When reading a story, humans can rapidly understand new fictional characters with a few observations, mainly by drawing analogy to fictional and real people they met before in their lives. This reflects the few-shot and meta-learning essence of humans' inference of characters' mental states, i.e., humans' theory-of-mind (ToM), which is largely ignored in existing research. We fill this gap with a novel NLP benchmark, TOM-IN-AMC, the first assessment of models' ability of meta-learning of ToM in a realistic narrative understanding scenario. Our benchmark consists of $\sim$1,000 parsed movie scripts for this purpose, each corresponding to a few-shot character understanding task; and requires models to mimic humans' ability of fast digesting characters with a few starting scenes in a new movie. Our human study verified that humans can solve our problem by inferring characters' mental states based on their previously seen movies; while the state-of-the-art metric-learning and meta-learning approaches adapted to our task lags 30% behind.

许多古典童话，小说和剧本都利用对话来推进故事情节并建立角色。我们提出了第一个研究，以探索机器是否可以理解和产生故事中的对话，这需要捕获不同角色的特征及其之间的关系。为此，我们提出了两项​​新任务，包括蒙版对话生成和对话演讲者的认可，即分别产生对话转弯和预测说话者的指定对话转弯。我们构建了一个新的数据集拨号故事，该数据集由105K中国故事组成，其中包含大量对话，以支持评估。我们通过对拨号故事进行自动和手动评估测试现有模型来显示提出的任务的困难。此外，我们建议学习明确的角色表示，以提高这些任务的绩效。广泛的实验和案例研究表明，我们的方法可以产生更连贯和信息丰富的对话，并获得比强基础更高的说话者识别精度。

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly human-like learning and thinking machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn, and how they learn it. Specifically, we argue that these machines should (a) build causal models of the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely solving pattern recognition problems; (b) ground learning in intuitive theories of physics and psychology, to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned; and (c) harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete challenges and promising routes towards these goals that can combine the strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive models.

整合不同域的知识是人类学习的重要特征。学习范式如转移学习，元学习和多任务学习，通过利用新任务的先验知识，鼓励更快的学习和新任务的良好普遍来反映人类学习过程。本文提供了这些学习范例的详细视图以及比较分析。学习算法的弱点是另一个的力量，从而合并它们是文献中的一种普遍的特征。这项工作提供了对文章的文献综述，这些文章融合了两种算法来完成多个任务。这里还介绍了全球通用学习网络，在此介绍了元学习，转移学习和多任务学习的集合，以及一些开放的研究问题和未来研究的方向。

We have a Christmas gift for Harry Potter fans all over the world. In this paper, we present Harry Potter Dialogue (HPD), a dataset that helps train Harry Potter-like dialogue agents. Such a task is typically viewed as a variant of personalized dialogue agents, but they differ significantly in three respects: 1) Harry lived in a virtual world of wizards, thus, real-world commonsense may not apply to Harry's conversations; 2) Harry's behavior is strongly linked to background information in conversations: the scene, its attributes and its relationship to other speakers; and 3) Such backgrounds are dynamically altered as the storyline goes on. The HPD dataset, as the first dataset to facilitate the study of dialogue agent construction for characters within a story, provides rich contextual information about each dialogue session such as scenes, character attributes, and relations. More importantly, all the background information will change over the course of the story. In addition, HPD could support both dialogue generation and retrieval tasks. We evaluate baselines such as Dialog-GPT and BOB to determine the extent to which they can generate Harry Potter-like responses. The experimental results disappoint us in that although the generated responses are fluent, they still seem out of character for Harry. Besides, we validate the current most robust dialogue agent, ChatGPT, which also can't generate plausible Harry-Potter-like responses in some cases, either. Our results suggest that there is much scope for future research.

最近的自然语言理解进展（NLU）已经被驱动，部分是由胶水，超级格，小队等的基准。事实上，许多NLU模型现在在许多任务中匹配或超过“人类水平”性能这些基准。然而，大多数这些基准测试都提供模型访问相对大量的标记数据进行培训。因此，该模型提供了比人类所需的更多数据，以实现强大的性能。这有动机侧重于侧重于改善NLU模型的少量学习性能。然而，缺乏少量射门的标准化评估基准，导致不同纸张中的不同实验设置。为了帮助加速这一工作的工作，我们介绍了线索（受限制的语言理解评估标准），这是评估NLU模型的几次拍摄学习功能的基准。我们证明，虽然最近的模型在获得大量标记数据时达到人类性能，但对于大多数任务，少量拍摄设置中的性能存在巨大差距。我们还展示了几个拍摄设置中替代模型家族和适应技术之间的差异。最后，我们讨论了在设计实验设置时讨论了评估真实少量学习绩效的实验设置，并提出了统一的标准化方法，以获得少量学习评估。我们的目标是鼓励对NLU模型的研究，可以概括为具有少数示例的新任务。线索的代码和数据可以在https://github.com/microsoft/clues提供。

在只有有限的数据可用的低资源场景中，自然语言处理（NLP）的建立模型（NLP）具有挑战性。基于优化的元学习算法通过适应良好的模型初始化来处理新任务，从而在低资源场景中实现了有希望的结果。尽管如此，这些方法遭受了记忆过度拟合问题的困扰，在这种情况下，模型倾向于记住元训练任务，而在适应新任务时忽略了支持集。为了解决此问题，我们提出了一种内存模仿元学习（MEMIML）方法，该方法增强了模型对任务适应的支持集的依赖。具体来说，我们引入了一个特定于任务的内存模块来存储支持集信息并构建一个模仿模块，以强制查询集，以模仿存储在存储器中的某些代表性支持集样本的行为。提供了一种理论分析来证明我们方法的有效性，经验结果还表明，我们的方法在文本分类和生成任务上都优于竞争基准。

元学习方法旨在构建能够快速适应低数据制度的新任务的学习算法。这种算法的主要基准之一是几次学习问题。在本文中，我们调查了在培训期间采用多任务方法的标准元学习管道的修改。该提出的方法同时利用来自常见损​​失函数中的几个元训练任务的信息。每个任务在损耗功能中的影响由相应的重量控制。正确优化这些权重可能对整个模型的训练产生很大影响，并且可能会提高测试时间任务的质量。在这项工作中，我们提出并调查了使用同时扰动随机近似（SPSA）方法的方法的使用方法，用于元列车任务权重优化。我们还将提出的算法与基于梯度的方法进行了比较，发现随机近似表明了测试时间最大的质量增强。提出的多任务修改可以应用于使用元学习管道的几乎所有方法。在本文中，我们研究了这种修改对CiFar-FS，FC100，TieredimAgenet和MiniimAgenet几秒钟学习基准的原型网络和模型 - 不可知的元学习算法。在这些实验期间，多任务修改已经证明了对原始方法的改进。所提出的SPSA跟踪算法显示了对最先进的元学习方法具有竞争力的最大精度提升。我们的代码可在线获取。

The goal of building dialogue agents that can converse with humans naturally has been a long-standing dream of researchers since the early days of artificial intelligence. The well-known Turing Test proposed to judge the ultimate validity of an artificial intelligence agent on the indistinguishability of its dialogues from humans'. It should come as no surprise that human-level dialogue systems are very challenging to build. But, while early effort on rule-based systems found limited success, the emergence of deep learning enabled great advance on this topic. In this thesis, we focus on methods that address the numerous issues that have been imposing the gap between artificial conversational agents and human-level interlocutors. These methods were proposed and experimented with in ways that were inspired by general state-of-the-art AI methodologies. But they also targeted the characteristics that dialogue systems possess.

It has been experimentally demonstrated that humans are able to learn in a manner that allows them to make predictions on categories for which they have not seen any examples (Malaviya et al., 2022). Sucholutsky and Schonlau (2020) have recently presented a machine learning approach that aims to do the same. They utilise synthetically generated data and demonstrate that it is possible to achieve sub-linear scaling and develop models that can learn to recognise N classes from M training samples where M is less than N - aka less-than-one shot learning. Their method was, however, defined for univariate or simple multivariate data (Sucholutsky et al., 2021). We extend it to work on large, high-dimensional and real-world datasets and empirically validate it in this new and challenging setting. We apply this method to learn previously unseen NLP tasks from very few examples (4, 8 or 16). We first generate compact, sophisticated less-than-one shot representations called soft-label prototypes which are fitted on training data, capturing the distribution of different classes across the input domain space. We then use a modified k-Nearest Neighbours classifier to demonstrate that soft-label prototypes can classify data competitively, even outperforming much more computationally complex few-shot learning methods.

Few-shot learning aims to fast adapt a deep model from a few examples. While pre-training and meta-training can create deep models powerful for few-shot generalization, we find that pre-training and meta-training focuses respectively on cross-domain transferability and cross-task transferability, which restricts their data efficiency in the entangled settings of domain shift and task shift. We thus propose the Omni-Training framework to seamlessly bridge pre-training and meta-training for data-efficient few-shot learning. Our first contribution is a tri-flow Omni-Net architecture. Besides the joint representation flow, Omni-Net introduces two parallel flows for pre-training and meta-training, responsible for improving domain transferability and task transferability respectively. Omni-Net further coordinates the parallel flows by routing their representations via the joint-flow, enabling knowledge transfer across flows. Our second contribution is the Omni-Loss, which introduces a self-distillation strategy separately on the pre-training and meta-training objectives for boosting knowledge transfer throughout different training stages. Omni-Training is a general framework to accommodate many existing algorithms. Evaluations justify that our single framework consistently and clearly outperforms the individual state-of-the-art methods on both cross-task and cross-domain settings in a variety of classification, regression and reinforcement learning problems.

随着预训练的语言模型的发展，对话理解（DU）已经看到了杰出的成功。但是，当前的DU方法通常为每个不同的DU任务采用独立模型，而无需考虑跨不同任务的共同知识。在本文中，我们提出了一个名为{\ em unidu}的统一的生成对话理解框架，以实现跨不同DU任务的有效信息交流。在这里，我们将所有DU任务重新制定为基于统一的立即生成模型范式。更重要的是，引入了一种新颖的模型多任务训练策略（MATS），以动态调整各种任务的权重，以根据每个任务的性质和可用数据在培训期间进行最佳知识共享。涵盖五个基本DU任务的十个DU数据集的实验表明，在所有任务上，提出的UNIDU框架在很大程度上优于特定于特定于任务精心设计的方法。 MATS还揭示了这些任务的知识共享结构。最后，Unidu在看不见的对话领域中获得了有希望的表现，显示了概括的巨大潜力。

Pragmatics is an essential part of communication, but it remains unclear what mechanisms underlie human pragmatic communication and whether NLP systems capture pragmatic language understanding. To investigate both these questions, we perform a fine-grained comparison of language models and humans on seven pragmatic phenomena, using zero-shot prompting on an expert-curated set of English materials. We ask whether models (1) select pragmatic interpretations of speaker utterances, (2) make similar error patterns as humans, and (3) use similar linguistic cues as humans to solve the tasks. We find that the largest models achieve high accuracy and match human error patterns: within incorrect responses, models favor the literal interpretation of an utterance over heuristic-based distractors. We also find evidence that models and humans are sensitive to similar linguistic cues. Our results suggest that even paradigmatic pragmatic phenomena may be solved without explicit representations of other agents' mental states, and that artificial models can be used to gain mechanistic insights into human pragmatic processing.

几乎没有弹出的文本分类旨在在几个弹奏方案下对文本进行分类。以前的大多数方法都采用基于优化的元学习来获得任务分布。但是，由于少数样本和复杂模型之间的匹配以及有用的任务功能之间的区别，这些方法遭受了过度拟合问题的影响。为了解决这个问题，我们通过梯度相似性（AMGS）方法提出了一种新颖的自适应元学习器，以提高模型的泛化能力。具体而言，拟议的AMG基于两个方面缓解了过度拟合：（i）通过内部循环中的自我监督的辅助任务来获取样品的潜在语义表示并改善模型的概括，（ii）利用适应性元学习者通过适应性元学习者通过梯度通过相似性，可以在外环中基底学习者获得的梯度上增加约束。此外，我们对正则化对整个框架的影响进行系统分析。对几个基准测试的实验结果表明，与最先进的优化元学习方法相比，提出的AMG始终提高了很少的文本分类性能。

以任务为导向的对话系统（TDSS）主要在离线设置或人类评估中评估。评估通常仅限于单转或非常耗时。作为替代方案，模拟用户行为的用户模拟器使我们能够考虑一组广泛的用户目标，以生成类似人类的对话以进行模拟评估。使用现有的用户模拟器来评估TDSS是具有挑战性的，因为用户模拟器主要旨在优化TDSS的对话策略，并且评估功能有限。此外，对用户模拟器的评估是一个开放的挑战。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个用于端到端TDS评估的隐喻用户模拟器，如果它在与系统的交互中模拟用户的类似思维，则定义模拟器是隐喻的。我们还提出了一个基于测试人员的评估框架，以生成变体，即具有不同功能的对话系统。我们的用户模拟器构建了一个隐喻的用户模型，该模型通过参考遇到新项目时的先验知识来帮助模拟器进行推理。我们通过检查模拟器与变体之间的模拟相互作用来估计模拟器的质量。我们的实验是使用三个TDS数据集进行的。与基于议程的模拟器和三个数据集上的SEQ2SEQ模型相比，隐喻用户模拟器与手动评估的一致性更好。我们的测试人员框架展示了效率，并且可以更好地概括和可扩展性，因为它可以适用于多个域中的对话和多个任务，例如对话建议和电子商务对话。

Metric-based meta-learning is one of the de facto standards in few-shot learning. It composes of representation learning and metrics calculation designs. Previous works construct class representations in different ways, varying from mean output embedding to covariance and distributions. However, using embeddings in space lacks expressivity and cannot capture class information robustly, while statistical complex modeling poses difficulty to metric designs. In this work, we use tensor fields (``areas'') to model classes from the geometrical perspective for few-shot learning. We present a simple and effective method, dubbed hypersphere prototypes (HyperProto), where class information is represented by hyperspheres with dynamic sizes with two sets of learnable parameters: the hypersphere's center and the radius. Extending from points to areas, hyperspheres are much more expressive than embeddings. Moreover, it is more convenient to perform metric-based classification with hypersphere prototypes than statistical modeling, as we only need to calculate the distance from a data point to the surface of the hypersphere. Following this idea, we also develop two variants of prototypes under other measurements. Extensive experiments and analysis on few-shot learning tasks across NLP and CV and comparison with 20+ competitive baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

We propose a novel task, G4C (Goal-driven Guidance Generation in Grounded Communication), for studying goal-driven and grounded natural language interactions. Specifically, we choose Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) -- a role-playing game consisting of multiple player characters and a Dungeon Master (DM) who collaborate to achieve a set of goals that are beneficial to the players -- as a testbed for this task. Here, each of the player characters is a student, with their own personas and abilities, and the DM is the teacher, an arbitrator of the rules of the world and responsible for assisting and guiding the students towards a global goal. We propose a theory-of-mind-inspired methodology for training such a DM with reinforcement learning (RL), where a DM: (1) learns to predict how the players will react to its utterances using a dataset of D&D dialogue transcripts; and (2) uses this prediction as a reward function providing feedback on how effective these utterances are at guiding the players towards a goal. Human and automated evaluations show that a DM trained with RL to generate guidance by incorporating a theory-of-mind of the players significantly improves the players' ability to achieve goals grounded in their shared world.

深度学习一直是自然语言处理（NLP）领域的主流技术。但是，这些技术需要许多标记的数据，并且在整个域之间不太概括。元学习是机器学习研究方法的一个领域，以学习更好的学习算法。方法旨在改善各个方面的算法，包括数据效率和概括性。在许多NLP任务中已经显示出方法的功效，但是在NLP中没有系统的调查，这阻碍了更多的研究人员加入该领域。我们使用这篇调查文件的目标是为研究人员提供NLP中相关的元学习作品的指针，并吸引NLP社区的更多关注以推动未来的创新。本文首先介绍了元学习和共同方法的一般概念。然后，我们总结了任务构建设置和用于各种NLP问题的元学习的应用，并审查NLP社区中元学习的发展。

不同的人以不同的方式衰老。为每个人学习个性化的年龄估计器是年龄估计的有前途的方向，因为它可以更好地建模衰老过程的个性化。但是，由于高级要求，大多数现有的个性化方法都缺乏大规模数据集：身份标签和足够的样本使每个人形成长期衰老模式。在本文中，我们旨在学习没有上述要求的个性化年龄估计量，并提出一种元学习方法，称为年龄估计。与大多数现有的个性化方法不同，这些方法学习了培训集中每个人的个性化估计器的参数，我们的方法将映射从身份信息到年龄估计器参数学习。具体而言，我们引入了个性化的估算器元学习器，该估计量元学习器将身份功能作为输入并输出定制估算器的参数。这样，我们的方法就可以学习元知识而没有上述要求，并无缝将学习的元知识转移到测试集中，这使我们能够利用现有的大规模年龄数据集，而无需任何其他注释。在包括Morph II，Chalearn Lap 2015和Chalearn Lap 2016数据库在内的三个基准数据集上进行的大量实验结果表明，我们的元大大提高了现有的个性化方法的性能，并优于最先进的方法。

Figure 1: Our MovieQA dataset contains 14,944 questions about 408 movies. It contains multiple sources of information: plots, subtitles, video clips, scripts, and DVS transcriptions. In this figure we show example QAs from The Matrix and localize them in the timeline.