Amazon announced today that a team from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) has won the overall first prize for Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 5 (SGC5). In addition, a team from Stanford University was awarded the first plate award for scientific innovation-one category, which was newly introduced to SGC5 with the aim of allowing teams to focus on promoting the area of ​​conversation AI through a deecy of the foundations in open dialogue conversations.
SGC5 teams came to build Socialbots with the aim of providing a Comelling interactive multimodal and conversation user experience and integrating speech with visuals. Keep pursued a wide range of approaches, including emotional avatars, synchronized graphics and multimedia, image generation and multimodal dialogue using tips and touch input.
The Gauchochat team of four UCSB students, advised by XIFENG YAN, earned $ 250,000 for its total first performance. Stanford Chirpy Cardinal Team, which consisted of nine students advised by Christopher Manning, was also awarded $ 250,000. Both teams’ work with the other SGC5 participants is now trapped in a number of research articles.
“This is a high return to our endeavors that awake the last eight month for implementation, testing and optimization on our social bot,” said Hong Wang, UCSB Gauchochat team leader. “In addition, it is also a strong proof of efficiency and user preference towards our bot.”
“The innovations we have been bumping at the table, thanks to SGC5, have really transformed the way we think of open domain conversation, and we are convinced that many others in the dialogue community will also share the same view,” said Ryan Chi, Stanford Cardinal Team.
This was the first iteration of Socialbot Grand Challenge to incorporate multimodal customer experiences. In addition to verbal conversations, customers presented Echo -Science or a brand -TV we presented with images or text designed to improve the conversation experience. Teams, we offered the opportunity to improve their customer interactions by including text and images that provide more different and meaningful information.
“We are most proud that we built a personal, proactively and robust Socialbot system that steadily achieved the first place on user-raing leaderboard,” said Rajan Saini, a Gauchochat team member.
Team Nam from the Stevens Institute of Technology, advised by JIA XU, and Team Alaquist from the Czech Technical University, advised by Jan Sedivy, took second and third place, atm Attaelt, in the total award. Team Athena from the University of California, Santa Cruz, advised by Xin Eric Wang; And Team Hokiebot from Virginia Tech, advised by Lifif Huang, earned second and third in the scientific innovation category. The teams were each awarded $ 50,000 for second and $ 25,000 for the third.
“This year, SGC teams have pushed the boundaries of conversation AI by exploiting the potential of large language models to design robust open domain-social bots and identified important opportunities to improve LLMS to build the next generation of interactive and multimodal conversation assistants,” said Reza Ghanadan Senior Rector of AiTexa AI and head of Ai Alexa Ai Alexa.
Alexa customers interacted with University Socialbots by saying “Alexa, Open Alexa Prize” on Amazon Echo or four TV devices. Customer assessments and feedback help the students teams improve their bots. In the final phase, university teams implemented their latest innovations and adjusted their approach based on customer feedback.
Each university selected for the challenge received a $ 250,000 research fellow, Alexa-enabled devices, Free Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Computing Services to support their research and development efforts, access to Amazon scientists, COBOT (Conversational Bot) AI/ML Tool Set and Other Tool Recognition Through Alexa, Neural Detors Generation Models, Conversational Datasets, use Ratings and Feedback and Design Guid Guid and Design Guid and Design Guid and Design and Development Support from The Development and Development and Development Support from The Development and Development Support from the Development and Webstance Guides Alexa Prize Team.
The ultimate goal is to accommodate the Grand Challenge: Earn a composite score of 4.0 or higher (out of 5) from a judging panel, and get these Judes to find that at least two -thirds of their conversations with Socialbot in the last referee round remain coherent and engage for at least 20 minutes. Although the first team that met this benchmark would have been eligible to receive a $ 1 million research fellow for their university, no team met this benchmark in the SGC5 competition.
“I am very proud to see the extraordinary commitment and the tireless efforts of studs from the different SGC team that utilize the Cobot AI platform and tools to conceptualize, experiment and validate their scientific innovations using the real world online feedback the customers,” Ghanadan said. “Their journey of learning, collaboration and growth throughout the nine-month program has been really remarkable. As can be seen from this year’s Socialbot process, SGC5 teams have made significant scientific contributions to promoting the science of human AI interaction, demonstrating their social innovations in the real world environment.”
In previous challenges, participating teams have improved the latest species for open domain dialogue systems by developed improved natural language understanding systems (NLU), neural response generation models, models of common sense and dialogue policies leading to smoother and more engaging conversations.
The “Alaquist” team from the Czech Technical University won the fourth challenge in SGC4, with teams from Stanford and the University of Buffalo, who earned at second and third plate awards, respective. The publications from this challenge can be found here.
Winning teams from previous years also includes Emory University, the University of Washington and the University of California, Davis.