# Recent Advances and Challenges in Task-oriented Dialog System

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.07490 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07490/

## Key facts

- Cited by 78 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 78)

- [WebLINX: Real-World Website Navigation with Multi-Turn Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05930/) (2024)
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- [Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13626/) (2023)
- [A Complete Survey on Generative AI (AIGC): Is ChatGPT from GPT-4 to GPT-5 All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11717/) (2023)
- [META-GUI: Towards Multi-modal Conversational Agents on Mobile GUI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11029/) (2022)
- [TalkToModel: Explaining Machine Learning Models with Interactive Natural Language Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04154/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Hallucination: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06265/) (2025)
- [GlobalWoZ: Globalizing MultiWoZ to Develop Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07679/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Recent Advances and Challenges in Reinforcement Learning Methods for Task-Oriented Dialogue Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13675/) (2022)
- [MMRC: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model in Real-World Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11903/) (2025)
- [Effectiveness of Pre-training for Few-shot Intent Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05782/) (2021)
- [Intelligent Virtual Assistants with LLM-based Process Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06677/) (2023)
- [Reliable LLM-based User Simulator for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13374/) (2024)
- [Goal Alignment in LLM-Based User Simulators for Conversational AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20152/) (2025)
- [ReMeDi: Resources for Multi-domain, Multi-service, Medical Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00430/) (2021)
- [In-Context Learning User Simulators for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00774/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Schema Graph Fusion Network for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06677/) (2022)
- [End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09008/) (2023)
- [Robust Dialogue State Tracking with Weak Supervision and Sparse Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03354/) (2022)
- [Social Influence Dialogue Systems: A Survey of Datasets and Models For Social Influence Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05664/) (2022)
- [Trajectory2Task: Training Robust Tool-Calling Agents with Synthesized Yet Verifiable Data for Complex User Intents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20144/) (2026)
- [Common Ground Tracking in Multimodal Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17284/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Dialogue Policy for Continual Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05928/) (2022)
- [Social Intelligence Data Infrastructure: Structuring the Present and Navigating the Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14659/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models as User-Agents for Evaluating Task-Oriented-Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09972/) (2024)
- [Prompt Conditioned VAE: Enhancing Generative Replay for Lifelong Learning in Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07783/) (2022)
- [Marrying Dialogue Systems with Data Visualization: Interactive Data Visualization Generation from Natural Language Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16013/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Task-oriented Dialogue Systems: A Systematic Review of Measures, Constructs and their Operationalisations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13871/) (2023)
- [Anti-Overestimation Dialogue Policy Learning for Task-Completion Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11762/) (2022)
- [Generative Zero-Shot Prompt Learning for Cross-Domain Slot Filling with Inverse Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02830/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Due to the significance and value in human-computer interaction and natural language processing, task-oriented dialog systems are attracting more and more attention in both academic and industrial communities. In this paper, we survey recent advances and challenges in task-oriented dialog systems. We also discuss three critical topics for task-oriented dialog systems: (1) improving data efficiency to facilitate dialog modeling in low-resource settings, (2) modeling multi-turn dynamics for dialog policy learning to achieve better task-completion performance, and (3) integrating domain ontology knowledge into the dialog model. Besides, we review the recent progresses in dialog evaluation and some widely-used corpora. We believe that this survey, though incomplete, can shed a light on future research in task-oriented dialog systems.