Related papers: Dynamic Dialogue Policy for Continual Reinforcemen…

A Dialogue State Tracker is a key component in dialogue systems which estimates the beliefs of possible user goals at each dialogue turn. Deep learning approaches using recurrent neural networks have shown state-of-the-art performance for…

Efforts towards endowing robots with the ability to speak have benefited from recent advancements in natural language processing, in particular large language models. However, current language models are not fully incremental, as their…

During the past decade, several areas of speech and language understanding have witnessed substantial breakthroughs from the use of data-driven models. In the area of dialogue systems, the trend is less obvious, and most practical systems…

Spoken dialogue systems allow humans to interact with machines using natural speech. As such, they have many benefits. By using speech as the primary communication medium, a computer interface can facilitate swift, human-like acquisition of…

Argumentation-based dialogue systems, which can handle and exchange arguments through dialogue, have been widely researched. It is required that these systems have sufficient supporting information to argue their claims rationally; however,…

Continual learning (CL) is a paradigm that aims to replicate the human ability to learn and accumulate knowledge continually without forgetting previous knowledge and transferring it to new tasks. Recent instruction tuning (IT) involves…

This paper is concerned with the training of recurrent neural networks as goal-oriented dialog agents using reinforcement learning. Training such agents with policy gradients typically requires a large amount of samples. However, the…

We consider the task of building a dialogue system that can motivate users to adopt positive lifestyle changes: Motivational Interviewing. Addressing such a task requires a system that can infer \textit{how} to motivate a user effectively.…

To train a statistical spoken dialogue system (SDS) it is essential that an accurate method for measuring task success is available. To date training has relied on presenting a task to either simulated or paid users and inferring the…

Reinforcement learning methods have been used for learning dialogue policies. However, learning an effective dialogue policy frequently requires prohibitively many conversations. This is partly because of the sparse rewards in dialogues,…

Stochastic sampling strategies such as top-k and top-p have been widely used in dialogue generation task. However, as an open-domain chatting system, there will be two different conversation scenarios, i.e. chit-chat and knowledge-based…

Dialog policy determines the next-step actions for agents and hence is central to a dialogue system. However, when migrated to novel domains with little data, a policy model can fail to adapt due to insufficient interactions with the new…

The theory of continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) has progressed rapidly in recent years. While the ultimate objective of RL is typically to learn deterministic control policies, most existing continuous-time RL methods rely on…

Sharing ideas through communication with peers is the primary mode of human interaction. Consequently, extensive research has been conducted in the area of conversational AI, leading to an increase in the availability and diversity of…

Training a task-completion dialogue agent via reinforcement learning (RL) is costly because it requires many interactions with real users. One common alternative is to use a user simulator. However, a user simulator usually lacks the…

In our dynamic world where data arrives in a continuous stream, continual learning enables us to incrementally add new tasks/domains without the need to retrain from scratch. A major challenge in continual learning of language model is…

Dialogue State Tracking (DST) is crucial for understanding user needs and executing appropriate system actions in task-oriented dialogues. Majority of existing DST methods are designed to work within predefined ontologies and assume the…

To adapt effectively to dynamic real-world environments, intelligent systems must continually acquire new skills while generalizing them to diverse, unseen scenarios. Here, we introduce a novel and realistic setting named domain…

Pre-trained models have achieved excellent performance on the dialogue task. However, for the continual increase of online chit-chat scenarios, directly fine-tuning these models for each of the new tasks not only explodes the capacity of…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been witnessed its potential for training a dialogue policy agent towards maximizing the accumulated rewards given from users. However, the reward can be very sparse for it is usually only provided at the end…