To improve user engagement during conversations with dialogue systems, we must improve individual dialogue responses and dialogue impressions such as consistency, personality, and empathy throughout the entire dialogue. While such dialogue systems have been developing rapidly with the help of large language models (LLMs), reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF) has attracted attention to align LLM-based dialogue models for such dialogue impressions. In RLAIF, a reward model based on another LLM is used to create a training signal for an LLM-based dialogue model using zero-shot/few-shot prompting techniques. However, evaluating an entire dialogue only by prompting LLMs is challenging. In this study, the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of LLMs prepared reward models corresponding to 12 metrics related to the impression of the entire dialogue for evaluating dialogue responses. We tuned our dialogue models using the reward model signals as feedback to improve the impression of the system. The results of automatic and human evaluations showed that tuning the dialogue model using our reward model corresponding to dialogue impression improved the evaluation of individual metrics and the naturalness of the dialogue response.

Automatic refinement of patent claims in patent applications is crucial from the perspective of intellectual property strategy. In this paper, we propose ClaimBrush, a novel framework for automated patent claim refinement that includes a dataset and a rewriting model. We constructed a dataset for training and evaluating patent claim rewriting models by collecting a large number of actual patent claim rewriting cases from the patent examination process. Using the constructed dataset, we built an automatic patent claim rewriting model by fine-tuning a large language model. Furthermore, we enhanced the performance of the automatic patent claim rewriting model by applying preference optimization based on a prediction model of patent examiners' Office Actions. The experimental results showed that our proposed rewriting model outperformed heuristic baselines and zero-shot learning in state-of-the-art large language models. Moreover, preference optimization based on patent examiners' preferences boosted the performance of patent claim refinement.

This paper introduces LLM-jp, a cross-organizational project for the research and development of Japanese large language models (LLMs). LLM-jp aims to develop open-source and strong Japanese LLMs, and as of this writing, more than 1,500 participants from academia and industry are working together for this purpose. This paper presents the background of the establishment of LLM-jp, summaries of its activities, and technical reports on the LLMs developed by LLM-jp.

Situated conversations, which refer to visual information as visual question answering (VQA), often contain ambiguities caused by reliance on directive information. This problem is exacerbated because some languages, such as Japanese, often omit subjective or objective terms. Such ambiguities in questions are often clarified by the contexts in conversational situations, such as joint attention with a user or user gaze information. In this study, we propose the Gaze-grounded VQA dataset (GazeVQA) that clarifies ambiguous questions using gaze information by focusing on a clarification process complemented by gaze information. We also propose a method that utilizes gaze target estimation results to improve the accuracy of GazeVQA tasks. Our experimental results showed that the proposed method improved the performance in some cases of a VQA system on GazeVQA and identified some typical problems of GazeVQA tasks that need to be improved.

Narratives include a rich source of events unfolding over time and context. Automatic understanding of these events provides a summarised comprehension of the narrative for further computation (such as reasoning). In this paper, we study the Information Status (IS) of the events and propose a novel challenging task: the automatic identification of new events in a narrative. We define an event as a triplet of subject, predicate, and object. The event is categorized as new with respect to the discourse context and whether it can be inferred through commonsense reasoning. We annotated a publicly available corpus of narratives with the new events at sentence level using human annotators. We present the annotation protocol and study the quality of the annotation and the difficulty of the task. We publish the annotated dataset, annotation materials, and machine learning baseline models for the task of new event extraction for narrative understanding.

Argumentation-based dialogue systems, which can handle and exchange arguments through dialogue, have been widely researched. It is required that these systems have sufficient supporting information to argue their claims rationally; however, the systems often do not have enough of such information in realistic situations. One way to fill in the gap is acquiring such missing information from dialogue partners (information-seeking dialogue). Existing information-seeking dialogue systems are based on handcrafted dialogue strategies that exhaustively examine missing information. However, the proposed strategies are not specialized in collecting information for constructing rational arguments. Moreover, the number of system's inquiry candidates grows in accordance with the size of the argument set that the system deal with. In this paper, we formalize the process of information-seeking dialogue as Markov decision processes (MDPs) and apply deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for automatically optimizing a dialogue strategy. By utilizing DRL, our dialogue strategy can successfully minimize objective functions, the number of turns it takes for our system to collect necessary information in a dialogue. We conducted dialogue experiments using two datasets from different domains of argumentative dialogue. Experimental results show that the proposed formalization based on MDP works well, and the policy optimized by DRL outperformed existing heuristic dialogue strategies.