For summarization, human preferences is critical to tame outputs of the summarizer in favor of human interests, as ground-truth summaries are scarce and ambiguous. Practical settings require dynamic exchanges between humans and AI agents wherein feedback is provided in an online manner, a few at a time. In this paper, we introduce a new framework to train summarization models with preference feedback interactively. By properly leveraging offline data and a novel reward model, we improve the performance regarding ROUGE scores and sample-efficiency. Our experiments on three various datasets confirm the benefit of the proposed framework in active, few-shot and online settings of preference learning.

Neural module networks (NMN) have achieved success in image-grounded tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA) on synthetic images. However, very limited work on NMN has been studied in the video-grounded dialogue tasks. These tasks extend the complexity of traditional visual tasks with the additional visual temporal variance and language cross-turn dependencies. Motivated by recent NMN approaches on image-grounded tasks, we introduce Video-grounded Neural Module Network (VGNMN) to model the information retrieval process in video-grounded language tasks as a pipeline of neural modules. VGNMN first decomposes all language components in dialogues to explicitly resolve any entity references and detect corresponding action-based inputs from the question. The detected entities and actions are used as parameters to instantiate neural module networks and extract visual cues from the video. Our experiments show that VGNMN can achieve promising performance on a challenging video-grounded dialogue benchmark as well as a video QA benchmark.

Designed for tracking user goals in dialogues, a dialogue state tracker is an essential component in a dialogue system. However, the research of dialogue state tracking has largely been limited to unimodality, in which slots and slot values are limited by knowledge domains (e.g. restaurant domain with slots of restaurant name and price range) and are defined by specific database schema. In this paper, we propose to extend the definition of dialogue state tracking to multimodality. Specifically, we introduce a novel dialogue state tracking task to track the information of visual objects that are mentioned in video-grounded dialogues. Each new dialogue utterance may introduce a new video segment, new visual objects, or new object attributes and a state tracker is required to update these information slots accordingly. We created a new synthetic benchmark and designed a novel baseline, Video-Dialogue Transformer Network (VDTN), for this task. VDTN combines both object-level features and segment-level features and learns contextual dependencies between videos and dialogues to generate multimodal dialogue states. We optimized VDTN for a state generation task as well as a self-supervised video understanding task which recovers video segment or object representations. Finally, we trained VDTN to use the decoded states in a response prediction task. Together with comprehensive ablation and qualitative analysis, we discovered interesting insights towards building more capable multimodal dialogue systems.

A video-grounded dialogue system is required to understand both dialogue, which contains semantic dependencies from turn to turn, and video, which contains visual cues of spatial and temporal scene variations. Building such dialogue systems is a challenging problem, involving various reasoning types on both visual and language inputs. Existing benchmarks do not have enough annotations to thoroughly analyze dialogue systems and understand their capabilities and limitations in isolation. These benchmarks are also not explicitly designed to minimise biases that models can exploit without actual reasoning. To address these limitations, in this paper, we present DVD, a Diagnostic Dataset for Video-grounded Dialogue. The dataset is designed to contain minimal biases and has detailed annotations for the different types of reasoning over the spatio-temporal space of video. Dialogues are synthesized over multiple question turns, each of which is injected with a set of cross-turn semantic relationships. We use DVD to analyze existing approaches, providing interesting insights into their abilities and limitations. In total, DVD is built from 11k CATER synthetic videos and contains 10 instances of 10-round dialogues for each video, resulting in more than 100k dialogues and 1M question-answer pairs. Our code and dataset are publicly available.

Pre-trained language models have shown remarkable success in improving various downstream NLP tasks due to their ability to capture dependencies in textual data and generate natural responses. In this paper, we leverage the power of pre-trained language models for improving video-grounded dialogue, which is very challenging and involves complex features of different dynamics: (1) Video features which can extend across both spatial and temporal dimensions; and (2) Dialogue features which involve semantic dependencies over multiple dialogue turns. We propose a framework by extending GPT-2 models to tackle these challenges by formulating video-grounded dialogue tasks as a sequence-to-sequence task, combining both visual and textual representation into a structured sequence, and fine-tuning a large pre-trained GPT-2 network. Our framework allows fine-tuning language models to capture dependencies across multiple modalities over different levels of information: spatio-temporal level in video and token-sentence level in dialogue context. We achieve promising improvement on the Audio-Visual Scene-Aware Dialogues (AVSD) benchmark from DSTC7, which supports a potential direction in this line of research.

Video-grounded dialogues are very challenging due to (i) the complexity of videos which contain both spatial and temporal variations, and (ii) the complexity of user utterances which query different segments and/or different objects in videos over multiple dialogue turns. However, existing approaches to video-grounded dialogues often focus on superficial temporal-level visual cues, but neglect more fine-grained spatial signals from videos. To address this drawback, we proposed Bi-directional Spatio-Temporal Learning (BiST), a vision-language neural framework for high-resolution queries in videos based on textual cues. Specifically, our approach not only exploits both spatial and temporal-level information, but also learns dynamic information diffusion between the two feature spaces through spatial-to-temporal and temporal-to-spatial reasoning. The bidirectional strategy aims to tackle the evolving semantics of user queries in the dialogue setting. The retrieved visual cues are used as contextual information to construct relevant responses to the users. Our empirical results and comprehensive qualitative analysis show that BiST achieves competitive performance and generates reasonable responses on a large-scale AVSD benchmark. We also adapt our BiST models to the Video QA setting, and substantially outperform prior approaches on the TGIF-QA benchmark.

Building an end-to-end conversational agent for multi-domain task-oriented dialogues has been an open challenge for two main reasons. First, tracking dialogue states of multiple domains is non-trivial as the dialogue agent must obtain complete states from all relevant domains, some of which might have shared slots among domains as well as unique slots specifically for one domain only. Second, the dialogue agent must also process various types of information across domains, including dialogue context, dialogue states, and database, to generate natural responses to users. Unlike the existing approaches that are often designed to train each module separately, we propose “UniConv” - a novel unified neural architecture for end-to-end conversational systems in multi-domain task-oriented dialogues, which is designed to jointly train (i) a Bi-level State Tracker which tracks dialogue states by learning signals at both slot and domain level independently, and (ii) a Joint Dialogue Act and Response Generator which incorporates information from various input components and models dialogue acts and target responses simultaneously. We conduct comprehensive experiments in dialogue state tracking, context-to-text, and end-to-end settings on the MultiWOZ2.1 benchmark, achieving superior performance over competitive baselines.

Developing Video-Grounded Dialogue Systems (VGDS), where a dialogue is conducted based on visual and audio aspects of a given video, is significantly more challenging than traditional image or text-grounded dialogue systems because (1) feature space of videos span across multiple picture frames, making it difficult to obtain semantic information; and (2) a dialogue agent must perceive and process information from different modalities (audio, video, caption, etc.) to obtain a comprehensive understanding. Most existing work is based on RNNs and sequence-to-sequence architectures, which are not very effective for capturing complex long-term dependencies (like in videos). To overcome this, we propose Multimodal Transformer Networks (MTN) to encode videos and incorporate information from different modalities. We also propose query-aware attention through an auto-encoder to extract query-aware features from non-text modalities. We develop a training procedure to simulate token-level decoding to improve the quality of generated responses during inference. We get state of the art performance on Dialogue System Technology Challenge 7 (DSTC7). Our model also generalizes to another multimodal visual-grounded dialogue task, and obtains promising performance.