Papers by Andrea Madotto
VScript: Controllable Script Generation with Visual Presentation (2022.aacl-demo)
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Ziwei Ji, Yan Xu, I-Tsun Cheng, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Rita Frieske, Etsuko Ishii, Min Zeng, Andrea Madotto, Pascale Fung
| Challenge: | Using a script generation system, scriptwriters can customize their scripts using video retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a controllable pipeline that generates complete scripts, including dialogues and scene descriptions, and presents visually using video retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines on both automatic and human evaluations, especially in genre control. |
Personalizing Dialogue Agents via Meta-Learning (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing personalized dialogue models use human designed persona descriptions to improve dialogue consistency. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) to personalized dialogue learning without using persona descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in terms of human-evaluated fluency and consistency on a persona-chat dataset. |
Mem2Seq: Effectively Incorporating Knowledge Bases into End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end task-oriented dialog systems often suffer from the challenge of incorporating knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel yet simple end-to-end differentiable model called memory-tosequence to address this issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained faster and achieve state-of-the-art performance on three different task-oriented dialog datasets. |
Neural Path Hunter: Reducing Hallucination in Dialogue Systems via Path Grounding (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Dialogue systems that generate factually incorrect responses are often unfitful and hallucinate factuality invalid. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to improve faithfulness and reduce hallucination of neural dialogue systems to known facts supplied by a Knowledge Graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves faithfulness and reduces hallucination of dialogue systems to known facts . it leverages a token-level fact critic to identify plausible sources of hallucinism . |
Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking via Cross-Task Transfer (2021.emnlp-main)
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Zhaojiang Lin, Bing Liu, Andrea Madotto, Seungwhan Moon, Zhenpeng Zhou, Paul Crook, Zhiguang Wang, Zhou Yu, Eunjoon Cho, Rajen Subba, Pascale Fung
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training a dialogue state tracking model require extensive annotated dialogue data. |
| Approach: | They propose to transfer cross-task knowledge from general question answering corpora to QA model that can handle zero-shot DST. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves existing zero-shot and few-shot results on MultiWoz and shows better generalization ability in unseen domains. |
MoEL: Mixture of Empathetic Listeners (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural network approaches for conversation models have shown to be successful in generating fluent and relevant responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel end-to-end approach for modeling empathy in dialogue systems by using Mixture of Empathetic Listeners (MoEL). |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms multitask training baseline in terms of empathy, relevance, and fluency. |
Continual Dialogue State Tracking via Example-Guided Question Answering (2023.emnlp-main)
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Hyundong Cho, Andrea Madotto, Zhaojiang Lin, Khyathi Chandu, Satwik Kottur, Jing Xu, Jonathan May, Chinnadhurai Sankar
| Challenge: | Dialogue systems are frequently updated to accommodate new services, but naively updating them by continually training with data for new services causes catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose to reformulate dialogue state tracking (DST) as a bundle of example-guided question answering tasks to minimize the task shift between services. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on DST continual learning metrics without relying on any complex regularization or parameter expansion methods. |
Zero-shot Cross-lingual Dialogue Systems with Transferable Latent Variables (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | a lack of research on multilingual or cross-lingual task-oriented dialog systems has limited results . we propose a zero-shot adaptation of task-orientated dialog systems to low-resource languages . task-focused systems are often trained with monolingual datasets that are expensive to build or acquire . |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot adaptation of multilingual task-oriented dialog systems to low-resource languages using latent variables and a set of very few parallel word pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better in natural language understanding task compared to state-of-the-art model . the proposed model uses very few parallel word pairs to refine cross-lingual representations . |
Dialogue Summaries as Dialogue States (DS2), Template-Guided Summarization for Few-shot Dialogue State Tracking (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Annotating task-oriented dialogues is notorious for the expensive and difficult data collection process. |
| Approach: | They propose to reformulate dialogue state tracking as a dialogue summarization problem by using synthetic dialogue summaries generated by a set of rules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous studies on few-shot dialogue state tracking in MultiWoZ 2.0 and 2.1 in cross-domain and multi-domain settings. |
SIMMC-VR: A Task-oriented Multimodal Dialog Dataset with Situated and Immersive VR Streams (2023.acl-long)
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Te-Lin Wu, Satwik Kottur, Andrea Madotto, Mahmoud Azab, Pedro Rodriguez, Babak Damavandi, Nanyun Peng, Seungwhan Moon
| Challenge: | Existing models lack a large-scale benchmark to capture user–assistant interactions . et al., 2022: 145-160. |
| Approach: | They propose a video-grounded task-oriented dialog dataset that captures real-world AI-assisted user scenarios in VR. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset captures real-world AI-assisted user scenarios in VR. |
SnapNTell: Enhancing Entity-Centric Visual Question Answering with Retrieval Augmented Multimodal LLM (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jielin Qiu, Andrea Madotto, Zhaojiang Lin, Paul Crook, Yifan Xu, Babak Damavandi, Xin Dong, Christos Faloutsos, Lei Li, Seungwhan Moon
| Challenge: | Vision-extended LLMs have made significant strides in VQA, but they still encounter significant difficulties in handling queries involving long-tail entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to test models' ability to identify entities and provide detailed, entity-specific knowledge by combining 10 images and 10 knowledge-intensive QA pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on the SnapNTell dataset, achieving a 66.5% improvement in the BELURT score. |
Leveraging Slot Descriptions for Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue StateTracking (2021.naacl-main)
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Zhaojiang Lin, Bing Liu, Seungwhan Moon, Paul Crook, Zhenpeng Zhou, Zhiguang Wang, Zhou Yu, Andrea Madotto, Eunjoon Cho, Rajen Subba
| Challenge: | Existing models for zero-shot cross-domain dialogue state tracking require in-domain data to model a new domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a slot descriptions enhanced generative approach for zero-shot cross-domain DST by encoding a dialogue context and a slots with a pre-trained encoder and generating slot value in auto-regressive manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves state-of-the-art results in zero-shot cross-domain setting. |
Getting To Know You: User Attribute Extraction from Dialogues (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | a new method to extract user attributes from dialogues is needed to improve user understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage dialogues with conversational agents to automatically extract user attributes from dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses retrieval and generation baselines on human evaluation. |
Towards Few-shot Fact-Checking via Perplexity (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that pre-trained language models can perform few-shot learning for various downstream tasks, such as question answering and machine translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to leverage the powerful transfer learning ability of a language model via a perplexity score to learn few-shot for the fact-checking task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the Major Class baseline by 10% on the F1-Macro metric across multiple datasets. |
Clickbait? Sensational Headline Generation with Auto-tuned Reinforcement Learning (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Conventional abstractive headline generation methods do not optimize for maximum reader attention. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that generates sensational headlines without labeled data by classifying online headlines with many comments against a summarization model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates sensational headlines without labeled data. |
MinTL: Minimalist Transfer Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn dialogue state tracking and response generation are time-intensive and not transferable between domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a transfer learning framework that allows efficient dialogue state tracking with a minimal generation length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the inference efficiency and improves state-of-the-art results on multi-domain multi-tasking systems. |
Training Models to Generate, Recognize, and Reframe Unhelpful Thoughts (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for cognitive behavioral therapy lack specific and diverse practice material. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to generate unhelpful thought patterns . they propose to train and evaluate existing models to generate an abundance of practice material . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate unlimited quantity of practice material and generate suitable reframing proposals with no or minimal additional model training required. |
IMU2CLIP: Language-grounded Motion Sensor Translation with Multimodal Contrastive Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to align motion sensors with text and video are limited in their scale and limited in the use of IMU models. |
| Approach: | They propose to project IMU motion sensor recordings into the joint representation space of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) they introduce several new IMU-based Wearable AI applications such as motion-based media search, or an LM-based multimodal reasoning with motion sensor data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves downstream performance when fine-tuned for each application, demonstrating its universal usage as a new pre-trained resource. |
QAConv: Question Answering on Informative Conversations (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that state-of-the-art pretrained QA systems have limited zero-shot performance and tend to predict our questions as unanswerable. |
| Approach: | They propose a question-answering dataset that uses conversations as a knowledge source. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides a training and evaluation testbed to facilitate QA on conversations research. |
Proactive Assistant Dialogue Generation from Streaming Egocentric Videos (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yichi Zhang, Xin Luna Dong, Zhaojiang Lin, Andrea Madotto, Anuj Kumar, Babak Damavandi, Joyce Chai, Seungwhan Moon
| Challenge: | Recent advances in conversational AI have been substantial, but developing real-time tasks guidance systems remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a data curation pipeline that synthesizes dialogues from annotated egocentric videos and a suite of automatic evaluation metrics that validated through extensive human studies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes dialogues from annotated egocentric videos and validates them through extensive human studies. |
AnyMAL: An Efficient and Scalable Any-Modality Augmented Language Model (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Seungwhan Moon, Andrea Madotto, Zhaojiang Lin, Tushar Nagarajan, Matt Smith, Shashank Jain, Chun-Fu Yeh, Prakash Murugesan, Peyman Heidari, Yue Liu, Kavya Srinet, Babak Damavandi, Anuj Kumar
| Challenge: | Prior work on LLMs focused on models that combine text and one other modality, such as image encoders or proprietary models that are not open sourced. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified model that reasons over diverse input modality signals and generates textual responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on multimodal tasks than industry-leading models . |
Transferable Multi-Domain State Generator for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to dialogue state tracking are dependent on domain ontology and lack of sharing knowledge across domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a transferable dialogue state generator that generates dialogue states from utterances using copy mechanism. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that TRADE achieves state-of-the-art 48.62% joint goal accuracy for the five domains of MultiWOZ. |
Plug-and-Play Conversational Models (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large conversational models that generate coherent and fluent responses often require large dialogue datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose and evaluate plug-and-play methods for controllable response generation . they demonstrate a high degree of control over the generated conversational responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method does not require further computation at decoding time and does not need fine-tuning of a large language model. |
NeuS: Neutral Multi-News Summarization for Mitigating Framing Bias (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | a new task is proposed to reduce media news framing bias by generating a neutral summary from multiple news articles of the varying political leanings. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that generates a neutral summary from multiple news articles . they find title provides a good signal for framing bias and propose metric and model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can neutralize news content in hierarchical order from title to article . scalability remains a bottleneck due to the time-consuming human labor needed for composing the roundup . |
Exploring Versatile Generative Language Model Via Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale language models can be fine-tuned to learn highly transferable embedding, but they are expensive and require multiple model parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to fine-tune multiple down-stream generation tasks simultaneously using a single, large pretrained model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can maintain or improve the performance of fine-tuning the whole model. |
Continual Learning in Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2021.emnlp-main)
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Andrea Madotto, Zhaojiang Lin, Zhenpeng Zhou, Seungwhan Moon, Paul Crook, Bing Liu, Zhou Yu, Eunjoon Cho, Pascale Fung, Zhiguang Wang
| Challenge: | Existing continuous learning systems are not designed to add new domains and functionalities through time without incurring the high cost of retraining the whole system. |
| Approach: | They propose a first-ever continual learning benchmark for task-oriented dialogue systems . they propose 'architecture' method based on residual adapters to implement continual training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed architectural method performs better than multitask learning while being 20X faster in learning new domains. |
Learning Knowledge Bases with Parameters for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2020.findings-emnlp)
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Andrea Madotto, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Genta Indra Winata, Yan Xu, Zihan Liu, Zhaojiang Lin, Pascale Fung
| Challenge: | End-to-end systems rely on dialogue state tracking and annotations to fulfill user requests . modularized systems require multiple steps, including a direct interaction with the KB . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to embed the KB directly into the model parameters . they evaluate five task-oriented dialogue datasets with small, medium, and large KBs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can embed the KB directly into the model parameters without any DST or template responses, nor the kb as input. |