# Generating Relevant and Coherent Dialogue Responses using Self-separated Conditional Variational AutoEncoders

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.03410 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03410/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04025/) (2015)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [Generating Sentences from a Continuous Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06349/) (2015)
- [SeqGAN: Sequence Generative Adversarial Nets with Policy Gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05473/) (2016)
- [How NOT To Evaluate Your Dialogue System: An Empirical Study of Unsupervised Evaluation Metrics for Dialogue Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08023/) (2016)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01541/) (2016)
- [A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06155/) (2016)
- [Learning Discourse-level Diversity for Neural Dialog Models using Conditional Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10960/) (2017)
- [Building End-To-End Dialogue Systems Using Generative Hierarchical Neural Network Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.04808/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning via Invariant Causal Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07922/) (2020)
- [A Hierarchical Latent Variable Encoder-Decoder Model for Generating Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06069/) (2016)
- [A Knowledge-Grounded Neural Conversation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01932/) (2017)
- [Neural Responding Machine for Short-Text Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02364/) (2015)
- [Generating Informative and Diverse Conversational Responses via Adversarial Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05972/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Learning for Neural Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06547/) (2017)
- [A Neural Network Approach to Context-Sensitive Generation of Conversational Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06714/) (2015)
- [Attribute2Image: Conditional Image Generation from Visual Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00570/) (2015)
- [You Impress Me: Dialogue Generation via Mutual Persona Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05388/) (2020)
- [A Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder For Generative Context-Aware Query Suggestion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.02221/) (2015)
- [DialogWAE: Multimodal Response Generation with Conditional Wasserstein Auto-Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12352/) (2018)
- [DP-GAN: Diversity-Promoting Generative Adversarial Network for Generating Informative and Diversified Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01345/) (2018)
- [Generating More Interesting Responses in Neural Conversation Models with Distributional Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01215/) (2018)
- [Improving Neural Conversational Models with Entropy-Based Data Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05471/) (2019)
- [Better Conversations by Modeling,Filtering,and Optimizing for Coherence and Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06873/) (2018)
- [Neural Machine Translation and Sequence-to-sequence Models: A Tutorial](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01619/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Enhancing Personalized Dialogue Generation with Contrastive Latent Variables: Combining Sparse and Dense Persona](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11482/) (2023)
- [Recent Trends in Personalized Dialogue Generation: A Review of Datasets, Methodologies, and Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17974/) (2024)
- [Diverse Text Generation via Variational Encoder-Decoder Models with Gaussian Process Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01227/) (2022)
- [Think Before You Speak: Cultivating Communication Skills of Large Language Models via Inner Monologue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07445/) (2023)
- [An Empirical Study on the Overlapping Problem of Open-Domain Dialogue Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06219/) (2022)
- [PVGRU: Generating Diverse and Relevant Dialogue Responses via Pseudo-Variational Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09086/) (2022)
- [DiffusionDialog: A Diffusion Model for Diverse Dialog Generation with Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06760/) (2024)
- [Towards Diverse, Relevant and Coherent Open-Domain Dialogue Generation via Hybrid Latent Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01145/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Bayes Framework for Open-Domain Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10945/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Inductive Transfer for Continual Dialogue Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10484/) (2022)
- [Modeling the One-to-Many Property in Open-Domain Dialogue with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15131/) (2025)
- [A Speaker-aware Parallel Hierarchical Attentive Encoder-Decoder Model for Multi-turn Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06823/) (2021)
- [Stop Filtering: Multi-View Attribute-Enhanced Dialogue Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11206/) (2022)
- [Rumor Detection on Social Media with Reinforcement Learning-based Key Propagation Graph Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13094/) (2024)
- [Modeling Complex Dialogue Mappings via Sentence Semantic Segmentation Guided Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00231/) (2022)
- [Heterogeneous-Branch Collaborative Learning for Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11621/) (2023)
- [Partially Randomizing Transformer Weights for Dialogue Response Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10943/) (2023)
- [Dior-CVAE: Pre-trained Language Models and Diffusion Priors for Variational Dialog Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15025/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conditional Variational AutoEncoder (CVAE) effectively increases the diversity and informativeness of responses in open-ended dialogue generation tasks through enriching the context vector with sampled latent variables. However, due to the inherent one-to-many and many-to-one phenomena in human dialogues, the sampled latent variables may not correctly reflect the contexts' semantics, leading to irrelevant and incoherent generated responses. To resolve this problem, we propose Self-separated Conditional Variational AutoEncoder (abbreviated as SepaCVAE) that introduces group information to regularize the latent variables, which enhances CVAE by improving the responses' relevance and coherence while maintaining their diversity and informativeness. SepaCVAE actively divides the input data into groups, and then widens the absolute difference between data pairs from distinct groups, while narrowing the relative distance between data pairs in the same group. Empirical results from automatic evaluation and detailed analysis demonstrate that SepaCVAE can significantly boost responses in well-established open-domain dialogue datasets.