ARCIDUCA - End of Project Workshop
Queen Mary University, 8th July 2025
Embedded Files
Location
Location
This will be a hybrid event - participation will be possible both in person and online - but the size of the room is limited, so please RSVP to Juexi Shao if you would like to attend in person. Also let us know if you want to attend online so we can add you to the list of participants on Zoom.
In-person location: Graduate Centre GC101
All times in British Summer Time.
Schedule
Schedule
10:15 Massimo Poesio (Queen Mary Uni / Uni Utrecht ): Welcome, Summary of the Project
11:00 Coffee break
11:30 Juntao Yu (Queen Mary Uni): The CODI / CRAC 2021 and 2022 Shared Tasks on Anaphoric Reference in Dialogue and the Universal Anaphora Scorer
Abstract: TBA
12:15 Chris Madge (Queen Mary Uni): Conversational Agents and Clarifiations in the Minecraft Dialogue Task
Abstract: TBA
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Christopher Zhang Cui (UCSD) and Marc-Alexandre Côté (Microsoft Research): TALES: Text Adventure Learning Environment Suite
Abstract: Reasoning is an essential skill to enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to interact with the world. As tasks become more complex, they demand increasingly sophisticated and diverse reasoning capabilities for sequential decision-making, requiring structured reasoning over the context history to determine the next best action. We introduce TALES, a diverse collection of synthetic and human-written text-adventure games designed to challenge and evaluate diverse reasoning capabilities. We present results over a range of LLMs, open- and closed-weights, performing a qualitative analysis on the top performing models. Despite an impressive showing on synthetic games, even the top LLM-driven agents fail to achieve 20% on games designed for human enjoyment. Code and visualization of the experiments can be found at https://microsoft.github.io/tale-suite.
Bio
Christopher Zhang Cui is a first year PhD student at the PEARLS Lab in University of California, San Diego. Before starting his PhD, he received his BS from UNC Chapel Hill and MS from Georgia Tech. His research focuses on natural language agents in a range of settings, from text-worlds to education. In text-worlds, he explores how to imbue agents with the long-horizon reasoning skills necessary for success in text-based adventure games and many real-world applications. In education, he explores how to better deliver interactive assignments through AI tutors to improve student learning outcomes.
Marc-Alexandre Côté is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research - Montréal. Since joining Microsoft in 2017, his research focused on reinforcement learning (RL) and natural language understanding. Specifically, he is leading the Microsoft TextWorld project which aims at developing new RL agents capable of navigating and interacting with text environments (e.g. text-based adventure games). Such agents should possess skills like reading and understanding natural language text, information/knowledge-gathering, planning, and dealing with a combinatorially large action-space. Marc-Alexandre Côté is also one of the organizers for the Wordplay: When Language Meets Games workshop at EMNLP 2025.
14:45 Julian Hough (Swansea University): TBA
Abstract: TBA
15:30 Yujian Gan (Queen Mary Uni & UCL): Coreference and clarification in textual adventure games
Abstract: TBA
16:15 Juexi Shao (Queen Mary Uni): Reference and Generalized Reference in the Minecraft Dialogue Task
Abstract: TBA
16:45 Tea Break
17:15 Final discussion, End
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