No Arabic abstract
As AI continues to advance, human-AI teams are inevitable. However, progress in AI is routinely measured in isolation, without a human in the loop. It is crucial to benchmark progress in AI, not just in isolation, but also in terms of how it translates to helping humans perform certain tasks, i.e., the performance of human-AI teams. In this work, we design a cooperative game - GuessWhich - to measure human-AI team performance in the specific context of the AI being a visual conversational agent. GuessWhich involves live interaction between the human and the AI. The AI, which we call ALICE, is provided an image which is unseen by the human. Following a brief description of the image, the human questions ALICE about this secret image to identify it from a fixed pool of images. We measure performance of the human-ALICE team by the number of guesses it takes the human to correctly identify the secret image after a fixed number of dialog rounds with ALICE. We compare performance of the human-ALICE teams for t
As the field of Spoken Dialogue Systems and Conversational AI grows, so does the need for tools and environments that abstract away implementation details in order to expedite the development process, lower the barrier of entry to the field, and offer a common test-bed for new ideas. In this paper, we present Plato, a flexible Conversational AI platform written in Python that supports any kind of conversational agent architecture, from standard architectures to architectures with jointly-trained components, single- or multi-party interactions, and offline or online training of any conversational agent component. Plato has been designed to be easy to understand and debug and is agnostic to the underlying learning frameworks that train each component.
We argue that a key challenge in enabling usable and useful interactive task learning for intelligent agents is to facilitate effective Human-AI collaboration. We reflect on our past 5 years of efforts on designing, developing and studying the SUGILITE system, discuss the issues on incorporating recent advances in AI with HCI principles in mixed-initiative interactions and multi-modal interactions, and summarize the lessons we learned. Lastly, we identify several challenges and opportunities, and describe our ongoing work
Reinforcement Learning AI commonly uses reward/penalty signals that are objective and explicit in an environment -- e.g. game score, completion time, etc. -- in order to learn the optimal strategy for task performance. However, Human-AI interaction for such AI agents should include additional reinforcement that is implicit and subjective -- e.g. human preferences for certain AI behavior -- in order to adapt the AI behavior to idiosyncratic human preferences. Such adaptations would mirror naturally occurring processes that increase trust and comfort during social interactions. Here, we show how a hybrid brain-computer-interface (hBCI), which detects an individuals level of interest in objects/events in a virtual environment, can be used to adapt the behavior of a Deep Reinforcement Learning AI agent that is controlling a virtual autonomous vehicle. Specifically, we show that the AI learns a driving strategy that maintains a safe distance from a lead vehicle, and most novelly, preferentially slows the vehicle when the human passengers of the vehicle encounter objects of interest. This adaptation affords an additional 20% viewing time for subjectively interesting objects. This is the first demonstration of how an hBCI can be used to provide implicit reinforcement to an AI agent in a way that incorporates user preferences into the control system.
Human and AI are increasingly interacting and collaborating to accomplish various complex tasks in the context of diverse application domains (e.g., healthcare, transportation, and creative design). Two dynamic, learning entities (AI and human) have distinct mental model, expertise, and ability; such fundamental difference/mismatch offers opportunities for bringing new perspectives to achieve better results. However, this mismatch can cause unexpected failure and result in serious consequences. While recent research has paid much attention to enhancing interpretability or explainability to allow machine to explain how it makes a decision for supporting humans, this research argues that there is urging the need for both human and AI should develop specific, corresponding ability to interact and collaborate with each other to form a human-AI team to accomplish superior results. This research introduces a conceptual framework called Co-Learning, in which people can learn with/from and grow with AI partners over time. We characterize three key concepts of co-learning: mutual understanding, mutual benefits, and mutual growth for facilitating human-AI collaboration on complex problem solving. We will present proof-of-concepts to investigate whether and how our approach can help human-AI team to understand and benefit each other, and ultimately improve productivity and creativity on creative problem domains. The insights will contribute to the design of Human-AI collaboration.
Advances in artificial intelligence have renewed interest in conversational agents. Additionally to software developers, today all kinds of employees show interest in new technologies and their possible applications for customers. German insurance companies generally are interested in improving their customer service and digitizing their business processes. In this work we investigate the potential use of conversational agents in insurance companies theoretically by determining which classes of agents exist which are of interest to insurance companies, finding relevant use cases and requirements. We add two practical parts: First we develop a showcase prototype for an exemplary insurance scenario in claim management. Additionally in a second step, we create a prototype focusing on customer service in a chatbot hackathon, fostering innovation in interdisciplinary teams. In this work, we describe the results of both prototypes in detail. We evaluate both chatbots defining criteria for both settings in detail and compare the results and draw conclusions for the maturity of chatbot technology for practical use, describing the opportunities and challenges companies, especially small and medium enterprises, face.