The context of modern smart voice assistants is often multi-modal, where images, audio and video content are consumed by users simultaneously. In such a setup, co-reference resolution is especially challenging, and runs across modalities and dialogue turns. We explore the problem of multi-modal co-reference resolution in multi-turn dialogues and quantify the performance of multi-modal LLMs on a specially curated dataset of long, image-interleaved conversations between a voice assistant and human in a shopping use case. We propose a custom architecture for multi-modal embedding alignment using a novel parameter augmentation technique. Our proposed Parameter Augmented LLM approach shows a 4.9% absolute F1 improvement above a cross-attention baseline while reducing the number of parameters being trained by 4x.

Large language models incorporate world knowledge and present breakthrough performances on zero-shot learning. However, these models capture societal bias (e.g., gender or racial bias) due to bias during the training process which raises ethical concerns or can even be potentially harmful. The issue is more pronounced in multi-modal settings, such as image captioning, as images can also add onto biases (e.g., due to historical non-equal representation of genders in different occupations). In this study, we investigate the removal of potentially problematic knowledge from multi-modal models used for image captioning. We relax the gender bias issue in captioning models by degenderizing generated captions through the use of a simple linear mask, trained via adversarial training. Our proposal makes no assumption on the architecture of the model and freezes the model weights during the procedure, which also enables the mask to be turned off. We conduct experiments on COCO caption datasets using our masking solution. The results suggest that the proposed mechanism can effectively mask the targeted biased knowledge, by replacing more than 99% gender words with neutral ones, and maintain a comparable captioning quality performance with minimal (e.g., -1.4 on BLEU4 and ROUGE) impact to accuracy metrics.

Multi-modality support has become an integral part of creating a seamless user experience with modern voice assistants with smart displays. Users refer to images, video thumbnails, or the accompanying text descriptions on the screen through voice communication with AI powered devices. This raises the need to either augment existing commercial voice only dialogue systems with state-of-the-art multimodal components, or to introduce entirely new architectures; where the latter can lead to costly system revamps. To support the emerging visual navigation and visual product selection use cases, we propose to augment commercially deployed voice-only dialogue systems with additional multi-modal components. In this work, we present a novel yet pragmatic approach to expand an existing dialogue-based context carryover system (Chen et al., 2019a) in a voice assistant with state-of-the-art multimodal components to facilitate quick delivery of visual modality support with minimum changes. We demonstrate a 35% accuracy improvement over the existing system on an in-house multi-modal visual navigation data set.

Current voice assistants typically use the best hypothesis yielded by their Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) module as input to their Natural Language Understanding (NLU) module, thereby losing helpful information that might be stored in lower-ranked ASR hypotheses. We explore the change in performance of NLU associated tasks when utilizing five-best ASR hypotheses when compared to status quo for two language datasets, German and Portuguese. To harvest information from the ASR five-best, we leverage extractive summarization and joint extractive-abstractive summarization models for Domain Classification (DC) experiments while using a sequence-to-sequence model with a pointer generator network for Intent Classification (IC) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) multi-task experiments. For the DC full test set, we observe significant improvements of up to 7.2% and 15.5% in micro-averaged F1 scores, for German and Portuguese, respectively. In cases where the best ASR hypothesis was not an exact match to the transcribed utterance (mismatched test set), we see improvements of up to 6.7% and 8.8% micro-averaged F1 scores, for German and Portuguese, respectively. For IC and NER multi-task experiments, when evaluating on the mismatched test set, we see improvements across all domains in German and in 17 out of 19 domains in Portuguese (improvements based on change in SeMER scores). Our results suggest that the use of multiple ASR hypotheses, as opposed to one, can lead to significant performance improvements in the DC task for these non-English datasets. In addition, it could lead to significant improvement in the performance of IC and NER tasks in cases where the ASR model makes mistakes.