Aiming to Know You Better Perhaps Makes Me a More Engaging Dialogue Partner

There have been several attempts to define a plausible motivation for a chit-chat dialogue agent that can lead to engaging conversations. In this work, we explore a new direction where the agent specifically focuses on discovering information about its interlocutor. We formalize this approach by defining a quantitative metric. We propose an algorithm for the agent to maximize it. We validate the idea with human evaluation where our system outperforms various baselines. We demonstrate that the metric indeed correlates with the human judgments of engagingness.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, CoNLL 201

Improving neural network representations using human similarity judgments

Deep neural networks have reached human-level performance on many computer vision tasks. However, the objectives used to train these networks enforce only that similar images are embedded at similar locations in the representation space, and do not directly constrain the global structure of the resulting space. Here, we explore the impact of supervising this global structure by linearly aligning it with human similarity judgments. We find that a naive approach leads to large changes in local representational structure that harm downstream performance. Thus, we propose a novel method that aligns the global structure of representations while preserving their local structure. This global-local transform considerably improves accuracy across a variety of few-shot learning and anomaly detection tasks. Our results indicate that human visual representations are globally organized in a way that facilitates learning from few examples, and incorporating this global structure into neural network representations improves performance on downstream tasks.Comment: Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 202