Today’s virtual assistants help users to accomplish a wide variety of tasks, including finding flights, searching for nearby events and movies, making reservations, sourcing information from the web and more. They provide this functionality by offering a unified natural language interface to a wide variety of services across the web. Large-scale virtual assistants, like Google Assistant, need to integrate with a large and constantly increasing number of services, each with potentially overlapping functionality, over a wide variety of domains. Supporting new services with ease, without collection of additional data or retraining the model, and reducing maintenance workload are necessary to accommodate future growth. Despite tremendous progress, however, these challenges have often been overlooked in state-of-the-art models. This is due, in part, to the absence of suitable datasets that match the scale and complexity confronted by such virtual assistants.

In our recent paper, “Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset”, we introduce a new dataset to address these problems. The Schema-Guided Dialogue dataset (SGD) is the largest publicly available corpus of task-oriented dialogues, with over 18,000 dialogues spanning 17 domains. Equipped with various annotations, this dataset is designed to serve as an effective testbed for intent prediction, slot filling, state tracking (i.e., estimating the user’s goal) and language generation, among other tasks for large-scale virtual assistants. We also propose a schema-guided approach for building virtual assistants as a solution to the aforementioned challenges. Our approach utilizes a single model across all services and domains, with no domain-specific parameters. Based on the schema-guided approach and building on the power of pre-trained language models like BERT, we open source a model for dialogue state tracking, which is applicable in a zero-shot setting (i.e., with no training data for new services and APIs) while remaining competitive in the regular setting.

The Dataset
The primary goal of releasing the SGD dataset is to confront many real-world challenges that are not sufficiently captured by existing datasets. The SGD dataset consists of over 18k annotated multi-domain, task-oriented conversations between a human and a virtual assistant. These conversations involve interactions with services and APIs spanning 17 domains, ranging from banks and events to media, calendar, travel, and weather. For most of these domains, the SGD dataset contains multiple different APIs, many of which have overlapping functionalities but different interfaces, which reflects common real-world scenarios. SGD is the first dataset to cover such a wide variety of domains and provide multiple APIs per domain. Furthermore, to quantify the robustness of models to changes in API interfaces or to the addition of new APIs, the evaluation set contains many new services that are not present in the training set.

For the creation of the SGD dataset, we have prioritized the variety and accuracy of annotations in the included dialogues. To begin with, dialogues were collected by interaction between two people using a Wizard-of-Oz style process, followed by crowdsourced annotation. Initial efforts revealed the difficulty in obtaining consistent annotations using this method, so we developed a new data collection process that minimized the need for complex manual annotation, and considerably reduced the time and cost of data collection.

For this alternate approach, we developed a multi-domain dialogue simulator that generates dialogue skeletons over an arbitrary combination of APIs, along with the corresponding annotations, such as dialogue state and system actions. The simulator consists of two agents playing the role of the user and the assistant. Both the agents interact with each other using a finite set of actions denoting dialogue semantics with transitions specified through a probabilistic automaton, designed to capture a wide variety of dialogue trajectories. The actions generated by the simulator are converted into natural language utterances using a set of templates. Crowdsourcing is used only for paraphrasing these templatized utterances in order to make the dialogue more natural and coherent. This setup eliminates the need for complicated domain-specific instructions while keeping the crowdsourcing task simple and yields natural dialogues with consistent, high quality annotations.

Steps for obtaining dialogues, with assistant turns marked in red and user turns in blue. Left: The simulator generates a dialogue skeleton using a finite set of actions. Center: Actions are converted into utterances using templates (~50 per service) and slot values are replaced with natural variations. Right: Paraphrasing via crowdsourcing to make the flow cohesive.

The Schema-Guided Approach
With the availability of the SGD dataset, it is now possible to train virtual assistants to support the diversity of services available on the web. A common approach to do this requires a large master schema that lists all supported functions and their parameters. However, it is difficult to develop a master schema catering to all possible use cases. Even if that problem is solved, a master schema would complicate integration of new or small-scale services and would increase the maintenance workload of the assistant. Furthermore, while there are many similar concepts across services that can be jointly modeled, for example, the similarities in logic for querying or specifying the number of movie tickets, flight tickets or concert tickets, the master schema approach does not facilitate joint modeling of such concepts, unless an explicit mapping between them is manually defined.

The new schema-guided approach we propose addresses these limitations. This approach does not require the definition of a master schema for the assistant. Instead, each service or API provides a natural language description of the functions listed in its schema along with their associated attributes. These descriptions are then used to learn a distributed semantic representation of the schema, which is given as an additional input to the dialogue system. The dialogue system is then implemented as a single unified model, containing no domain or service specific parameters. This unified model facilitates representation of common knowledge between similar concepts in different services, while the use of distributed representations of the schema makes it possible to operate over new services that are not present in the training data. We have implemented this approach in our open-sourced dialogue state tracking model.

Eighth Dialogue System Technology Challenge
The Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTCs) are a series of research competitions to accelerate the development of new dialogue technologies. This year, Google organized one of the tracks, “Schema-Guided Dialogue State Tracking“, as part of the recently concluded 8th DSTC. We received submissions from a total of 25 teams from both industry and academia, which will be presented at the DSTC8 workshop at AAAI-20.

We believe that this dataset will act as a good benchmark for building large-scale dialogue models. We are excited and looking forward to all the innovative ways in which the research community will use it for the advancement of dialogue technologies.

Acknowledgements
This post reflects the work of our co-authors Xiaoxue Zang, Srinivas Sunkara and Raghav Gupta. We also thank Amir Fayazi and Maria Wang for help with data collection and Guan-Lin Chao for insights on model design and implementation.

This week, Seoul, South Korea hosts the International Conference on Computer Vision 2019 (ICCV 2019), one of the world’s premier conferences on computer vision. As a leader in computer vision research and a Gold Sponsor, Google will have a strong presence at ICCV 2019 with over 200 Googlers in attendance, more than 40 research presentations, and involvement in the organization of a number of workshops and tutorials.

If you are attending ICCV this year, please stop by our booth. There you can chat with researchers who are actively pursuing the latest innovations in computer vision and demo some of their latest research, including the technology behind MediaPipe, the new Open Images dataset, new developments for Google Lens and much more.

This year Google researchers are recipients of three prestigious ICCV awards:

• Distinguished Researcher Award — Bill Freeman, Research Scientist, Google Research
• Helmholtz Prize (Test of Time Award) — ICCV 2009 paper, “Building Rome in a Day“, by Sameer Agarwal, Noah Snavely, Ian Simon, Steve Seitz and Rick Szeliski
• Marr Prize (Best Paper Award) — ICCV 2019 paper, “SinGAN: Learning a Generative Model from a Single Natural Image“, by Tamar Rott Shaham, Tali Dekel and Tomer Michaeli

More details about the Google research being presented at ICCV 2019 can be found below (Google affiliations in blue).

Organizing Committee includes:
Ming-Hsuan Yang (Program Chair)

Oral Presentations
Learning Single Camera Depth Estimation using Dual-Pixels
Rahul Garg, Neal Wadhwa, Sameer Ansari, Jonathan Barron 

RIO: 3D Object Instance Re-Localization in Changing Indoor Environments
Johanna Wald, Armen Avetisyan, Nassir Navab, Federico Tombari, Matthias Niessner 

ShapeMask: Learning to Segment Novel Objects by Refining Shape Priors
Weicheng Kuo, Anelia Angelova, Jitendra Malik, Tsung-Yi Lin 

PuppetGAN: Cross-Domain Image Manipulation by Demonstration
Ben Usman, Nick Dufour, Kate Saenko, Chris Bregler

COCO-GAN: Generation by Parts via Conditional Coordinating
Chieh Hubert Lin, Chia-Che Chang, Yu-Sheng Chen, Da-Cheng Juan, Wei Wei, Hwann-Tzong Chen

Towards Unconstrained End-to-End Text Spotting
Siyang Qin, Alessandro Bissaco, Michalis Raptis, Yasuhisa Fujii, Ying Xiao

SinGAN: Learning a Generative Model from a Single Natural Image
Tamar Rott Shaham, Tali Dekel, Tomer Michaeli 
(ICCV 2019 Marr Prize Winner — Best Paper Award)

Generative Modeling for Small-Data Object Detection
Lanlan Liu, Michael Muelly, Jia Deng, Tomas Pfister, Li-Jia Li 

Searching for MobileNetV3
Andrew Howard, Mark Sandler, Bo Chen, Weijun Wang, Liang-Chieh Chen, Mingxing Tan, Grace Chu, Vijay Vasudevan, Yukun Zhu, Ruoming Pang, Hartwig Adam, Quoc Le 

S⁴L: Self-Supervised Semi-supervised Learning
Lucas Beyer, Xiaohua Zhai, Avital Oliver, Alexander Kolesnikov 

Sampling-Free Epistemic Uncertainty Estimation Using Approximated Variance Propagation
Janis Postels, Francesco Ferroni, Huseyin Coskun, Nassir Navab, Federico Tombari

Linearized Multi-sampling for Differentiable Image Transformation
Wei Jiang, Weiwei Sun, Andrea Tagliasacchi, Eduard Trulls, Kwang Moo Yi 

Poster Presentations
ELF: Embedded Localisation of Features in Pre-trained CNN
Assia Benbihi, Matthieu Geist, Cedric Pradalier 

Depth from Videos in the Wild: Unsupervised Monocular Depth Learning from Unknown Cameras
Ariel Gordon, Hanhan Li, Rico Jonschkowski, Anelia Angelova

ForkNet: Multi-branch Volumetric Semantic Completion from a Single Depth Image
Yida Wang, David Joseph Tan, Nassir Navab, Federico Tombari 

A Learned Representation for Scalable Vector Graphics
Raphael Gontijo Lopes, David Ha, Douglas Eck, Jonathon Shlens 

FrameNet: Learning Local Canonical Frames of 3D Surfaces from a Single RGB Image
Jingwei Huang, Yichao Zhou, Thomas Funkhouser, Leonidas Guibas

Prior-Aware Neural Network for Partially-Supervised Multi-Organ Segmentation
Yuyin Zhou, Zhe Li, Song Bai, Xinlei Chen, Mei Han, Chong Wang, Elliot Fishman, Alan Yuille 

Boundless: Generative Adversarial Networks for Image Extension
Dilip Krishnan, Piotr Teterwak, Aaron Sarna, Aaron Maschinot, Ce Liu, David Belanger, William Freeman

Cap2Det: Learning to Amplify Weak Caption Supervision for Object Detection
Keren Ye, Mingda Zhang, Adriana Kovashka, Wei Li, Danfeng Qin, Jesse Berent 

NOTE-RCNN: NOise Tolerant Ensemble RCNN for Semi-supervised Object Detection
Jiyang Gao, Jiang Wang, Shengyang Dai, Li-Jia Li, Ram Nevatia 

Object-Driven Multi-Layer Scene Decomposition from a Single Image
Helisa Dhamo, Nassir Navab, Federico Tombari 

Improving Adversarial Robustness via Guided Complement Entropy
Hao-Yun Chen, Jhao-Hong Liang, Shih-Chieh Chang, Jia-Yu Pan, Yu-Ting Chen, Wei Wei, Da-Cheng Juan 

XRAI: Better Attributions Through Regions
Andrei Kapishnikov, Tolga Bolukbasi, Fernanda Viegas, Michael Terry

SegSort: Segment Sorting for Semantic Segmentation
Jyh-Jing Hwang, Stella Yu, Jianbo Shi, Maxwell Collins, Tien-Ju Yang, Xiao Zhang, Liang-Chieh Chen 

Self-Supervised Learning with Geometric Constraints in Monocular Video: Connecting Flow, Depth, and Camera
Yuhua Chen, Cordelia Schmid, Cristian Sminchisescu 

VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning
Chen Sun, Austin Myers, Carl Vondrick, Kevin Murphy, Cordelia Schmid 

Explaining the Ambiguity of Object Detection and 6D Pose from Visual Data
Fabian Manhardt, Diego Martín Arroyo, Christian Rupprecht, Benjamin  Busam, Tolga Birdal, Nassir Navab, Federico Tombari 

Constructing Self-Motivated Pyramid Curriculums for Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation
Qing Lian, Lixin Duan, Fengmao Lv, Boqing Gong 

Learning Shape Templates Using Structured Implicit Functions
Kyle Genova, Forrester Cole, Daniel Vlasic, Aaron Sarna, William Freeman, Thomas Funkhouser

Transferable Representation Learning in Vision-and-Language Navigation
Haoshuo Huang, Vihan Jain, Harsh Mehta, Alexander Ku, Gabriel Magalhaes, Jason Baldridge, Eugene Ie 

Controllable Attention for Structured Layered Video Decomposition
Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Joao Carreira, Relja Arandjelović, Andrew Zisserman

Pixel2Mesh++: Multi-view 3D Mesh Generation via Deformation
Chao Wen, Yinda Zhang, Zhuwen Li, Yanwei Fu

Beyond Cartesian Representations for Local Descriptors
Patrick Ebel, Anastasiia Mishchuk, Kwang Moo Yi, Pascal Fua, Eduard Trulls

Domain Randomization and Pyramid Consistency: Simulation-to-Real Generalization without Accessing Target Domain Data
Xiangyu Yue, Yang Zhang, Sicheng Zhao, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Kurt Keutzer, Boqing Gong 

Evolving Space-Time Neural Architectures for Videos
AJ Piergiovanni, Anelia Angelova, Alexander Toshev, Michael Ryoo 

Moulding Humans: Non-parametric 3D Human Shape Estimation from Single Images
Valentin Gabeur, Jean-Sebastien Franco, Xavier Martin, Cordelia Schmid, Gregory Rogez

Multi-view Image Fusion
Marc Comino Trinidad, Ricardo Martin-Brualla, Florian Kainz, Janne Kontkanen 

EvalNorm: Estimating Batch Normalization Statistics for Evaluation
Saurabh Singh, Abhinav Shrivastava

Attention Augmented Convolutional Networks
Irwan Bello, Barret Zoph, Quoc Le, Ashish Vaswani, Jonathon Shlens 

Patchwork: A Patch-wise Attention Network for Efficient Object Detection and Segmentation in Video Streams
Yuning Chai

Workshops
Low-Power Computer Vision
Organizers include: Bo Chen

Neural Architects
Organizers include: Barret Zoph

The 3rd YouTube-8M Large-Scale Video Understanding Workshop
Organizers include: Paul Natsev, Cordelia Schmid, Rahul Sukthankar, Joonseok Lee, George Toderici

Should We Pre-register Experiments in Computer Vision?
Organizers include: Jack Valmadre

Extreme Vision Modeling
Organizers include: Rahul Sukthankar

Joint COCO and Mapillary Recognition Challenge
Organizers include: Tsung-Yi Lin, Yin Cui

Open Images Challenge
Organizers include: Vittorio Ferrari, Alina Kuznetsova, Rodrigo Benenson, Victor Gomes, Matteo Malloci

Tutorials
Meta-Learning and Metric Learning Algorithms
Organizers include: Kevin Swersky