PhD Thesis Defense - Pei Zhou

PhD Thesis Defense - Pei Zhou    
 
Committee Members: Xiang Ren (Chair), Jay Pujara (Co-Chair), Toby Mintz, Jieyu Zhao    
 
Title: Common Ground Reasoning for Communicative Agents    
 
Abstract: Effective communication requires reasoning to reach mutual beliefs and knowledge among participants, a process called grounding. Large language model (LLM)-powered conversational AIs have displayed impressive capabilities, showing the potential of building AI agents that can interact with humans and the world smoothly. However, challenges remain unsolved for AI models to become capable communicative agents including understanding implicit intents and reaching goals. My PhD thesis outlines my research aiming to tackle these challenges by teaching models to reason to build common ground to become better communicators. Specifically, I focus on 1) enhancing conversational models with common sense knowledge; 2) modeling theory-of-mind capabilities to build goal-driven dialogue agents; and 3) eliciting metacognition by planning reasoning strategies for diverse scenarios. I will also discuss future directions including life-long self-learning with evolving common ground for personalization, interactive super-alignment to supervise models stronger than us, and measuring and improving safety to deploy agents in the wild.    
 
Venue: RTH 306 and Zoom https://usc.zoom.us/j/2065614640  
Date: 04/24/2024, 2-4PM  

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) -

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: CS Events

Event Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/2065614640