Invited Talk: Safer Generative ConvAI by Pascale Fung

Generative models for Conversational AI are less than a decade old, but they hold great promise for human-machine interactions. Machine responses based on generative models can seem quite fluent and human-like, empathetic and funny, knowledgeable and professional. However, behind the confident voice of generative ConvAI systems, they can also be hallucinating misinformation, giving biased and harmful views, and are still not "safe" enough for many real life applications. The expressive power of generative ConvAI models and their undesirable behaviors are two sides of the same coin. How can we harness the fluency, diversity, engagingness of generative ConvAI models while mitigating the downside? In this talk, I will present some of our recent work in making generative ConvAI safer via mitigating hallucinations, misinformation, and toxicity.