United States

Dialogue policies play a crucial role in developing task-oriented dialogue systems, yet their development and maintenance are challenging and typically require substantial effort from experts in dialogue modeling. While in many situations, large amounts of conversational data are available for the task at hand, people lack an effective solution able to extract dialogue policies from this data. In this paper, we address this gap by first illustrating how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be instrumental in extracting dialogue policies from datasets, through the conversion of conversations into a unified intermediate representation consisting of canonical forms. We then propose a novel method for generating dialogue policies utilizing a controllable and interpretable graph-based methodology. By combining canonical forms across conversations into a flow network, we find that running graph traversal algorithms helps in extracting dialogue flows. These flows are a better representation of the underlying interactions than flows extracted by prompting LLMs. Our technique focuses on giving conversation designers greater control, offering a productivity tool to improve the process of developing dialogue policies.

EMNLP 2024

Unsupervised Extraction of Dialogue Policies from Conversations

action-localization

multimodal ai

representation learning

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

poster

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Food is a rich and varied dimension of cultural heritage, crucial to both individuals and social groups. To bridge the gap in the literature on the often-overlooked regional diversity in this domain, we introduce FoodieQA, a manually curated, fine-grained image-text dataset capturing the intricate features of food cultures across various regions in China. We evaluate vision--language Models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) on newly collected, unseen food images and corresponding questions. FoodieQA comprises three multiple-choice question-answering tasks where models need to answer questions based on multiple images, a single image, and text-only descriptions, respectively. While LLMs excel at text-based question answering, surpassing human accuracy, the open-sourced VLMs still fall short by 41% on multi-image and 21% on single-image VQA tasks, although closed-weights models perform closer to human levels (within 10%). Our findings highlight that understanding food and its cultural implications remains a challenging and under-explored direction.

FoodieQA: A Multimodal Dataset for Fine-Grained Understanding of Chinese Food Culture

Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) distinguishes itself from other semantic representation frameworks by its ability to model complex semantic and discourse phenomena through structural nesting and variable binding. While seq2seq models hold the state of the art on DRT parsing, their accuracy degrades with the complexity of the sentence, and they sometimes struggle to produce well-formed DRT representations. We introduce the AMS parser, a compositional, neurosymbolic semantic parser for DRT. It rests on a novel mechanism for predicting quantifier scope. We show that the AMS parser reliably produces well-formed outputs and performs well on DRT parsing, especially on complex sentences.

Scope-enhanced Compositional Semantic Parsing for DRT

We present substantial evidence demonstrating the benefits of integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with a Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit framework. Contextual bandits have been widely used in recommendation systems to generate personalized suggestions based on user-specific contexts. We show that LLMs, pre-trained on extensive corpora rich in human knowledge and preferences, can simulate human behaviours well enough to jump-start contextual multi-armed bandits to reduce online learning regret. We propose an initialization algorithm for contextual bandits by prompting LLMs to produce a pre-training dataset of approximate human preferences for the bandit. This significantly reduces online learning regret and data-gathering costs for training such models. Our approach is validated empirically through two sets of experiments with different bandit setups: one which utilizes LLMs to serve as an oracle and a real-world experiment utilizing data from a conjoint survey experiment.

Jump Starting Bandits with LLM-Generated Prior Knowledge

Prompt engineering is very important to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs). When dealing with complex issues, prompt engineers tend to distill multiple patterns from examples and inject relevant solutions to optimize the prompts, achieving satisfying results. However, existing automatic prompt optimization techniques are only limited to producing single flow instructions, struggling with handling diverse patterns. In this paper, we present AMPO, an automatic prompt optimization method that can iteratively develop a multi-branched prompt using failure cases as feedback. Our goal is to explore a novel way of structuring prompts with multi-branches to better handle multiple patterns in complex tasks, for which we introduce three modules: Pattern Recognition, Branch Adjustment, and Branch Pruning. In experiments across five tasks, AMPO consistently achieves the best results. Additionally, our approach demonstrates significant optimization efficiency due to our adoption of a minimal search strategy.

ATPO: Automatic Tree-Structured Prompt Optimization

Training question-answering QA and information retrieval systems for web queries require large, expensive datasets that are difficult to annotate and time-consuming to gather. Moreover, while natural datasets of information-seeking questions are often prone to ambiguity or ill-formed, there are troves of freely available, carefully crafted question datasets for many languages. Thus, we automatically generate shorter, information-seeking questions, resembling web queries in the style of the Natural Questions (NQ) dataset from longer trivia data. Training a QA system on these transformed questions is a viable strategy for alternating to more expensive training setups showing the F1 score difference of less than six points and contrasting the final systems.

You Make me Feel like a Natural Question: Training QA Systems on Transformed Trivia Questions

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), are known to enhance training efficiency in Large Language Models (LLMs). Due to the limited parameters of LoRA, recent studies seek to combine LoRA with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to boost performance across various tasks. However, inspired by the observed redundancy in traditional MoE structures, prior studies find that LoRA experts within the MoE architecture also exhibit redundancy, suggesting a need to vary the allocation of LoRA experts across different layers. In this paper, we leverage Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization (HT-SR) Theory to design a fine-grained allocation strategy. Our analysis reveals that the number of experts per layer correlates with layer training quality, which exhibits significant variability across layers. Based on this, we introduce AlphaLoRA, a theoretically principled and training-free method for allocating LoRA experts to reduce redundancy further. Experiments on three models across ten language processing and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that AlphaLoRA achieves comparable or superior performance over all baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/morelife2017/alphalora.

AlphaExpert: Assigning LoRA Experts Based on Layer Training Quality

Building socially-intelligent AI agents (Social-AI) is a multidisciplinary, multimodal research goal that involves creating agents that can sense, perceive, reason about, learn from, and respond to affect, behavior, and cognition of other agents (human or artificial). Progress towards Social-AI has accelerated in the past decade across several computing communities, including natural language processing, machine learning, robotics, human-machine interaction, computer vision, and speech. Natural language processing, in particular, has been prominent in Social-AI research, as language plays a key role in constructing the social world. In this position paper, we identify a set of underlying technical challenges and open questions for researchers across computing communities to advance Social-AI. We anchor our discussion in the context of social intelligence concepts and prior progress in Social-AI research.

Advancing Social Intelligence in AI Agents: Technical Challenges and Open Question

Learning from human feedback via proxy reward modeling has been studied to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values. However, achieving reliable training through that proxy reward model (RM) is not a trivial problem, and its behavior remained as a black-box. In this paper, we study the role of proxy rewards in the LLM alignment via `reverse reward engineering' by composing interpretable features as a white-box reward function. We aim to replicate the ground truth (gold) reward signal by achieving a monotonic relationship between the proxy and gold reward signals after training the model using the proxy reward in reinforcement learning (RL). Our findings indicate that successfully emulating the gold reward requires generating responses that are relevant with enough length to open-ended questions, while also ensuring response consistency in closed-ended questions. Furthermore, resulting models optimizing our devised white-box reward show competitive performances with strong open-source RMs in alignment benchmarks. We highlight its potential usage as a simple but strong reward baseline for the LLM alignment, not requiring explicit human feedback dataset and RM training.

Rethinking the Role of Proxy Rewards in Language Model Alignment

Knowledge graph–grounded dialog generation requires retrieving a dialog-relevant subgraph from the given knowledge base graph and integrating it with the dialog history. Previous works typically represent the graph using an external encoder, such as graph neural networks, and retrieve relevant triplets based on the similarity between single-vector representations of triplets and the dialog history. However, these external encoders fail to leverage the rich knowledge of pretrained language models, and the retrieval process is also suboptimal due to the information bottleneck caused by the single-vector abstraction of the dialog history. In this work, we propose Dialog generation with Generative Subgraph Retrieval (DialogGSR), which retrieves relevant knowledge subgraphs by directly generating their token sequences on top of language models. For effective generative subgraph retrieval, we introduce two key methods: (i) structure-aware knowledge graph linearization with self-supervised graph-specific tokens and (ii) graph-constrained decoding utilizing graph structural proximity-based entity informativeness scores for valid and relevant generative retrieval. DialogGSR achieves state-of-the-art performance in knowledge graph–grounded dialog generation, as demonstrated on OpenDialKG and KOMODIS datasets.

Generative Subgraph Retrieval for Knowledge Graph–Grounded Dialog Generation

The New York Times Connections game has emerged as a popular and challenging pursuit for word puzzle enthusiasts. We collect
438 Connections games to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) against expert and novice human
players. Our results show that even the best-performing LLM, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which has otherwise shown impressive reasoning abilities on a wide variety of benchmarks, can only fully solve 18% of the games. Novice and expert players perform better than Claude 3.5 Sonnet, with expert human players significantly outperforming it. We create a taxonomy of the knowledge types required to successfully cluster and categorize words in the Connections game. We find that while LLMs are decent at categorizing words based on semantic relations they struggle with other types of knowledge such as Encyclopedic Knowledge, Multiword Expressions or knowledge that combines both Word Form and Meaning. Our results establish the New York Times Connections game as a challenging benchmark for evaluating abstract reasoning capabilities in humans and AI systems.

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