Given the ubiquity of negative campaigning in recent political elections, we find it important to study its properties from a theoretical computational perspective. To this end, we present a model where elections can be manipulated by convincing voters to demote specific non-favored candidates, and study its properties in the classic setting of scoring rules. When the goal is constructive (making a preferred candidate win), we prove that finding such a demotion strategy is easy for Plurality and Veto, while generally hard for t-approval and Borda. We also provide a min(t, m - t)-factor approximation for t-approval for every t ∈ {1,..., m - 1} (where m is the number of candidates), and a 3-factor approximation algorithm for Borda. Interestingly enough---following recent trends in political science that show that the effectiveness of negative campaigning depends on the type of candidate and demographic---when assigning varying prices to different possible demotion operations, we are able to provide inapproximability results. When the goal is destructive (making the leading opponent lose), we show that the problem is easy for a broad class of scoring rules and provide an FPTAS for the general case.

NLP benchmarks rely on standardized datasets for training and evaluating models and are crucial for advancing the field. Traditionally, expert annotations ensure high-quality labels; however, the cost of expert annotation does not scale well with the growing demand for larger datasets required by modern models. While crowd-sourcing provides a more scalable solution, it often comes at the expense of annotation precision and consistency. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities to enhance the annotation process, particularly for detecting label errors in existing datasets. In this work, we consider the recent approach of LLM-as-a-judge, leveraging an ensemble of LLMs to flag potentially mislabeled examples. We conduct a case study on four factual consistency datasets from the TRUE benchmark, spanning diverse NLP tasks, and on SummEval, which uses Likert-scale ratings of summary quality across multiple dimensions. We empirically analyze the labeling quality of existing datasets and compare expert, crowd-sourced, and LLM-based annotations in terms of the agreement, label quality, and efficiency, demonstrating the strengths and limitations of each annotation method. Our findings reveal a substantial number of label errors, which, when corrected, induce a significant upward shift in reported model performance. This suggests that many of the LLMs' so-called mistakes are due to label errors rather than genuine model failures. Additionally, we discuss the implications of mislabeled data and propose methods to mitigate them in training to improve performance.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become the standard approach for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, allowing LLMs to demonstrate remarkable abilities in various tasks. Existing methods work by emulating the human preference at the single decision (turn) level, limiting their capabilities in settings that require planning or multi-turn interactions to achieve a long-term goal. In this paper, we address this issue by developing novel methods for Reinforcement Learning (RL) from preference feedback between two full multi-turn conversations. In the tabular setting, we present a novel mirror-descent-based policy optimization algorithm for the general multi-turn preference-based RL problem, and prove its convergence to Nash equilibrium. To evaluate performance, we create a new environment, Education Dialogue, where a teacher agent guides a student in learning a random topic, and show that a deep RL variant of our algorithm outperforms RLHF baselines. Finally, we show that in an environment with explicit rewards, our algorithm recovers the same performance as a reward-based RL baseline, despite relying solely on a weaker preference signal.

Despite the seeming success of contemporary grounded text generation systems, they often tend to generate factually inconsistent text with respect to their input. This phenomenon is emphasized in tasks like summarization, in which the generated summaries should be corroborated by their source article. In this work, we leverage recent progress on textual entailment models to directly address this problem for abstractive summarization systems. We use reinforcement learning with reference-free, textual entailment rewards to optimize for factual consistency and explore the ensuing trade-offs, as improved consistency may come at the cost of less informative or more extractive summaries. Our results, according to both automatic metrics and human evaluation, show that our method considerably improves the faithfulness, salience, and conciseness of the generated summaries.

Most work on modeling the conversation history in Conversational Question Answering (CQA) reports a single main result on a common CQA benchmark. While existing models show impressive results on CQA leaderboards, it remains unclear whether they are robust to shifts in setting (sometimes to more realistic ones), training data size (e.g., from large to small sets) and domain. In this work, we design and conduct the first large-scale robustness study of history modeling approaches for CQA. We find that high benchmark scores do not necessarily translate to strong robustness, and that various methods can perform extremely differently under different settings. Equipped with the insights from our study, we design a novel prompt-based history modeling approach and demonstrate its strong robustness across various settings. Our approach is inspired by existing methods that highlight historic answers in the passage. However, instead of highlighting by modifying the passage token embeddings, we add textual prompts directly in the passage text. Our approach is simple, easy to plug into practically any model, and highly effective, thus we recommend it as a starting point for future model developers. We also hope that our study and insights will raise awareness to the importance of robustness-focused evaluation, in addition to obtaining high leaderboard scores, leading to better CQA systems.(1)

Despite recent advances in natural language understanding and generation, and decades of research on the development of conversational bots, building automated agents that can carry on rich open-ended conversations with humans "in the wild" remains a formidable challenge. In this work we develop a real-time, open-ended dialogue system that uses reinforcement learning (RL) to power a bot's conversational skill at scale. Our work pairs the succinct embedding of the conversation state generated using SOTA (supervised) language models with RL techniques that are particularly suited to a dynamic action space that changes as the conversation progresses. Trained using crowd-sourced data, our novel system is able to substantially exceeds the (strong) baseline supervised model with respect to several metrics of interest in a live experiment with real users of the Google Assistant.

Given the ubiquity of negative campaigning in recent political elections, we find it important to study its properties from a computational perspective. To this end, we present a model where elections can be manipulated by convincing voters to demote specific non-favored candidates, and study its properties in the classic setting of scoring rules. When the goal is constructive (making a preferred candidate win), we prove that finding such a demotion strategy is easy for Plurality and Veto, while generally hard for t-approval and Borda. We also provide a t-factor approximation for t-approval for every fixed t, and a 3-factor approximation algorithm for Borda. Interestingly enough - following recent trends in political science that show that the effectiveness of negative campaigning depends on the type of candidate and demographic - when assigning varying prices to different possible demotion operations, we are able to provide inapproximability results. When the goal is destructive (making the leading opponent lose), we show that the problem is easy for a broad class of scoring rules.

Sentence fusion is the task of joining related sentences into coherent text. Current training and evaluation schemes for this task are based on single reference ground-truths and do not account for valid fusion variants. We show that this hinders models from robustly capturing the semantic relationship between input sentences. To alleviate this, we present an approach in which ground-truth solutions are automatically expanded into multiple references via curated equivalence classes of connective phrases. We apply this method to a large-scale dataset and use the augmented dataset for both model training and evaluation. To improve the learning of semantic representation using multiple references, we enrich the model with auxiliary discourse classification tasks under a multi-tasking framework. Our experiments highlight the improvements of our approach over state-of-the-art models.

We study conversational domain exploration (CODEX), where the user’s goal is to enrich her knowledge of a given domain by conversing with an informative bot. Such conversations should be well grounded in high-quality domain knowledge as well as engaging and open-ended. A CODEX bot should be proactive and introduce relevant information even if not directly asked for by the user. The bot should also appropriately pivot the conversation to undiscovered regions of the domain. To address these dialogue characteristics, we introduce a novel approach termed dynamic composition that decouples candidate content generation from the flexible composition of bot responses. This allows the bot to control the source, correctness and quality of the offered content, while achieving flexibility via a dialogue manager that selects the most appropriate contents in a compositional manner. We implemented a CODEX bot based on dynamic composition and integrated it into the Google Assistant . As an example domain, the bot conversed about the NBA basketball league in a seamless experience, such that users were not aware whether they were conversing with the vanilla system or the one augmented with our CODEX bot. Results are positive and offer insights into what makes for a good conversation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first real user experiment of open-ended dialogues as part of a commercial assistant system.

We study the problem of coalitional manipulation-where k manipulators try to manipulate an election on m candidates-for any scoring rule, with focus on the Borda protocol. We do so in both the weighted and unweighted settings. For these problems, recent approximation approaches have tried to minimize k, the number of manipulators needed to make some preferred candidate p win (thus assuming that the number of manipulators is not limited in advance). In contrast, we focus on minimizing the score margin of p which is the difference between the maximum score of a candidate and the score of p. We provide algorithms that approximate the optimum score margin, which are applicable to any scoring rule. For the specific case of the Borda protocol in the unweighted setting, our algorithm provides a superior approximation factor for lower values of k. Our methods are novel and adapt techniques from multiprocessor scheduling by carefully rounding an exponentially-large con figuration linear program that is solved by using the ellipsoid method with an efficient separation oracle. We believe that such methods could be beneficial in other social choice settings as well.

The classic Bribery problem is to find a minimal subset of voters who need to change their vote to make some preferred candidate win. Its important generalizations consider voters who are weighted and also have different prices. We provide an approximate solution for these problems for a broad family of scoring rules (which includes Borda and t-approval), in the following sense: for constant weights and prices, if there exists a strategy which costs k, we efficiently find a strategy which costs at most k+\widetilde{O}(sqrt(k)). An extension for non-constant weights and prices is also given. Our algorithm is based on a randomized reduction from these Bribery generalizations to weighted coalitional manipulation (WCM). To solve this WCM instance, we apply the Birkhoff-von Neumann (BvN) decomposition to a fractional manipulation matrix. This allows us to limit the size of the possible ballot search space reducing it from exponential to polynomial, while still obtaining good approximation guarantees. Finding a solution in the truncated search space yields a new algorithm for WCM, which is of independent interest.

The classic bribery problem is to find a minimal subset of voters who need to change their vote to make some preferred candidate win.We find an approximate solution for this problem for a broad family of scoring rules (which includes Borda and t-approval), in the following sense: if there is a strategy which requires bribing k voters, we efficiently find a strategy which requires bribing at most k + Õ(√k) voters. Our algorithm is based on a randomized reduction from bribery to coalitional manipulation (UCM). To solve the UCM problem, we apply the Birkhoff-von Neumann (BvN) decomposition to a fractional manipulation matrix. This allows us to limit the size of the possible ballot search space reducing it from exponential to polynomial, while still obtaining good approximation guarantees. Finding the optimal solution in the truncated search space yields a new algorithm for UCM, which is of independent interest.

We present a system to enable speaker separation and identification, designed to operate without requiring any effort from the end-user. In the system, single channel conversations are transformed into i-vectors, clustered into speakers and matched to a database of known speakers. Enrollment is automatic and a voice print is constructed for the recording user, taking advantage of the meta-data identifying that user's conversations. Further information is used when available from other information sources such as video and the ASR transcribed content to identify speakers. We describe the system architecture, novel unsupervised enrollment algorithm and describe the difficulties encountered in solving this problem.

We study the problem of Borda Unweighted Coalitional Manipulation, where k manipulators try to manipulate an election on m candidates under the Borda protocol. This problem is known to be NP-hard. While most recent approaches to approximation tried to minimize k, the number of manipulators needed to make the preferred candidate win (thus assuming that the number of manipulators is not limited in advance), we focus instead on minimizing the maximum score obtainable by a non-preferred candidate. We provide a randomized, additive O(k √(m log m) ) approximation to this value; in other words, if there exists a strategy enabling the preferred candidate to win by an Ω(k √(m log m) ) margin, our method, with high probability, will find a strategy enabling her to win (albeit with a possibly smaller margin). It thus provides a somewhat stronger guarantee compared to the previous methods, where the addition of an extra manipulator implied (with respect to the original k) a strategy that provides an Ω(m)-additive approximation to a runner-up's score: when k is o(√(m/log m)), our strategy provides a stronger approximation. Our algorithm can also be viewed as a (1+o(1))-multiplicative approximation since the value we approximate has a natural Ω(km) lower bound.Our methods are novel and adapt techniques from multiprocessor scheduling by carefully rounding an exponentially-large configuration linear program that is solved by using the ellipsoid method with an efficient separation oracle. We believe that such methods could be beneficial in approximating coalitional manipulation in other election protocols as well.

Given a weighted n-vertex graph G with integer edge-weights taken from a range [−M,M], we show that the minimum-weight simple path visiting k vertices can be found in time $\tilde{O}(2^k \mathrm{poly}(k) M n^\omega) = O^*(2^k M)$. If the weights are reals in [1,M], we provide a (1+ε)-approximation which has a running time of $\tilde{O}(2^k \mathrm{poly}(k) n^\omega(\log\log M + 1/\varepsilon))$. For the more general problem of k-tree, in which we wish to find a minimum-weight copy of a k-node tree T in a given weighted graph G, under the same restrictions on edge weights respectively, we give an exact solution of running time $\tilde{O}(2^k \mathrm{poly}(k) M n^3) $ and a (1+ε)-approximate solution of running time $\tilde{O}(2^k \mathrm{poly}(k) n^3(\log\log M + 1/\varepsilon))$. All of the above algorithms are randomized with a polynomially-small error probability.

A string S∈Σm can be viewed as a set of pairs {(si,i)∣si∈S,i∈{0,…,m−1}}. We follow the recent work on pattern matching with address errors and consider approximate pattern matching problems arising from the setting where errors are introduced to the location component (i), rather than the more traditional setting, where errors are introduced to the content itself (si). Specifically, we continue the work on string matching in the presence of address bit errors. In this paper, we consider the case where bits of i may be stuck, either in a consistent or transient manner. We formally define the corresponding approximate pattern matching problems, and provide efficient algorithms for their resolution.

In substring compression one is given a text to preprocess so that, upon request, a compressed substring is returned. Generalized substring compression is the same with the following twist. The queries contain an additional context substring (or a collection of context substrings) and the answers are the substring in compressed format, where the context substring is used to make the compression more efficient.

The well-known problem of the longest common subsequence (LCS), of two strings of lengths nand mrespectively, is O(nm)-time solvable and is a classical distance measure for strings. Another well-studied string comparison measure is that of parameterized matching, where two equal-length strings are a parameterized-match if there exists a bijection on the alphabets such that one string matches the other under the bijection. All works associated with parameterized pattern matching present polynomial time algorithms.There have been several attempts to accommodate parameterized matching along with other distance measures, as these turn out to be natural problems, e.g., Hamming distance, and a bounded version of edit-distance. Several algorithms have been proposed for these problems.In this paper we consider the longest common parameterized subsequence problem which combines the LCS measure with parameterized matching. We prove that the problem is NP-hard, and then show a couple of approximation algorithms for the problem.