PhD defense of Thibault Cordier – 13 October 2023

13 October 2023

Date: Friday, the 13th of October at 9 am, Place: room “salle des thèses” at l’Université d’Avignon, Campus Hannah Arendt (centre-ville). Title: « Hierarchical Imitation and Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems ». The defense can be followed through the live link below: https://v-au.univ-avignon.fr/live Abstract: In this Ph.D thesis, we study task-oriented dialogue systems that are systems designed to assist users in completing specific tasks, such as booking a flight or ordering food. They typically rely on reinforcement learning paradigm to model the dialogue that allows the system to reason about the user’s goals and preferences, and to select actions that will lead to the desired outcome. Our focus is specifically on learning from a limited number of interactions that is crucial due to the scarcity and costliness of human interactions. Standard reinforcement learning algorithms typically require a large amount of interaction data to achieve good performance. To address this challenge, we aim to make dialogue systems more sample-efficient in their training. We draw from two main ideas: imitation and hierarchy. Our first contribution explores the integration of imitation with reinforcement learning. We investigate how to effectively use expert demonstrations to extrapolate knowledge with minimal generalisation effort. Our second contribution focuses on Plus d'infos

ANR muDialBot Project

1 January 2021

MUlti-party perceptually-active situated DIALog for human-roBOT interaction In muDialBot, our ambition is to proactively incorporate human-like behavioral traits in human-robot spoken communication. We aim to reach a new stage in harnessing the rich information provided by audio and visual data streams from humans. In particular, extracting verbal and non-verbal events should enhance the decision-making abilities of robots to manage turns of speech more naturally and also switch from group interactions to face-to-face dialogues according to the situation. There has been growing interest recently in companion robots capable of assisting individuals in their daily lives and effectively communicating with them. These robots are perceived as social entities, and their relevance to health and psychological well-being has been highlighted in studies. Patients, their families, and healthcare professionals will better appreciate the potential of these robots as certain limitations are quickly overcome, such as their ability to move, see, and listen to communicate naturally with humans, beyond what touchscreen displays and voice commands already enable. The scientific and technological outcomes of the project will be implemented on a commercial social robot and tested and validated with multiple use cases in the context of a day hospital unit. Large-scale data collection will complement in-situ Plus d'infos