← Search

Ryan McDonald

7 accepted papers

2025

Sparse Rewards Can Self-Train Dialogue Agents

ACL 2025finding

Recent advancements in state-of-the-art (SOTA) Large Language Model (LLM) agents, especially in multi-turn dialogue tasks, have been primarily driven by supervised fine-tuning and high-quality human feedback. However, as base LLM models continue to improve, acquiring meaningful human feedback has be…

2023

On the Effectiveness of Offline RL for Dialogue Response Generation

ICML 2023poster

A common training technique for language models is teacher forcing (TF). TF attempts to match human language exactly, even though identical meanings can be expressed in different ways. This motivates use of sequence-level objectives for dialogue response generation. In this paper, we study the effic…

2023

Wav2Seq: Pre-Training Speech-to-Text Encoder-Decoder Models Using Pseudo Languages

ICASSP 2023accepted

We introduce Wav2Seq, the first self-supervised approach to pre-train both parts of encoder-decoder models for speech data. We induce a pseudo language as a compact discrete representation, and formulate a self-supervised pseudo speech recognition task — transcribing audio inputs into pseudo subword…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Long-term Control for Dialogue Generation: Methods and Evaluation

NAACL 2022long

Current approaches for controlling dialogue response generation are primarily focused on high-level attributes like style, sentiment, or topic. In this work, we focus on constrained long-term dialogue generation, which involves more fine-grained control and requires a given set of control words to a…

2021

Focus Attention: Promoting Faithfulness and Diversity in Summarization

ACL 2021long

Professional summaries are written with document-level information, such as the theme of the document, in mind. This is in contrast with most seq2seq decoders which simultaneously learn to focus on salient content, while deciding what to generate, at each decoding step. With the motivation to narrow…

2021

Leveraging Type Descriptions for Zero-shot Named Entity Recognition and Classification

ACL 2021long

A common issue in real-world applications of named entity recognition and classification (NERC) is the absence of annotated data for the target entity classes during training. Zero-shot learning approaches address this issue by learning models from classes with training data that can predict classes…

Cited by 37SourcePDFScholar