Related papers: Joint System-Wise Optimization for Pipeline Goal-O…

The ability to compute an accurate reward function is essential for optimising a dialogue policy via reinforcement learning. In real-world applications, using explicit user feedback as the reward signal is often unreliable and costly to…

Dialog response ranking is used to rank response candidates by considering their relation to the dialog history. Although researchers have addressed this concept for open-domain dialogs, little attention has been focused on task-oriented…

Much of the alignment tuning literature is organized around optimization objectives, while the construction of alignment data is often treated implicitly. In this survey, we adopt a data centric perspective and reframe alignment tuning as a…

Large-scale alignment pipelines typically pair a policy model with a separately trained reward model whose parameters remain frozen during reinforcement learning (RL). This separation creates a complex, resource-intensive pipeline and…

Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems are designed to carry out specific tasks by tracking dialogue states and generating appropriate responses to help users achieve defined goals. Recently, end-to-end dialogue models pre-trained based on…

To overcome the limitations of automated metrics (e.g. BLEU, METEOR) for evaluating dialogue systems, researchers typically use human judgments to provide convergent evidence. While it has been demonstrated that human judgments can suffer…

Prompt-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) paradigm have succeeded substantially in few-shot natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, prior discrete prompt optimization methods require expert knowledge to design the base…

The effectiveness of the machine learning methods for real-world tasks depends on the proper structure of the modeling pipeline. The proposed approach is aimed to automate the design of composite machine learning pipelines, which is…

Evaluation is crucial in the development process of task-oriented dialogue systems. As an evaluation method, user simulation allows us to tackle issues such as scalability and cost-efficiency, making it a viable choice for large-scale…

The emergence of instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) has advanced the field of dialogue systems, enabling both realistic user simulations and robust multi-turn conversational agents. However, existing research often evaluates…

Dialogue data in real scenarios tend to be sparsely available, rendering data-starved end-to-end dialogue systems trained inadequately. We discover that data utilization efficiency in low-resource scenarios can be enhanced by mining…

We present "AutoJudge", an automated evaluation method for conversational dialogue systems. The method works by first generating dialogues based on self-talk, i.e. dialogue systems talking to itself. Then, it uses human ratings on these…

On-the-job learning consists in continuously learning while being used in production, in an open environment, meaning that the system has to deal on its own with situations and elements never seen before. The kind of systems that seem to be…

A major bottleneck for building statistical spoken dialogue systems for new domains and applications is the need for large amounts of training data. To address this problem, we adopt the multi-dimensional approach to dialogue management and…

There is a multitude of novel generative models for open-domain conversational systems; however, there is no systematic evaluation of different systems. Systematic comparisons require consistency in experimental design, evaluation sets,…

Large Language Models have demonstrated outstanding performance across various downstream tasks and have been widely applied in multiple scenarios. Human-annotated preference data is used for training to further improve LLMs' performance,…

The common pipeline of training deep neural networks consists of several building blocks such as data augmentation and network architecture selection. AutoML is a research field that aims at automatically designing those parts, but most…

An intelligent dialogue system in a multi-turn setting should not only generate the responses which are of good quality, but it should also generate the responses which can lead to long-term success of the dialogue. Although, the current…

A learning dialogue agent can infer its behaviour from interactions with the users. These interactions can be taken from either human-to-human or human-machine conversations. However, human interactions are scarce and costly, making…

Automatic evaluation metrics are a crucial component of dialog systems research. Standard language evaluation metrics are known to be ineffective for evaluating dialog. As such, recent research has proposed a number of novel,…