Fatemeh Sheikholeslami


2023

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Scalable and Safe Remediation of Defective Actions in Self-Learning Conversational Systems
Sarthak Ahuja | Mohammad Kachuee | Fatemeh Sheikholeslami | Weiqing Liu | Jaeyoung Do
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)

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.