Enhancing Large Language Model Induced Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems Through Look-Forward Motivated Goals

Recently, the development of large language models (LLMs) has been significantly enhanced the question answering and dialogue generation, and makes them become increasingly popular in current practical scenarios. While unlike the general dialogue system which emphasizes the semantic performance, the task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems aim to achieve the dialogue goal efficiently and successfully in multiple turns. Unfortunately, existing LLM-induced ToD systems lack the direct reward toward the final goal and do not take account of the dialogue proactivity that can strengthen the dialogue efficiency. To fill these gaps, we introduce the ProToD (Proactively Goal-Driven LLM-Induced ToD) approach, which anticipates the future dialogue actions and incorporates the goal-oriented reward signal to enhance ToD systems. Additionally, we present a novel evaluation method that assesses ToD systems based on goal-driven dialogue simulations. This method allows us to gauge user satisfaction, system efficiency and successful rate while overcoming the limitations of current Information and Success metrics. Empirical experiments conducted on the MultiWoZ 2.1 dataset demonstrate that our model can achieve superior performance using only 10% of the data compared to previous end-to-end fully supervised models. This improvement is accompanied by enhanced user satisfaction and efficiency.

IOMatch: Simplifying Open-Set Semi-Supervised Learning with Joint Inliers and Outliers Utilization

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) aims to leverage massive unlabeled data when labels are expensive to obtain. Unfortunately, in many real-world applications, the collected unlabeled data will inevitably contain unseen-class outliers not belonging to any of the labeled classes. To deal with the challenging open-set SSL task, the mainstream methods tend to first detect outliers and then filter them out. However, we observe a surprising fact that such approach could result in more severe performance degradation when labels are extremely scarce, as the unreliable outlier detector may wrongly exclude a considerable portion of valuable inliers. To tackle with this issue, we introduce a novel open-set SSL framework, IOMatch, which can jointly utilize inliers and outliers, even when it is difficult to distinguish exactly between them. Specifically, we propose to employ a multi-binary classifier in combination with the standard closed-set classifier for producing unified open-set classification targets, which regard all outliers as a single new class. By adopting these targets as open-set pseudo-labels, we optimize an open-set classifier with all unlabeled samples including both inliers and outliers. Extensive experiments have shown that IOMatch significantly outperforms the baseline methods across different benchmark datasets and different settings despite its remarkable simplicity. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/nukezil/IOMatch.

Do you really follow me? Adversarial Instructions for Evaluating the Robustness of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency in following instructions, making them valuable in customer-facing applications. However, their impressive capabilities also raise concerns about the amplification of risks posed by adversarial instructions, which can be injected into the model input by third-party attackers to manipulate LLMs' original instructions and prompt unintended actions and content. Therefore, it is crucial to understand LLMs' ability to accurately discern which instructions to follow to ensure their safe deployment in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a pioneering benchmark for automatically evaluating the robustness of LLMs against adversarial instructions. The objective of this benchmark is to quantify the extent to which LLMs are influenced by injected adversarial instructions and assess their ability to differentiate between these adversarial instructions and original user instructions. Through experiments conducted with state-of-the-art instruction-following LLMs, we uncover significant limitations in their robustness against adversarial instruction attacks. Furthermore, our findings indicate that prevalent instruction-tuned models are prone to being overfitted to follow any instruction phrase in the prompt without truly understanding which instructions should be followed. This highlights the need to address the challenge of training models to comprehend prompts instead of merely following instruction phrases and completing the text.

The mapKurator System: A Complete Pipeline for Extracting and Linking Text from Historical Maps

Scanned historical maps in libraries and archives are valuable repositories of geographic data that often do not exist elsewhere. Despite the potential of machine learning tools like the Google Vision APIs for automatically transcribing text from these maps into machine-readable formats, they do not work well with large-sized images (e.g., high-resolution scanned documents), cannot infer the relation between the recognized text and other datasets, and are challenging to integrate with post-processing tools. This paper introduces the mapKurator system, an end-to-end system integrating machine learning models with a comprehensive data processing pipeline. mapKurator empowers automated extraction, post-processing, and linkage of text labels from large numbers of large-dimension historical map scans. The output data, comprising bounding polygons and recognized text, is in the standard GeoJSON format, making it easily modifiable within Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The proposed system allows users to quickly generate valuable data from large numbers of historical maps for in-depth analysis of the map content and, in turn, encourages map findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR principles). We deployed the mapKurator system and enabled the processing of over 60,000 maps and over 100 million text/place names in the David Rumsey Historical Map collection. We also demonstrated a seamless integration of mapKurator with a collaborative web platform to enable accessing automated approaches for extracting and linking text labels from historical map scans and collective work to improve the results.

Learning Anchor Transformations for 3D Garment Animation

This paper proposes an anchor-based deformation model, namely AnchorDEF, to predict 3D garment animation from a body motion sequence. It deforms a garment mesh template by a mixture of rigid transformations with extra nonlinear displacements. A set of anchors around the mesh surface is introduced to guide the learning of rigid transformation matrices. Once the anchor transformations are found, per-vertex nonlinear displacements of the garment template can be regressed in a canonical space, which reduces the complexity of deformation space learning. By explicitly constraining the transformed anchors to satisfy the consistencies of position, normal and direction, the physical meaning of learned anchor transformations in space is guaranteed for better generalization. Furthermore, an adaptive anchor updating is proposed to optimize the anchor position by being aware of local mesh topology for learning representative anchor transformations. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on different types of garments demonstrate that AnchorDEF achieves the state-of-the-art performance on 3D garment deformation prediction in motion, especially for loose-fitting garments.

I2Edit: Towards Multi-turn Interactive Image Editing via Dialogue

Although there have been considerable research efforts on controllable facial image editing, the desirable interactive setting where the users can interact with the system to adjust their requirements dynamically hasn't been well explored. This paper focuses on facial image editing via dialogue and introduces a new benchmark dataset, Multi-turn Interactive Image Editing (I2Edit), for evaluating image editing quality and interaction ability in real-world interactive facial editing scenarios. The dataset is constructed upon the CelebA-HQ dataset with images annotated with a multi-turn dialogue that corresponds to the user editing requirements. I2Edit is challenging, as it needs to 1) track the dynamically updated user requirements and edit the images accordingly, as well as 2) generate the appropriate natural language response to communicate with the user. To address these challenges, we propose a framework consisting of a dialogue module and an image editing module. The former is for user edit requirements tracking and generating the corresponding indicative responses, while the latter edits the images conditioned on the tracked user edit requirements. In contrast to previous works that simply treat multi-turn interaction as a sequence of single-turn interactions, we extract the user edit requirements from the whole dialogue history instead of the current single turn. The extracted global user edit requirements enable us to directly edit the input raw image to avoid error accumulation and attribute forgetting issues. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on the I2Edit dataset demonstrate the advantage of our proposed framework over the previous single-turn methods. We believe our new dataset could serve as a valuable resource to push forward the exploration of real-world, complex interactive image editing. Code and data will be made public.

Guiding Large Language Models via Directional Stimulus Prompting

We introduce a new framework, Directional Stimulus Prompting, that uses a tuneable language model (LM) to provide guidance for the black-box frozen large language model (LLM) on downstream tasks. Unlike prior work that manually or automatically finds the optimal prompt for each task, we train a policy LM to generate discrete tokens as ``directional stimulus'' of each input, which is a hint/cue such as keywords of an article for summarization. The directional stimulus is then combined with the original input and fed into the LLM to guide its generation toward the desired target. The policy LM can be trained through 1) supervised learning from annotated data and 2) reinforcement learning from offline and online rewards to explore directional stimulus that better aligns LLMs with human preferences. This framework is flexibly applicable to various LMs and tasks. To verify its effectiveness, we apply our framework to summarization and dialogue response generation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that it can significantly improve LLMs' performance with a small collection of training data: a T5 (780M) trained with 2,000 samples from the CNN/Daily Mail dataset improves Codex (175B)'s performance by 7.2% in ROUGE-Avg scores; 500 dialogues boost the combined score by 52.5%, achieving comparable or even better performance than fully trained models on the MultiWOZ dataset.

Explanations from Large Language Models Make Small Reasoners Better

Integrating free-text explanations to in-context learning of large language models (LLM) is shown to elicit strong reasoning capabilities along with reasonable explanations. In this paper, we consider the problem of leveraging the explanations generated by LLM to improve the training of small reasoners, which are more favorable in real-production deployment due to their low cost. We systematically explore three explanation generation approaches from LLM and utilize a multi-task learning framework to facilitate small models to acquire strong reasoning power together with explanation generation capabilities. Experiments on multiple reasoning tasks show that our method can consistently and significantly outperform finetuning baselines across different settings, and even perform better than finetuning/prompting a 60x larger GPT-3 (175B) model by up to 9.5% in accuracy. As a side benefit, human evaluation further shows that our method can generate high-quality explanations to justify its predictions, moving towards the goal of explainable AI.