All-in-One Image-Grounded Conversational Agents

As single-task accuracy on individual language and image tasks has improved substantially in the last few years, the long-term goal of a generally skilled agent that can both see and talk becomes more feasible to explore. In this work, we focus on leveraging individual language and image tasks, along with resources that incorporate both vision and language towards that objective. We design an architecture that combines state-of-the-art Transformer and ResNeXt modules fed into a novel attentive multimodal module to produce a combined model trained on many tasks. We provide a thorough analysis of the components of the model, and transfer performance when training on one, some, or all of the tasks. Our final models provide a single system that obtains good results on all vision and language tasks considered, and improves the state-of-the-art in image-grounded conversational applications

Open-Domain Conversational Agents: Current Progress, Open Problems, and Future Directions

We present our view of what is necessary to build an engaging open-domain conversational agent: covering the qualities of such an agent, the pieces of the puzzle that have been built so far, and the gaping holes we have not filled yet. We present a biased view, focusing on work done by our own group, while citing related work in each area. In particular, we discuss in detail the properties of continual learning, providing engaging content, and being well-behaved -- and how to measure success in providing them. We end with a discussion of our experience and learnings, and our recommendations to the community