effective, but it easily suffers from overfitting noisy data and lacks uncertainty quantification for the solution under noise scenarios.To this end, we develop the Bayesian physics-informed extreme learning machine (BPIELM) to solve both forward and inverse linear PDE problems with noisy data in a unified framework. In our framework, a prior probability distribution is introduced in the output layer for extreme learning machine with physic laws and the Bayesian method is used to estimate the posterior of parameters. Besides, for inverse PDE problems, problem parameters considered as new output layer weights are unified in a framework with forward PDE problems. Finally, we demonstrate BPIELM considering both forward problems, including Poisson, advection, and diffusion equations, as well as inverse problems, where unknown problem parameters are estimated. The results show that, compared with PIELM, BPIELM quantifies uncertainty arising from noisy data and provides more accurate predictions. In addition, BPIELM is considerably cheaper than PINN in terms of the computational cost.

RANG: A Residual-based Adaptive Node Generation Method for Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Learning solutions of partial differential equations (PDEs) with Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) is an attractive alternative approach to traditional solvers due to its flexibility and ease of incorporating observed data. Despite the success of PINNs in accurately solving a wide variety of PDEs, the method still requires improvements in terms of computational efficiency. One possible improvement idea is to optimize the generation of training point sets. Residual-based adaptive sampling and quasi-uniform sampling approaches have been each applied to improve the training effects of PINNs, respectively. To benefit from both methods, we propose the Residual-based Adaptive Node Generation (RANG) approach for efficient training of PINNs, which is based on a variable density nodal distribution method for RBF-FD. The method is also enhanced by a memory mechanism to further improve training stability. We conduct experiments on three linear PDEs and three nonlinear PDEs with various node generation methods, through which the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method compared to the predominant uniform sampling approach is verified numerically.