SAGEval: The frontiers of Satisfactory Agent based NLG Evaluation for reference-free open-ended text

Large Language Model (LLM) integrations into applications like Microsoft365 suite and Google Workspace for creating/processing documents, emails, presentations, etc. has led to considerable enhancements in productivity and time savings. But as these integrations become more more complex, it is paramount to ensure that the quality of output from the LLM-integrated applications are relevant and appropriate for use. Identifying the need to develop robust evaluation approaches for natural language generation, wherein references/ground labels doesn't exist or isn't amply available, this paper introduces a novel framework called "SAGEval" which utilizes a critiquing Agent to provide feedback on scores generated by LLM evaluators. We show that the critiquing Agent is able to rectify scores from LLM evaluators, in absence of references/ground-truth labels, thereby reducing the need for labeled data even for complex NLG evaluation scenarios, like the generation of JSON-structured forms/surveys with responses in different styles like multiple choice, likert ratings, single choice questions, etc.

On Optimizing Interventions in Shared Autonomy

Shared autonomy refers to approaches for enabling an autonomous agent to collaborate with a human with the aim of improving human performance. However, besides improving performance, it may often also be beneficial that the agent concurrently accounts for preserving the user's experience or satisfaction of collaboration. In order to address this additional goal, we examine approaches for improving the user experience by constraining the number of interventions by the autonomous agent. We propose two model-free reinforcement learning methods that can account for both hard and soft constraints on the number of interventions. We show that not only does our method outperform the existing baseline, but also eliminates the need to manually tune a black-box hyperparameter for controlling the level of assistance. We also provide an in-depth analysis of intervention scenarios in order to further illuminate system understanding.