Scalable and Safe Remediation of Defective Actions in Self-Learning Conversational Systems

Sarthak Ahuja, Mohammad Kachuee, Fatemeh Sheikholeslami, Weiqing Liu, Jaeyoung Do


Abstract
Off-Policy reinforcement learning has been the driving force for the state-of-the-art conversational AIs leading to more natural human-agent interactions and improving the user satisfaction for goal-oriented agents. However, in large-scale commercial settings, it is often challenging to balance between policy improvements and experience continuity on the broad spectrum of applications handled by such system. In the literature, off-policy evaluation and guard-railing on aggregate statistics has been commonly used to address this problem. In this paper, we propose method for curating and leveraging high-precision samples sourced from historical regression incident reports to validate, safe-guard, and improve policies prior to the online deployment. We conducted extensive experiments using data from a real-world conversational system and actual regression incidents. The proposed method is currently deployed in our production system to protect customers against broken experiences and enable long-term policy improvements.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-industry.35
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Sunayana Sitaram, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Jason D Williams
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
361–367
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-industry.35
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-industry.35
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sarthak Ahuja, Mohammad Kachuee, Fatemeh Sheikholeslami, Weiqing Liu, and Jaeyoung Do. 2023. Scalable and Safe Remediation of Defective Actions in Self-Learning Conversational Systems. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track), pages 361–367, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Scalable and Safe Remediation of Defective Actions in Self-Learning Conversational Systems (Ahuja et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-industry.35.pdf