26,050 research outputs found
Evaluating Visual Conversational Agents via Cooperative Human-AI Games
As AI continues to advance, human-AI teams are inevitable. However, progress
in AI is routinely measured in isolation, without a human in the loop. It is
crucial to benchmark progress in AI, not just in isolation, but also in terms
of how it translates to helping humans perform certain tasks, i.e., the
performance of human-AI teams.
In this work, we design a cooperative game - GuessWhich - to measure human-AI
team performance in the specific context of the AI being a visual
conversational agent. GuessWhich involves live interaction between the human
and the AI. The AI, which we call ALICE, is provided an image which is unseen
by the human. Following a brief description of the image, the human questions
ALICE about this secret image to identify it from a fixed pool of images.
We measure performance of the human-ALICE team by the number of guesses it
takes the human to correctly identify the secret image after a fixed number of
dialog rounds with ALICE. We compare performance of the human-ALICE teams for
two versions of ALICE. Our human studies suggest a counterintuitive trend -
that while AI literature shows that one version outperforms the other when
paired with an AI questioner bot, we find that this improvement in AI-AI
performance does not translate to improved human-AI performance. This suggests
a mismatch between benchmarking of AI in isolation and in the context of
human-AI teams.Comment: HCOMP 201
Improving Search through A3C Reinforcement Learning based Conversational Agent
We develop a reinforcement learning based search assistant which can assist
users through a set of actions and sequence of interactions to enable them
realize their intent. Our approach caters to subjective search where the user
is seeking digital assets such as images which is fundamentally different from
the tasks which have objective and limited search modalities. Labeled
conversational data is generally not available in such search tasks and
training the agent through human interactions can be time consuming. We propose
a stochastic virtual user which impersonates a real user and can be used to
sample user behavior efficiently to train the agent which accelerates the
bootstrapping of the agent. We develop A3C algorithm based context preserving
architecture which enables the agent to provide contextual assistance to the
user. We compare the A3C agent with Q-learning and evaluate its performance on
average rewards and state values it obtains with the virtual user in validation
episodes. Our experiments show that the agent learns to achieve higher rewards
and better states.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure
Leveraging Crowdsourcing Data For Deep Active Learning - An Application: Learning Intents in Alexa
This paper presents a generic Bayesian framework that enables any deep
learning model to actively learn from targeted crowds. Our framework inherits
from recent advances in Bayesian deep learning, and extends existing work by
considering the targeted crowdsourcing approach, where multiple annotators with
unknown expertise contribute an uncontrolled amount (often limited) of
annotations. Our framework leverages the low-rank structure in annotations to
learn individual annotator expertise, which then helps to infer the true labels
from noisy and sparse annotations. It provides a unified Bayesian model to
simultaneously infer the true labels and train the deep learning model in order
to reach an optimal learning efficacy. Finally, our framework exploits the
uncertainty of the deep learning model during prediction as well as the
annotators' estimated expertise to minimize the number of required annotations
and annotators for optimally training the deep learning model.
We evaluate the effectiveness of our framework for intent classification in
Alexa (Amazon's personal assistant), using both synthetic and real-world
datasets. Experiments show that our framework can accurately learn annotator
expertise, infer true labels, and effectively reduce the amount of annotations
in model training as compared to state-of-the-art approaches. We further
discuss the potential of our proposed framework in bridging machine learning
and crowdsourcing towards improved human-in-the-loop systems
Crowdsourcing in Computer Vision
Computer vision systems require large amounts of manually annotated data to
properly learn challenging visual concepts. Crowdsourcing platforms offer an
inexpensive method to capture human knowledge and understanding, for a vast
number of visual perception tasks. In this survey, we describe the types of
annotations computer vision researchers have collected using crowdsourcing, and
how they have ensured that this data is of high quality while annotation effort
is minimized. We begin by discussing data collection on both classic (e.g.,
object recognition) and recent (e.g., visual story-telling) vision tasks. We
then summarize key design decisions for creating effective data collection
interfaces and workflows, and present strategies for intelligently selecting
the most important data instances to annotate. Finally, we conclude with some
thoughts on the future of crowdsourcing in computer vision.Comment: A 69-page meta review of the field, Foundations and Trends in
Computer Graphics and Vision, 201
Computing as the 4th “R”: a general education approach to computing education
Computing and computation are increasingly pervading our lives, careers, and societies - a change driving interest in computing education at the secondary level. But what should define a "general education" computing course at this level? That is, what would you want every person to know, assuming they never take another computing course? We identify possible outcomes for such a course through the experience of designing and implementing a general education university course utilizing best-practice pedagogies. Though we nominally taught programming, the design of the course led students to report gaining core, transferable skills and the confidence to employ them in their future. We discuss how various aspects of the course likely contributed to these gains. Finally, we encourage the community to embrace the challenge of teaching general education computing in contrast to and in conjunction with existing curricula designed primarily to interest students in the field
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