Scalable and Safe Remediation of Defective Actions in Self-Learning
  Conversational Systems
Sarthak Ahuja Mohammad Kachuee Fateme Sheikholeslami Weiqing Liu Jaeyoung Do
Off-Policy reinforcement learning has been a driving force for the
state-of-the-art conversational AIs leading to more natural humanagent
interactions and improving the user satisfaction for goal-oriented agents.
However, in large-scale commercial settings, it is often challenging to balance
between policy improvements and experience continuity on the broad spectrum of
applications handled by such system. In the literature, off-policy evaluation
and guard-railing on aggregate statistics has been commonly used to address
this problem. In this paper, we propose a method for curating and leveraging
high-precision samples sourced from historical regression incident reports to
validate, safe-guard, and improve policies prior to the online deployment. We
conducted extensive experiments using data from a real-world conversational
system and actual regression incidents. The proposed method is currently
deployed in our production system to protect customers against broken
experiences and enable long-term policy improvements.