Frozen models trained to mimic static datasets can never improve their performance. Models that can employ internet-retrieval for up-to-date information and obtain feedback from humans during deployment provide the promise of both adapting to new information, and improving their performance. In this work we study how to improve internet-driven conversational skills in such a learning framework. We collect deployment data, which we make publicly available, of human interactions, and collect various types of human feedback – including binary quality measurements, free-form text feedback, and fine-grained reasons for failure. We then study various algorithms for improving from such feedback, including standard supervised learning, rejection sampling, model-guiding and reward-based learning, in order to make recommendations on which type of feed- back and algorithms work best. We find the recently introduced DIRECTOR model (Arora et al., 2022) shows significant improvements over other existing approaches.

Current language models achieve low perplexity but their resulting generations still suffer from toxic responses, repetitiveness, and contradictions. The standard language modeling setup fails to address these issues. In this paper, we introduce a new architecture, Director, that consists of a unified generator-classifier with both a language modeling and a classification head for each output token. Training is conducted jointly using both standard language modeling data, and data labeled with desirable and undesirable sequences. Experiments in several settings show that the model has competitive training and decoding speed compared to standard language models while yielding superior results, avoiding undesirable behaviors while maintaining generation quality. It also outperforms existing model guiding approaches in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. Our code is made publicly available.

Current language generation models suffer from issues such as repetition, incoherence, and hallucinations. An often-repeated hypothesis for this brittleness of generation models is that it is caused by the training and the generation procedure mismatch, also referred to as exposure bias. In this paper, we verify this hypothesis by analyzing exposure bias from an imitation learning perspective. We show that exposure bias leads to an accumulation of errors during generation, analyze why perplexity fails to capture this accumulation of errors, and empirically show that this accumulation results in poor generation quality.

Humans can learn to operate the user interface (UI) of an application by reading an instruction manual or how-to guide. Along with text, these resources include visual content such as UI screenshots and images of application icons referenced in the text. We explore how to leverage this data to learn generic visio-linguistic representations of UI screens and their components. These representations are useful in many real applications, such as accessibility, voice navigation, and task automation. Prior UI representation models rely on UI metadata (UI trees and accessibility labels), which is often missing, incompletely defined, or not accessible. We avoid such a dependency, and propose Lexi, a pre-trained vision and language model designed to handle the unique features of UI screens, including their text richness and context sensitivity. To train Lexi we curate the UICaption dataset consisting of 114k UI images paired with descriptions of their functionality. We evaluate Lexi on four tasks: UI action entailment, instruction-based UI image retrieval, grounding referring expressions, and UI entity recognition.

In this paper, we propose LexSub, a novel approach towards unifying lexical and distributional semantics. We inject knowledge about lexical-semantic relations into distributional word embeddings by defining subspaces of the distributional vector space in which a lexical relation should hold. Our framework can handle symmetric attract and repel relations (e.g., synonymy and antonymy, respectively), as well as asymmetric relations (e.g., hypernymy and meronomy). In a suite of intrinsic benchmarks, we show that our model outperforms previous approaches on relatedness tasks and on hypernymy classification and detection, while being competitive on word similarity tasks. It also outperforms previous systems on extrinsic classification tasks that benefit from exploiting lexical relational cues. We perform a series of analyses to understand the behaviors of our model.1Code available at https://github.com/aishikchakraborty/LexSub.