Papers by Oliver Lemon
Imagining Grounded Conceptual Representations from Perceptual Information in Situated Guessing Games (2020.coling-main)
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Alessandro Suglia, Antonio Vergari, Ioannis Konstas, Yonatan Bisk, Emanuele Bastianelli, Andrea Vanzo, Oliver Lemon
| Challenge: | Existing models fail to learn multi-modal representations, relying on category labels at inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a "imagination" module that learns context-aware and category-awful latent embeddings without relying on category labels at inference time. |
| Outcome: | The imagination module outperforms state-of-the-art competitors by 8.26% gameplay accuracy in the CompGuessWhat?! benchmark. |
Clarifying Completions: Evaluating How LLMs Respond to Incomplete Questions (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | iCRs are a complex phenomenon with different forms, readings and functions and can occur on different levels of communication on Clark's 'Clark's' . they are often multi-modal and can be generated on different level of communication. |
| Approach: | They collect, release and analyse a corpus of 3000 human produced iCRs and use them to probe the incremental processing capability of state of the art LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate contextually appropriate iCRs at larger LLM sizes and only when prompted with examples from the corpus. |
Multitask Multimodal Prompted Training for Interactive Embodied Task Completion (2023.emnlp-main)
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Georgios Pantazopoulos, Malvina Nikandrou, Amit Parekh, Bhathiya Hemanthage, Arash Eshghi, Ioannis Konstas, Verena Rieser, Oliver Lemon, Alessandro Suglia
| Challenge: | Embodied MultiModal Agent (EMMA) is a unified encoder-decoder model that reasons over images and trajectories and casts action prediction as multimodal text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose an Embodied MultiModal Agent (EMMA) that uses a unified encoder-decoder model that reasons over images and trajectories and casts action prediction as multimodal text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs on par with similar models on several VL benchmarks and sets a new state-of-the-art success rate on the Dialog-guided Task Completion (DTC) benchmark. |
Triangulating LLM Progress through Benchmarks, Games, and Cognitive Tests (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Filippo Momentè, Alessandro Suglia, Mario Giulianelli, Ambra Ferrari, Alexander Koller, Oliver Lemon, David Schlangen, Raquel Fernández, Raffaella Bernardi
| Challenge: | MMLU and BBH are three evaluation paradigms for language learning models . interactive games are superior to standard benchmarks in discriminating models based on human cognitive assessments . |
| Approach: | They examine three evaluation paradigms: standard benchmarks, interactive games and cognitive tests . they examine whether interactive games are more effective at discriminating LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The results show that interactive games are superior to standard benchmarks in discriminating models. |
Shaking Up VLMs: Comparing Transformers and Structured State Space Models for Vision & Language Modeling (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a task-agnostic visual encoding yields minimal performance gains on grounding, but Transformers outperform Mamba at in-context multimodal retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose to replace Transformers in Visual Language Models with Mamba, a structured state space model that demonstrates promising performance in sequence modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Transformers-based models in captioning, question answering, and reading comprehension. |
Multi-party Multimodal Conversations Between Patients, Their Companions, and a Social Robot in a Hospital Memory Clinic (2024.eacl-demo)
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Angus Addlesee, Neeraj Cherakara, Nivan Nelson, Daniel Hernandez Garcia, Nancie Gunson, Weronika Sieińska, Christian Dondrup, Oliver Lemon
| Challenge: | a new spoken dialogue system is being developed for hospitals and hospitals to enable multi-party interactions . a social robot can be used to have multi-part conversations with patients and their companions . |
| Approach: | They describe a spoken dialogue system that allows patients to have multi-party conversations with their companions . they use speech and video input to generate both speech and gestures - arm, head, and eye movements . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates human-like clarification requests when the patient pauses mid-utterance, answers in-domain questions, and responds appropriately to out-of-domain requests. |
Data-Efficient Goal-Oriented Conversation with Dialogue Knowledge Transfer Networks (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Goal-oriented dialogue systems are now being widely adopted in industry where it is of key importance to maintain a rapid prototyping cycle for new products and domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-driven approach to goal-oriented dialogue generation which only uses a few example dialogues, none of which has to be annotated. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves upon baseline models and over the previous state-of-the-art model, ZSDG. |
RECANTFormer: Referring Expression Comprehension with Varying Numbers of Targets (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for REC assume that a single referring expression always refers to a one instance in the image. |
| Approach: | They propose a one-stage method that generates bounding boxes for objects referred to in natural language expressions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in three GREC datasets. |
CompGuessWhat?!: A Multi-task Evaluation Framework for Grounded Language Learning (2020.acl-main)
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Alessandro Suglia, Ioannis Konstas, Andrea Vanzo, Emanuele Bastianelli, Desmond Elliott, Stella Frank, Oliver Lemon
| Challenge: | Approaches to Grounded Language Learning focus on a single task-based final performance measure which may not depend on desirable properties of the learned hidden representations. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation framework for Grounded Language Learning with Attributes based on three sub-tasks: 1) Goal-oriented evaluation; 2) Object attribute prediction evaluation; and 3) Zero-shot evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the quality of learned representations with respect to attribute grounding. |
Lost in Space: Probing Fine-grained Spatial Understanding in Vision and Language Resamplers (2024.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches for developing vision and language models leverage existing vision and a language expert and try to learn a mapping between them. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a resampler module to create a ‘visual prompt’ which is then fed to the large language models (LLM) using a textual prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has been shown to be effective across coarse-grained tasks like image captioning and visual question answering, but more fine-grounded tasks that require spatial understanding have not been thoroughly examined. |
AlanaVLM: A Multimodal Embodied AI Foundation Model for Egocentric Video Understanding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Alessandro Suglia, Claudio Greco, Katie Baker, Jose Part, Ioannis Papaioannou, Arash Eshghi, Ioannis Konstas, Oliver Lemon
| Challenge: | Current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) focus on third-person view videos, neglecting the richness of egocentric perceptual experience. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Egocentric Video Understanding Dataset (EVUD) to train VLMs on video captioning and question answering tasks specific to egocentric videos. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models including strong Socratic models using GPT-4 as a planner by 3.6% and outperformed Claude 3 and Gemini Pro Vision 1.0. |
Playpen: An Environment for Exploring Learning From Dialogue Game Feedback (2025.emnlp-main)
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Nicola Horst, Davide Mazzaccara, Antonia Schmidt, Michael Sullivan, Filippo Momentè, Luca Franceschetti, Philipp Sadler, Sherzod Hakimov, Alberto Testoni, Raffaella Bernardi, Raquel Fernández, Alexander Koller, Oliver Lemon, David Schlangen, Mario Giulianelli, Alessandro Suglia
| Challenge: | In this paper, we investigate whether Dialogue Games—goal-directed and rule-governed activities driven predominantly by verbal actions—can also serve as a source of feedback signals for learning. |
| Approach: | They introduce Playpen, an environment for off- and online learning through Dialogue Game self-play, and investigate a representative set of post-training methods: supervised fine-tuning, direct alignment and reinforcement learning with Group Relative Policy Optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on unseen instances, but negatively impacts other skills, while interactive learning shows balanced improvements without loss of skills. |
An Empirical Study on the Generalization Power of Neural Representations Learned via Visual Guessing Games (2021.eacl-main)
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Alessandro Suglia, Yonatan Bisk, Ioannis Konstas, Antonio Vergari, Emanuele Bastianelli, Andrea Vanzo, Oliver Lemon
| Challenge: | Using guessing games, an artificial agent can learn to perform on novel downstream tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised learning scenario in which an agent learns to mimic successful guessing games and a novel way for an agent to play by itself, called Self-play via Iterated Experience Learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be applied to a VQA dataset using a supervised learning scenario and a novel way for an agent to play by itself. |