Y-Lan Boureau

Kurt Shuster, Jing Xu, Mojtaba Komeili et al. · meta-ai, mila

We present BlenderBot 3, a 175B parameter dialogue model capable of open-domain conversation with access to the internet and a long-term memory, and having been trained on a large number of user defined tasks. We release both the model weights and code, and have also deployed the model on a public web page to interact with organic users. This technical report describes how the model was built (architecture, model and training scheme), and details of its deployment, including safety mechanisms. Human evaluations show its superiority to existing open-domain dialogue agents, including its predecessors (Roller et al., 2021; Komeili et al., 2022). Finally, we detail our plan for continual learning using the data collected from deployment, which will also be publicly released. The goal of this research program is thus to enable the community to study ever-improving responsible agents that learn through interaction.

Jing Xu, Megan Ung, Mojtaba Komeili et al. · meta-ai, mila

Frozen models trained to mimic static datasets can never improve their performance. Models that can employ internet-retrieval for up-to-date information and obtain feedback from humans during deployment provide the promise of both adapting to new information, and improving their performance. In this work we study how to improve internet-driven conversational skills in such a learning framework. We collect deployment data, which we make publicly available, of human interactions, and collect various types of human feedback -- including binary quality measurements, free-form text feedback, and fine-grained reasons for failure. We then study various algorithms for improving from such feedback, including standard supervised learning, rejection sampling, model-guiding and reward-based learning, in order to make recommendations on which type of feedback and algorithms work best. We find the recently introduced Director model (Arora et al., '22) shows significant improvements over other existing approaches.

Da Ju, Jing Xu, Y-Lan Boureau et al. · meta-ai

The promise of interaction between intelligent conversational agents and humans is that models can learn from such feedback in order to improve. Unfortunately, such exchanges in the wild will not always involve human utterances that are benign or of high quality, and will include a mixture of engaged (helpers) and unengaged or even malicious users (trolls). In this work we study how to perform robust learning in such an environment. We introduce a benchmark evaluation, SafetyMix, which can evaluate methods that learn safe vs. toxic language in a variety of adversarial settings to test their robustness. We propose and analyze several mitigating learning algorithms that identify trolls either at the example or at the user level. Our main finding is that user-based methods, that take into account that troll users will exhibit adversarial behavior across multiple examples, work best in a variety of settings on our benchmark. We then test these methods in a further real-life setting of conversations collected during deployment, with similar results.

Jing Xu, Da Ju, Joshua Lane et al. · meta-ai

We present BlenderBot 3x, an update on the conversational model BlenderBot 3, which is now trained using organic conversation and feedback data from participating users of the system in order to improve both its skills and safety. We are publicly releasing the participating de-identified interaction data for use by the research community, in order to spur further progress. Training models with organic data is challenging because interactions with people "in the wild" include both high quality conversations and feedback, as well as adversarial and toxic behavior. We study techniques that enable learning from helpful teachers while avoiding learning from people who are trying to trick the model into unhelpful or toxic responses. BlenderBot 3x is both preferred in conversation to BlenderBot 3, and is shown to produce safer responses in challenging situations. While our current models are still far from perfect, we believe further improvement can be achieved by continued use of the techniques explored in this work.

Morteza Behrooz, William Ngan, Joshua Lane et al. · meta-ai

Publicly deploying research chatbots is a nuanced topic involving necessary risk-benefit analyses. While there have recently been frequent discussions on whether it is responsible to deploy such models, there has been far less focus on the interaction paradigms and design approaches that the resulting interfaces should adopt, in order to achieve their goals more effectively. We aim to pose, ground, and attempt to answer HCI questions involved in this scope, by reporting on a mixed-methods user study conducted on a recent research chatbot. We find that abstract anthropomorphic representation for the agent has a significant effect on user's perception, that offering AI explainability may have an impact on feedback rates, and that two (diegetic and extradiegetic) levels of the chat experience should be intentionally designed. We offer design recommendations and areas of further focus for the research community.

Mounica Maddela, Megan Ung, Jing Xu et al. · meta-ai

Many cognitive approaches to well-being, such as recognizing and reframing unhelpful thoughts, have received considerable empirical support over the past decades, yet still lack truly widespread adoption in self-help format. A barrier to that adoption is a lack of adequately specific and diverse dedicated practice material. This work examines whether current language models can be leveraged to both produce a virtually unlimited quantity of practice material illustrating standard unhelpful thought patterns matching specific given contexts, and generate suitable positive reframing proposals. We propose PATTERNREFRAME, a novel dataset of about 10k examples of thoughts containing unhelpful thought patterns conditioned on a given persona, accompanied by about 27k positive reframes. By using this dataset to train and/or evaluate current models, we show that existing models can already be powerful tools to help generate an abundance of tailored practice material and hypotheses, with no or minimal additional model training required.

Eric Michael Smith, Orion Hsu, Rebecca Qian et al.

At the heart of improving conversational AI is the open problem of how to evaluate conversations. Issues with automatic metrics are well known (Liu et al., 2016, arXiv:1603.08023), with human evaluations still considered the gold standard. Unfortunately, how to perform human evaluations is also an open problem: differing data collection methods have varying levels of human agreement and statistical sensitivity, resulting in differing amounts of human annotation hours and labor costs. In this work we compare five different crowdworker-based human evaluation methods and find that different methods are best depending on the types of models compared, with no clear winner across the board. While this highlights the open problems in the area, our analysis leads to advice of when to use which one, and possible future directions.

Megan Ung, Jing Xu, Y-Lan Boureau

Current open-domain conversational models can easily be made to talk in inadequate ways. Online learning from conversational feedback given by the conversation partner is a promising avenue for a model to improve and adapt, so as to generate fewer of these safety failures. However, current state-of-the-art models tend to react to feedback with defensive or oblivious responses. This makes for an unpleasant experience and may discourage conversation partners from giving feedback in the future. This work proposes SaFeRDialogues, a task and dataset of graceful responses to conversational feedback about safety failures. We collect a dataset of 10k dialogues demonstrating safety failures, feedback signaling them, and a response acknowledging the feedback. We show how fine-tuning on this dataset results in conversations that human raters deem considerably more likely to lead to a civil conversation, without sacrificing engagingness or general conversational ability.

Oana Ignat, Y-Lan Boureau, Jane A. Yu et al.

Inspiration moves a person to see new possibilities and transforms the way they perceive their own potential. Inspiration has received little attention in psychology, and has not been researched before in the NLP community. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to study inspiration through machine learning methods. We aim to automatically detect inspiring content from social media data. To this end, we analyze social media posts to tease out what makes a post inspiring and what topics are inspiring. We release a dataset of 5,800 inspiring and 5,800 non-inspiring English-language public post unique ids collected from a dump of Reddit public posts made available by a third party and use linguistic heuristics to automatically detect which social media English-language posts are inspiring.

Emily Dinan, Gavin Abercrombie, A. Stevie Bergman et al.

Over the last several years, end-to-end neural conversational agents have vastly improved in their ability to carry a chit-chat conversation with humans. However, these models are often trained on large datasets from the internet, and as a result, may learn undesirable behaviors from this data, such as toxic or otherwise harmful language. Researchers must thus wrestle with the issue of how and when to release these models. In this paper, we survey the problem landscape for safety for end-to-end conversational AI and discuss recent and related work. We highlight tensions between values, potential positive impact and potential harms, and provide a framework for making decisions about whether and how to release these models, following the tenets of value-sensitive design. We additionally provide a suite of tools to enable researchers to make better-informed decisions about training and releasing end-to-end conversational AI models.

Sabrina J. Mielke, Arthur Szlam, Emily Dinan et al.

While improving neural dialogue agents' factual accuracy is the object of much research, another important aspect of communication, less studied in the setting of neural dialogue, is transparency about ignorance. In this work, we analyze to what extent state-of-the-art chit-chat models are linguistically calibrated in the sense that their verbalized expression of doubt (or confidence) matches the likelihood that the model's responses are factually incorrect (or correct). We find that these models are poorly calibrated, yet we show that likelihood of correctness can accurately be predicted. By incorporating such metacognitive features into the training of a controllable generation model, we obtain a dialogue agent with greatly improved linguistic calibration. While improving neural dialogue agents' factual accuracy is the object of much research, another important aspect of communication, less studied in the setting of neural dialogue, is transparency about ignorance. In this work, we analyze to what extent state-of-the-art chit-chat models are linguistically calibrated in the sense that their verbalized expression of doubt (or confidence) matches the likelihood that the model's responses are factually incorrect (or correct). We find that these models are poorly calibrated, yet we show that likelihood of correctness can accurately be predicted. By incorporating such metacognitive features into the training of a controllable generation model, we obtain a dialogue agent with greatly improved linguistic calibration.

Jing Xu, Da Ju, Margaret Li et al.

Models trained on large unlabeled corpora of human interactions will learn patterns and mimic behaviors therein, which include offensive or otherwise toxic behavior and unwanted biases. We investigate a variety of methods to mitigate these issues in the context of open-domain generative dialogue models. We introduce a new human-and-model-in-the-loop framework for both training safer models and for evaluating them, as well as a novel method to distill safety considerations inside generative models without the use of an external classifier at deployment time. We conduct experiments comparing these methods and find our new techniques are (i) safer than existing models as measured by automatic and human evaluations while (ii) maintaining usability metrics such as engagingness relative to the state of the art. We then discuss the limitations of this work by analyzing failure cases of our models.

Eric Michael Smith, Diana Gonzalez-Rico, Emily Dinan et al.

Open-domain conversation models have become good at generating natural-sounding dialogue, using very large architectures with billions of trainable parameters. The vast training data required to train these architectures aggregates many different styles, tones, and qualities. Using that data to train a single model makes it difficult to use the model as a consistent conversational agent, e.g. with a stable set of persona traits and a typical style of expression. Several architectures affording control mechanisms over generation architectures have been proposed, each with different trade-offs. However, it remains unclear whether their use in dialogue is viable, and what the trade-offs look like with the most recent state-of-the-art conversational architectures. In this work, we adapt three previously proposed controllable generation architectures to open-domain dialogue generation, controlling the style of the generation to match one among about 200 possible styles. We compare their respective performance and tradeoffs, and show how they can be used to provide insights into existing conversational datasets, and generate a varied set of styled conversation replies.

Stephen Roller, Y-Lan Boureau, Jason Weston et al.

We present our view of what is necessary to build an engaging open-domain conversational agent: covering the qualities of such an agent, the pieces of the puzzle that have been built so far, and the gaping holes we have not filled yet. We present a biased view, focusing on work done by our own group, while citing related work in each area. In particular, we discuss in detail the properties of continual learning, providing engaging content, and being well-behaved -- and how to measure success in providing them. We end with a discussion of our experience and learnings, and our recommendations to the community.

Sandeep Subramanian, Ronan Collobert, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato et al.

We investigate multi-scale transformer language models that learn representations of text at multiple scales, and present three different architectures that have an inductive bias to handle the hierarchical nature of language. Experiments on large-scale language modeling benchmarks empirically demonstrate favorable likelihood vs memory footprint trade-offs, e.g. we show that it is possible to train a hierarchical variant with 30 layers that has 23% smaller memory footprint and better perplexity, compared to a vanilla transformer with less than half the number of layers, on the Toronto BookCorpus. We analyze the advantages of learned representations at multiple scales in terms of memory footprint, compute time, and perplexity, which are particularly appealing given the quadratic scaling of transformers' run time and memory usage with respect to sequence length.

Stephen Roller, Emily Dinan, Naman Goyal et al.

Building open-domain chatbots is a challenging area for machine learning research. While prior work has shown that scaling neural models in the number of parameters and the size of the data they are trained on gives improved results, we show that other ingredients are important for a high-performing chatbot. Good conversation requires a number of skills that an expert conversationalist blends in a seamless way: providing engaging talking points and listening to their partners, and displaying knowledge, empathy and personality appropriately, while maintaining a consistent persona. We show that large scale models can learn these skills when given appropriate training data and choice of generation strategy. We build variants of these recipes with 90M, 2.7B and 9.4B parameter models, and make our models and code publicly available. Human evaluations show our best models are superior to existing approaches in multi-turn dialogue in terms of engagingness and humanness measurements. We then discuss the limitations of this work by analyzing failure cases of our models.

Eric Michael Smith, Mary Williamson, Kurt Shuster et al.

Being engaging, knowledgeable, and empathetic are all desirable general qualities in a conversational agent. Previous work has introduced tasks and datasets that aim to help agents to learn those qualities in isolation and gauge how well they can express them. But rather than being specialized in one single quality, a good open-domain conversational agent should be able to seamlessly blend them all into one cohesive conversational flow. In this work, we investigate several ways to combine models trained towards isolated capabilities, ranging from simple model aggregation schemes that require minimal additional training, to various forms of multi-task training that encompass several skills at all training stages. We further propose a new dataset, BlendedSkillTalk, to analyze how these capabilities would mesh together in a natural conversation, and compare the performance of different architectures and training schemes. Our experiments show that multi-tasking over several tasks that focus on particular capabilities results in better blended conversation performance compared to models trained on a single skill, and that both unified or two-stage approaches perform well if they are constructed to avoid unwanted bias in skill selection or are fine-tuned on our new task.

Da Ju, Kurt Shuster, Y-Lan Boureau et al.

As single-task accuracy on individual language and image tasks has improved substantially in the last few years, the long-term goal of a generally skilled agent that can both see and talk becomes more feasible to explore. In this work, we focus on leveraging individual language and image tasks, along with resources that incorporate both vision and language towards that objective. We design an architecture that combines state-of-the-art Transformer and ResNeXt modules fed into a novel attentive multimodal module to produce a combined model trained on many tasks. We provide a thorough analysis of the components of the model, and transfer performance when training on one, some, or all of the tasks. Our final models provide a single system that obtains good results on all vision and language tasks considered, and improves the state-of-the-art in image-grounded conversational applications.

Eric Michael Smith, Diana Gonzalez-Rico, Emily Dinan et al.

Text style transfer is usually performed using attributes that can take a handful of discrete values (e.g., positive to negative reviews). In this work, we introduce an architecture that can leverage pre-trained consistent continuous distributed style representations and use them to transfer to an attribute unseen during training, without requiring any re-tuning of the style transfer model. We demonstrate the method by training an architecture to transfer text conveying one sentiment to another sentiment, using a fine-grained set of over 20 sentiment labels rather than the binary positive/negative often used in style transfer. Our experiments show that this model can then rewrite text to match a target sentiment that was unseen during training.

Margaret Li, Stephen Roller, Ilia Kulikov et al.

Generative dialogue models currently suffer from a number of problems which standard maximum likelihood training does not address. They tend to produce generations that (i) rely too much on copying from the context, (ii) contain repetitions within utterances, (iii) overuse frequent words, and (iv) at a deeper level, contain logical flaws. In this work we show how all of these problems can be addressed by extending the recently introduced unlikelihood loss (Welleck et al., 2019) to these cases. We show that appropriate loss functions which regularize generated outputs to match human distributions are effective for the first three issues. For the last important general issue, we show applying unlikelihood to collected data of what a model should not do is effective for improving logical consistency, potentially paving the way to generative models with greater reasoning ability. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach across several dialogue tasks.

Kurt Shuster, Da Ju, Stephen Roller et al.

We introduce dodecaDialogue: a set of 12 tasks that measures if a conversational agent can communicate engagingly with personality and empathy, ask questions, answer questions by utilizing knowledge resources, discuss topics and situations, and perceive and converse about images. By multi-tasking on such a broad large-scale set of data, we hope to both move towards and measure progress in producing a single unified agent that can perceive, reason and converse with humans in an open-domain setting. We show that such multi-tasking improves over a BERT pre-trained baseline, largely due to multi-tasking with very large dialogue datasets in a similar domain, and that the multi-tasking in general provides gains to both text and image-based tasks using several metrics in both the fine-tune and task transfer settings. We obtain state-of-the-art results on many of the tasks, providing a strong baseline for this challenge.

Dongyeop Kang, Anusha Balakrishnan, Pararth Shah et al.

Traditional recommendation systems produce static rather than interactive recommendations invariant to a user's specific requests, clarifications, or current mood, and can suffer from the cold-start problem if their tastes are unknown. These issues can be alleviated by treating recommendation as an interactive dialogue task instead, where an expert recommender can sequentially ask about someone's preferences, react to their requests, and recommend more appropriate items. In this work, we collect a goal-driven recommendation dialogue dataset (GoRecDial), which consists of 9,125 dialogue games and 81,260 conversation turns between pairs of human workers recommending movies to each other. The task is specifically designed as a cooperative game between two players working towards a quantifiable common goal. We leverage the dataset to develop an end-to-end dialogue system that can simultaneously converse and recommend. Models are first trained to imitate the behavior of human players without considering the task goal itself (supervised training). We then finetune our models on simulated bot-bot conversations between two paired pre-trained models (bot-play), in order to achieve the dialogue goal. Our experiments show that models finetuned with bot-play learn improved dialogue strategies, reach the dialogue goal more often when paired with a human, and are rated as more consistent by humans compared to models trained without bot-play. The dataset and code are publicly available through the ParlAI framework.

Ryan Lowe, Jakob Foerster, Y-Lan Boureau et al.

How do we know if communication is emerging in a multi-agent system? The vast majority of recent papers on emergent communication show that adding a communication channel leads to an increase in reward or task success. This is a useful indicator, but provides only a coarse measure of the agent's learned communication abilities. As we move towards more complex environments, it becomes imperative to have a set of finer tools that allow qualitative and quantitative insights into the emergence of communication. This may be especially useful to allow humans to monitor agents' behaviour, whether for fault detection, assessing performance, or even building trust. In this paper, we examine a few intuitive existing metrics for measuring communication, and show that they can be misleading. Specifically, by training deep reinforcement learning agents to play simple matrix games augmented with a communication channel, we find a scenario where agents appear to communicate (their messages provide information about their subsequent action), and yet the messages do not impact the environment or other agent in any way. We explain this phenomenon using ablation studies and by visualizing the representations of the learned policies. We also survey some commonly used metrics for measuring emergent communication, and provide recommendations as to when these metrics should be used.

Sandeep Subramanian, Guillaume Lample, Eric Michael Smith et al.

The dominant approach to unsupervised "style transfer" in text is based on the idea of learning a latent representation, which is independent of the attributes specifying its "style". In this paper, we show that this condition is not necessary and is not always met in practice, even with domain adversarial training that explicitly aims at learning such disentangled representations. We thus propose a new model that controls several factors of variation in textual data where this condition on disentanglement is replaced with a simpler mechanism based on back-translation. Our method allows control over multiple attributes, like gender, sentiment, product type, etc., and a more fine-grained control on the trade-off between content preservation and change of style with a pooling operator in the latent space. Our experiments demonstrate that the fully entangled model produces better generations, even when tested on new and more challenging benchmarks comprising reviews with multiple sentences and multiple attributes.

Hannah Rashkin, Eric Michael Smith, Margaret Li et al.

One challenge for dialogue agents is recognizing feelings in the conversation partner and replying accordingly, a key communicative skill. While it is straightforward for humans to recognize and acknowledge others' feelings in a conversation, this is a significant challenge for AI systems due to the paucity of suitable publicly-available datasets for training and evaluation. This work proposes a new benchmark for empathetic dialogue generation and EmpatheticDialogues, a novel dataset of 25k conversations grounded in emotional situations. Our experiments indicate that dialogue models that use our dataset are perceived to be more empathetic by human evaluators, compared to models merely trained on large-scale Internet conversation data. We also present empirical comparisons of dialogue model adaptations for empathetic responding, leveraging existing models or datasets without requiring lengthy re-training of the full model.

Antoine Bordes, Y-Lan Boureau, Jason Weston

Traditional dialog systems used in goal-oriented applications require a lot of domain-specific handcrafting, which hinders scaling up to new domains. End-to-end dialog systems, in which all components are trained from the dialogs themselves, escape this limitation. But the encouraging success recently obtained in chit-chat dialog may not carry over to goal-oriented settings. This paper proposes a testbed to break down the strengths and shortcomings of end-to-end dialog systems in goal-oriented applications. Set in the context of restaurant reservation, our tasks require manipulating sentences and symbols, so as to properly conduct conversations, issue API calls and use the outputs of such calls. We show that an end-to-end dialog system based on Memory Networks can reach promising, yet imperfect, performance and learn to perform non-trivial operations. We confirm those results by comparing our system to a hand-crafted slot-filling baseline on data from the second Dialog State Tracking Challenge (Henderson et al., 2014a). We show similar result patterns on data extracted from an online concierge service.