Papers by Yinpei Dai
Preview, Attend and Review: Schema-Aware Curriculum Learning for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing dialog state tracking models neglect rich structural information in a dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose to use curriculum learning to leverage dialog state tracking data . they propose a model-agnostic framework that pre-trains a DST model with schema information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance over a transformer-based and RNN-based model on WOZ2.0 and MultiWOZ2.1. |
Training Turn-by-Turn Verifiers for Dialogue Tutoring Agents: The Curious Case of LLMs as Your Coding Tutors (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on coding tutoring, but their capabilities in guiding users to solve complex tasks remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel agent workflow, Trace-and-Verify, which combines knowledge tracing to estimate a student’s knowledge state and turn-by-turn verification to ensure effective guidance toward task completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent workflow achieves significantly higher success rates than existing tutoring agents. |
CGoDial: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chinese Goal-oriented Dialog Evaluation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a new benchmark for goal-oriented dialog evaluation is needed to address the problem of knowledge sources, noisy user expressions, and the shortage of annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese benchmark for goal-oriented dialog evaluation that uses dialog sessions and 574,949 dialog turns to bridge the gap between academic benchmarks and spoken dialog scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark contains 96,763 dialog sessions and 574,949 dialog turns totally. |
SafetyALFRED: Evaluating Safety-Conscious Planning of Vision Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Josue Torres-Fonseca, Naihao Deng, Yinpei Dai, Shane Storks, Yichi Zhang, Rada Mihalcea, Casey Kennington, Joyce Chai
| Challenge: | Existing safety evaluations focus on hazard recognition through disembodied question answering (QA) settings, but lack a critical gap in evaluating an agent. |
| Approach: | They evaluate multimodal large language models with six categories of kitchen hazards . they propose a safety-based approach that prioritizes multi-step corrective actions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can recognize hazards in QA settings, but average mitigation success rates are low . the proposed model is based on the embodied agent benchmark ALFRED . |
Learning Low-Resource End-To-End Goal-Oriented Dialog for Fast and Reliable System Deployment (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing end-to-end dialog systems perform less effectively when data is scarce. |
| Approach: | They propose a Meta-Dialog System which combines meta-learning and human-machine collaboration to improve dialog learning by a new extended-bAbI dataset and a transformed MultiWOZ dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms non-meta-learning baselines on a new extended-bAbI dataset and a transformed MultiWOZ dataset for low-resource goal-oriented dialog learning. |
SPACE-2: Tree-Structured Semi-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training for Task-Oriented Dialog Understanding (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dialog understanding only consider self-augmented dialogs as positive samples and treat all other dialogs like negative ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-structured pre-trained conversation model which learns dialog representations from limited labeled dialogs and large-scale unlabeled dialog corpora via semi-supervised contrastive pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art results on the DialoGLUE benchmark. |
Teaching Embodied Reinforcement Learning Agents: Informativeness and Diversity of Language Use (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for embodied agents to learn and perform tasks use low-level instructions, which may not reflect natural human communication. |
| Approach: | They propose to use different types of language inputs to facilitate reinforcement learning (RL) embodied agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that agents trained with diverse and informative language can achieve enhanced generalization and fast adaptation to new tasks in an open world. |
Transferable Dialogue Systems and User Simulators (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a lack of training data is limiting the development of dialogue systems . we develop a framework for creating dialogue data through self-play between agents . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can incorporate new dialogue scenarios through self-play between two agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is highly effective in bootstrapping the performance of two agents in transfer learning. |