Sudha Rao

Paul Soulos, Sudha Rao, Caitlin Smith et al. · berkeley, meta-ai

Machine translation has seen rapid progress with the advent of Transformer-based models. These models have no explicit linguistic structure built into them, yet they may still implicitly learn structured relationships by attending to relevant tokens. We hypothesize that this structural learning could be made more robust by explicitly endowing Transformers with a structural bias, and we investigate two methods for building in such a bias. One method, the TP-Transformer, augments the traditional Transformer architecture to include an additional component to represent structure. The second method imbues structure at the data level by segmenting the data with morphological tokenization. We test these methods on translating from English into morphologically rich languages, Turkish and Inuktitut, and consider both automatic metrics and human evaluations. We find that each of these two approaches allows the network to achieve better performance, but this improvement is dependent on the size of the dataset. In sum, structural encoding methods make Transformers more sample-efficient, enabling them to perform better from smaller amounts of data.

Faeze Brahman, Baolin Peng, Michel Galley et al. · microsoft-research

Large pre-trained language models have recently enabled open-ended generation frameworks (e.g., prompt-to-text NLG) to tackle a variety of tasks going beyond the traditional data-to-text generation. While this framework is more general, it is under-specified and often leads to a lack of controllability restricting their real-world usage. We propose a new grounded keys-to-text generation task: the task is to generate a factual description about an entity given a set of guiding keys, and grounding passages. To address this task, we introduce a new dataset, called EntDeGen. Inspired by recent QA-based evaluation measures, we propose an automatic metric, MAFE, for factual correctness of generated descriptions. Our EntDescriptor model is equipped with strong rankers to fetch helpful passages and generate entity descriptions. Experimental result shows a good correlation (60.14) between our proposed metric and human judgments of factuality. Our rankers significantly improved the factual correctness of generated descriptions (15.95% and 34.51% relative gains in recall and precision). Finally, our ablation study highlights the benefit of combining keys and groundings.

Sudha Rao, Weijia Xu, Michael Xu et al.

The use of generative AI in video game development is on the rise, and as the conversational and other capabilities of large language models continue to improve, we expect LLM-driven non-player characters (NPCs) to become widely deployed. In this paper, we seek to understand how human players collaborate with LLM-driven NPCs to accomplish in-game goals. We design a minigame within Minecraft where a player works with two GPT4-driven NPCs to complete a quest. We perform a user study in which 28 Minecraft players play this minigame and share their feedback. On analyzing the game logs and recordings, we find that several patterns of collaborative behavior emerge from the NPCs and the human players. We also report on the current limitations of language-only models that do not have rich game-state or visual understanding. We believe that this preliminary study and analysis will inform future game developers on how to better exploit these rapidly improving generative AI models for collaborative roles in games.

Jorge Leandro, Sudha Rao, Michael Xu et al.

Dialogue-based Role Playing Games (RPGs) require powerful storytelling. The narratives of these may take years to write and typically involve a large creative team. In this work, we demonstrate the potential of large generative text models to assist this process. \textbf{GENEVA}, a prototype tool, generates a rich narrative graph with branching and reconverging storylines that match a high-level narrative description and constraints provided by the designer. A large language model (LLM), GPT-4, is used to generate the branching narrative and to render it in a graph format in a two-step process. We illustrate the use of GENEVA in generating new branching narratives for four well-known stories under different contextual constraints. This tool has the potential to assist in game development, simulations, and other applications with game-like properties.

Xiangyu Peng, Jessica Quaye, Sudha Rao et al.

We explore how interaction with large language models (LLMs) can give rise to emergent behaviors, empowering players to participate in the evolution of game narratives. Our testbed is a text-adventure game in which players attempt to solve a mystery under a fixed narrative premise, but can freely interact with non-player characters generated by GPT-4, a large language model. We recruit 28 gamers to play the game and use GPT-4 to automatically convert the game logs into a node-graph representing the narrative in the player's gameplay. We find that through their interactions with the non-deterministic behavior of the LLM, players are able to discover interesting new emergent nodes that were not a part of the original narrative but have potential for being fun and engaging. Players that created the most emergent nodes tended to be those that often enjoy games that facilitate discovery, exploration and experimentation.

Weijia Xu, Nebojsa Jojic, Sudha Rao et al.

With rapid advances in large language models (LLMs), there has been an increasing application of LLMs in creative content ideation and generation. A critical question emerges: can current LLMs provide ideas that are diverse enough to truly bolster collective creativity? We examine two state-of-the-art LLMs, GPT-4 and LLaMA-3, on story generation and discover that LLM-generated stories often consist of plot elements that are echoed across a number of generations. To quantify this phenomenon, we introduce the Sui Generis score, an automatic metric that measures the uniqueness of a plot element among alternative storylines generated using the same prompt under an LLM. Evaluating on 100 short stories, we find that LLM-generated stories often contain combinations of idiosyncratic plot elements echoed frequently across generations and across different LLMs, while plots from the original human-written stories are rarely recreated or even echoed in pieces. Moreover, our human evaluation shows that the ranking of Sui Generis scores among story segments correlates moderately with human judgment of surprise level, even though score computation is completely automatic without relying on human judgment.

Seyed Hossein Alavi, Sudha Rao, Ashutosh Adhikari et al.

We propose a novel approach that uses large language models (LLMs) to generate persona-driven conversations between Players and Non-Player Characters (NPC) in games. Showcasing the application of our methodology, we introduce the Minecraft Persona-driven Dialogue dataset (MCPDial). Starting with a small seed of expert-written conversations, we employ our method to generate hundreds of additional conversations. Each conversation in the dataset includes rich character descriptions of the player and NPC. The conversations are long, allowing for in-depth and extensive interactions between the player and NPC. MCPDial extends beyond basic conversations by incorporating canonical function calls (e.g. "Call find a resource on iron ore") between the utterances. Finally, we conduct a qualitative analysis of the dataset to assess its quality and characteristics.

Seyed Hossein Alavi, Weijia Xu, Nebojsa Jojic et al.

We introduce GamePlot, an LLM-powered assistant that supports game designers in crafting immersive narratives for turn-based games, and allows them to test these games through a collaborative game play and refine the plot throughout the process. Our user study with 14 game designers shows high levels of both satisfaction with the generated game plots and sense of ownership over the narratives, but also reconfirms that LLM are limited in their ability to generate complex and truly innovative content. We also show that diverse user populations have different expectations from AI assistants, and encourage researchers to study how tailoring assistants to diverse user groups could potentially lead to increased job satisfaction and greater creativity and innovation over time.

Claire Jin, Sudha Rao, Xiangyu Peng et al.

Advancements in large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing interactive game design, enabling dynamic plotlines and interactions between players and non-player characters (NPCs). However, LLMs may exhibit flaws such as hallucinations, forgetfulness, or misinterpretations of prompts, causing logical inconsistencies and unexpected deviations from intended designs. Automated techniques for detecting such game bugs are still lacking. To address this, we propose a systematic LLM-based method for automatically identifying such bugs from player game logs, eliminating the need for collecting additional data such as post-play surveys. Applied to a text-based game DejaBoom!, our approach effectively identifies bugs inherent in LLM-powered interactive games, surpassing unstructured LLM-powered bug-catching methods and filling the gap in automated detection of logical and design flaws.

Ashish Sharma, Sudha Rao, Chris Brockett et al.

Agency, the capacity to proactively shape events, is central to how humans interact and collaborate. While LLMs are being developed to simulate human behavior and serve as human-like agents, little attention has been given to the Agency that these models should possess in order to proactively manage the direction of interaction and collaboration. In this paper, we investigate Agency as a desirable function of LLMs, and how it can be measured and managed. We build on social-cognitive theory to develop a framework of features through which Agency is expressed in dialogue - indicating what you intend to do (Intentionality), motivating your intentions (Motivation), having self-belief in intentions (Self-Efficacy), and being able to self-adjust (Self-Regulation). We collect a new dataset of 83 human-human collaborative interior design conversations containing 908 conversational snippets annotated for Agency features. Using this dataset, we develop methods for measuring Agency of LLMs. Automatic and human evaluations show that models that manifest features associated with high Intentionality, Motivation, Self-Efficacy, and Self-Regulation are more likely to be perceived as strongly agentive.

Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Sudha Rao, Michel Galley et al.

The ability to generate clarification questions i.e., questions that identify useful missing information in a given context, is important in reducing ambiguity. Humans use previous experience with similar contexts to form a global view and compare it to the given context to ascertain what is missing and what is useful in the context. Inspired by this, we propose a model for clarification question generation where we first identify what is missing by taking a difference between the global and the local view and then train a model to identify what is useful and generate a question about it. Our model outperforms several baselines as judged by both automatic metrics and humans.

Allyson Ettinger, Sudha Rao, Hal Daumé et al.

This paper presents a summary of the first Workshop on Building Linguistically Generalizable Natural Language Processing Systems, and the associated Build It Break It, The Language Edition shared task. The goal of this workshop was to bring together researchers in NLP and linguistics with a shared task aimed at testing the generalizability of NLP systems beyond the distributions of their training data. We describe the motivation, setup, and participation of the shared task, provide discussion of some highlighted results, and discuss lessons learned.