United States

The goal of building intelligent dialogue systems has largely been separately pursued under two paradigms: task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, which perform task-specific functions, and open-domain dialogue (ODD) systems, which focus on non-goal-oriented chitchat. The two dialogue modes can potentially be intertwined together seamlessly in the same conversation, as easily done by a friendly human assistant. Such ability is desirable in conversational agents, as the integration makes them more accessible and useful. Our paper addresses this problem of fusing TODs and ODDs in multi-turn dialogues. Based on the popular TOD dataset MultiWOZ, we build a new dataset FusedChat, by rewriting the existing TOD turns and adding new ODD turns. This procedure constructs conversation sessions containing exchanges from both dialogue modes. It features inter-mode contextual dependency, i.e., the dialogue turns from the two modes depend on each other. Rich dependency patterns such as co-reference and ellipsis are included. The new dataset, with 60k new human-written ODD turns and 5k re-written TOD turns, offers a benchmark to test a dialogue model&#39;s ability to perform inter-mode conversations. This is a more challenging task since the model has to determine the appropriate dialogue mode and generate the response based on the inter-mode context. However, such models would better mimic human-level conversation capabilities. We evaluate two baseline models on this task, including the classification-based two-stage models and the two-in-one fused models. We publicly release FusedChat and the baselines to propel future work on inter-mode dialogue systems.

AAAI 2022

Fusing task-oriented and open-domain dialogues in conversational agents

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

The goal of building intelligent dialogue systems has largely been separately pursued under two paradigms: task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, which perform task-specific functions, and open-domain dialogue (ODD) systems, which focus on non-goal-oriented chitchat. The two dialogue modes can potentially be intertwined together seamlessly in the same conversation, as easily done by a friendly human assistant. Such ability is desirable in conversational agents, as the integration makes them more accessible and useful. Our paper addresses this problem of fusing TODs and ODDs in multi-turn dialogues. Based on the popular TOD dataset MultiWOZ, we build a new dataset FusedChat, by rewriting the existing TOD turns and adding new ODD turns. This procedure constructs conversation sessions containing exchanges from both dialogue modes. It features inter-mode contextual dependency, i.e., the dialogue turns from the two modes depend on each other. Rich dependency patterns such as co-reference and ellipsis are included. The new dataset, with 60k new human-written ODD turns and 5k re-written TOD turns, offers a benchmark to test a dialogue model's ability to perform inter-mode conversations. This is a more challenging task since the model has to determine the appropriate dialogue mode and generate the response based on the inter-mode context. However, such models would better mimic human-level conversation capabilities. We evaluate two baseline models on this task, including the classification-based two-stage models and the two-in-one fused models. We publicly release FusedChat and the baselines to propel future work on inter-mode dialogue systems.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Advances in LiDAR sensors provide rich 3D data that supports 3D scene understanding. However, due to occlusion and signal miss, LiDAR point clouds are in practice 2.5D as they cover only partial underlying shapes, which poses a fundamental challenge to 3D perception. To tackle the challenge, we present a novel LiDAR-based 3D object detection model, dubbed Behind the Curtain Detector (BtcDet), which learns the object shape priors and estimates the complete object shapes that are partially occluded (curtained) in point clouds. BtcDet first identifies the regions that are affected by occlusion and signal miss. In these regions, our model predicts the probability of occupancy that indicates if a region contains object shapes and integrates this probability map with detection features and generates high-quality 3D proposals. Finally, the occupancy estimation is integrated into the proposal refinement module to generate accurate bounding boxes. Extensive experiments on the KITTI Dataset and the Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of BtcDet. Particularly for the 3D detection of both cars and cyclists on the KITTI benchmark, BtcDet surpasses all of the published state-of-the-art methods by remarkable margins. Code is released.

Behind the Curtain: Learning Occluded Shapes for 3D Object Detection

We present a novel non-iterative learnable method for partial-to-partial 3D shape registration.
The partial alignment task is extremely complex, as it jointly tries to match between points, and identify which points do not appear in the corresponding shape, causing the solution to be non-unique and ill-posed in most cases. 

Until now, two main methodologies have been suggested to solve this problem: sample a subset of points that are likely to have correspondences, or perform soft alignment between the point clouds and try to avoid a match to an occluded part. These heuristics work when the partiality is mild or when the transformation is small but fails for severe occlusions, or when outliers are present.
We present a unique approach named Confidence Guided Distance Network (CGD-net), where we fuse learnable similarity between point embeddings and spatial distance between point clouds, inducing an optimized solution for the overlapping points while ignoring parts that only appear in one of the shapes.
The point feature generation is done by a self-supervised architecture that repels far points to have different embeddings, therefore succeeds to align partial views of shapes, even with excessive internal symmetries, or acute rotations.
We compare our network to recently presented learning-based and axiomatic methods and report a fundamental boost in performance.

Deep Confidence Guided Distance for 3D Partial Shape Registration

The paper studies strategic abilities that rise from restrictions on the information sharing in multi-agent systems. The main technical result is a sound and complete logical system that describes the interplay between the knowledge and the strategic ability modalities.

Prevailing in the Dark: Information Walls in Strategic Games

Despite significant advancements of deep learning-based forgery detectors for distinguishing manipulated deepfake images, most detection approaches suffer from moderate to significant performance degradation with low-quality compressed deepfake images. Because of the limited information in low-quality images, detecting low-quality deepfake remains an important challenge. In this work, we apply frequency domain learning and optimal transport theory in knowledge distillation (KD) to specifically improve the detection of low-quality compressed deepfake images. We explore transfer learning capability in KD to enable a student network to learn discriminative features from low-quality images effectively. In particular, we propose the Attention-based Deepfake detection Distiller (ADD), which consists of two novel distillations: 1) frequency attention distillation that effectively retrieves the removed high-frequency components in the student network, and 2) multi-view attention distillation that creates multiple attention vectors by slicing the teacher's and student's tensors under different views to transfer the teacher tensor's distribution to the student more efficiently. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in detecting low-quality compressed deepfake images.

ADD: Frequency Attention and Multi-View based Knowledge Distillation to Detect Low-Quality Compressed Deepfake Images

In this work, we focus on a very practical problem: image segmentation under rain conditions. Image deraining is a classic low-level restoration task, while image segmentation is a typical high-level understanding task. Most of the existing methods intuitively employ the bottom-up paradigm by taking deraining as a preprocessing step for subsequent segmentation. However, our statistical analysis indicates that not only deraining would benefit segmentation (bottom-up), but also segmentation would further improve deraining performance (top-down) in turn. This motivates us to solve the rainy image segmentation task within a novel top-down and bottom-up unified paradigm, in which two sub-tasks are alternatively performed and collaborated with each other. Specifically, the bottom-up procedure yields both clearer images and rain-robust features from both image and feature domains, so as to ease the segmentation ambiguity caused by rain streaks. The top-down procedure adopts semantics to adaptively guide the restoration for different contents via a novel multi-path semantic attentive module (SAM). Thus the deraining and segmentation could boost the performance of each other cooperatively and progressively. Extensive experiments and ablations demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art on rainy image segmentation.

Close the Loop: A Unified Bottom-up and Top-down Paradigm for Joint Image Deraining and Segmentation

Semi-supervised video object segmentation (VOS) refers to segmenting the target object in remaining frames given its annotation in the first frame, which has been actively studied in recent years. The key challenge lies in finding effective ways to exploit the spatio-temporal context of past frames to help learn discriminative target representation of current frame. In this paper, we propose a novel Siamese network with a specifically designed interactive transformer, called SITVOS, to enable effective context propagation from historical to current frames. Technically, we use the transformer encoder and decoder to handle the past frames and current frame separately, i.e., the encoder encodes robust spatio-temporal context of target object from the past frames, while the decoder takes the feature embedding of current frame as the query to retrieve the target from the encoder output. To further enhance the target representation, a feature interaction module (FIM) is devised to promote the information flow between the encoder and decoder. Moreover, we employ the Siamese architecture to extract backbone features of both past and current frames, which enables feature reuse and is more efficient than existing methods. Experimental results on three challenging benchmarks validate the superiority of SITVOS over state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/LANMNG/SITVOS.

Siamese Network with Interactive Transformer for Video Object Segmentation

Although convolutional neural network based stereo matching architectures have made impressive achievements, there are still some limitations: 1) Convolutional Feature (CF) tends to capture appearance information, which is inadequate for accurate matching. 2) Due to the static filters, current convolution based disparity refinement modules often produce over-smooth results. In this paper, we present two schemes to address these issues, where some traditional wisdoms are integrated. Firstly, we introduce a pairwise feature for deep stereo matching networks, named LSP (Local Similarity Pattern). Through explicitly revealing the neighbor relationships, LSP contains rich structural information, which can be leveraged to aid CF for more discriminative feature description. Secondly, we design a dynamic self-reassembling refinement strategy and apply it to the cost distribution and the disparity map respectively. The former could be equipped with the unimodal distribution constraint to alleviate the over-smoothing problem, and the latter is more practical. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is demonstrated via incorporating them into two well-known basic architectures, GwcNet and GANet-deep. Experimental results on the SceneFlow and KITTI benchmarks show that our modules significantly improve the performance of the model. Code is available at https://github.com/SpadeLiu/Lac-GwcNet.

Local Similarity Pattern and Cost Self-Reassembling for Deep Stereo Matching Networks

Unified opinion role labeling (ORL) aims to detect all possible opinion structures of 'opinion-holder-target' in one shot, given a text. The existing transition-based unified method, unfortunately, is subject to longer opinion terms and fails to solve the term overlap issue. Current top performance has been achieved by employing the span-based graph model, which however still suffers from both high model complexity and insufficient interaction among opinions and roles. In this work, we investigate a novel solution by revisiting the transition architecture, and augmenting it with a pointer network (PointNet). The framework parses out all opinion structures in linear-time complexity, meanwhile breaks through the limitation of any length of terms with PointNet. To achieve the explicit opinion-role interactions, we further propose a unified dependency-opinion graph (UDOG), co-modeling the syntactic dependency structure and the partial opinion-role structure. We then devise a relation-centered graph aggregator (RCGA) to encode the multi-relational UDOG, where the resulting high-order representations are used to promote the predictions in the vanilla transition system. Our model achieves new state-of-the-art results on the MPQA benchmark. Analyses further demonstrate the superiority of our methods on both efficacy and efficiency.

Mastering the Explicit Opinion-Role Interaction: Syntax-Aided Neural Transition System for Unified Opinion Role Labeling

Invariance to diverse types of image corruption, such as noise, blurring, or colour shifts, is essential to establish robust models in computer vision. Data augmentation has been the major approach in improving the robustness against common corruptions. However, the samples produced by popular augmentation strategies deviate significantly from the underlying data manifold. As a result, performance is skewed toward certain types of corruption. To address this issue, we propose a multi-source vicinal transfer augmentation (VITA) method for generating diverse on-manifold samples. The proposed VITA consists of two complementary parts: tangent transfer and integration of multi-source vicinal samples. The tangent transfer creates initial augmented samples for improving corruption robustness. The integration employs a generative model to characterize the underlying manifold built by vicinal samples, facilitating the generation of on-manifold samples. Our proposed VITA significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art augmentation methods, demonstrated in extensive experiments on corruption benchmarks.

VITA: A Multi-Source Vicinal Transfer Augmentation Method for Out-of-Distribution Generalization

So far, named entity recognition (NER) has been involved with three major types, including flat, overlapped (aka. nested), and discontinuous NER, which have mostly been studied individually. Recently, a growing interest has been built for unified NER, tackling the above three jobs concurrently with one single model. Current best-performing methods mainly include span-based and sequence-to-sequence models, where unfortunately the former merely focus on boundary identification and the latter may suffer from exposure bias. In this work, we present a novel alternative by modeling the unified NER as word-word relation classification, namely W^2NER. The architecture resolves the kernel bottleneck of unified NER by effectively modeling the neighboring relations between entity words with Next-Neighboring-Word (NNW) and Tail-Head-Word-* (THW-*) relations. Based on the W^2NER scheme we develop a neural framework, in which the unified NER is modeled as a 2D grid of word pairs. We then propose multi-granularity 2D convolutions for better refining the grid representations. Finally, a co-predictor is used to sufficiently reason the word-word relations. We perform extensive experiments on 14 widely-used benchmark datasets for flat, overlapped, and discontinuous NER (8 English and 6 Chinese datasets), where our model beats all the current top-performing baselines, pushing the state-of-the-art performances of unified NER.

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