# A Unified Multi-task Learning Framework for Multi-goal Conversational Recommender Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.06923 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06923/

## Key facts

- Cited by 32 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)
- [Document Ranking with a Pretrained Sequence-to-Sequence Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06713/) (2020)
- [A Simple Language Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00796/) (2020)
- [Unified Structure Generation for Universal Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12277/) (2022)
- [Towards Deep Conversational Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07617/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Dialogue Systems: Recent Advances and New Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.01731/) (2017)
- [PLATO: Pre-trained Dialogue Generation Model with Discrete Latent Variable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07931/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00646/) (2020)
- [Multi-Task Pre-Training for Plug-and-Play Task-Oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14739/) (2021)
- [Improving Conversational Recommender Systems via Knowledge Graph based Semantic Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04032/) (2020)
- [Advances and Challenges in Conversational Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09459/) (2021)
- [Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03277/) (2018)
- [Towards Knowledge-Based Recommender Dialog System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05391/) (2019)
- [Towards Conversational Recommendation over Multi-Type Dialogs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03954/) (2020)
- [Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction as Paraphrase Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00796/) (2021)
- [Estimation-Action-Reflection: Towards Deep Interaction Between Conversational and Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09102/) (2020)
- [Towards Topic-Guided Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04125/) (2020)
- [Dialogue State Tracking with a Language Model using Schema-Driven Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07506/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Recommender Systems in the Era of Large Language Models (LLMs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02046/) (2023)
- [How Can Recommender Systems Benefit from Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05817/) (2023)
- [Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13626/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Proactive Dialogue Systems: Problems, Methods, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02750/) (2023)
- [Cue-CoT: Chain-of-thought Prompting for Responding to In-depth Dialogue Questions with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11792/) (2023)
- [Towards Human-centered Proactive Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12670/) (2024)
- [Rethinking the Evaluation for Conversational Recommendation in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13112/) (2023)
- [PACIFIC: Towards Proactive Conversational Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data in Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08817/) (2022)
- [MuseChat: A Conversational Music Recommendation System for Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06282/) (2023)
- [Towards Robust Personalized Dialogue Generation via Order-Insensitive Representation Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12782/) (2023)
- [Conversational Recommender System and Large Language Model Are Made for Each Other in E-commerce Pre-sales Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14626/) (2023)
- [The Imperative of Conversation Analysis in the Era of LLMs: A Survey of Tasks, Techniques, and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14195/) (2024)
- [Parameter-Efficient Conversational Recommender System as a Language Processing Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14194/) (2024)
- [Towards Empathetic Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10527/) (2024)
- [Incorporating External Knowledge and Goal Guidance for LLM-based Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01868/) (2024)
- [Beyond Persuasion: Towards Conversational Recommender System with Credible Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14399/) (2024)
- [When Multi-Task Learning Meets Partial Supervision: A Computer Vision Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14382/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models as Source Planner for Personalized Knowledge-grounded Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08840/) (2023)
- [Target-constrained Bidirectional Planning for Generation of Target-oriented Proactive Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06063/) (2024)
- [OPERA: Harmonizing Task-Oriented Dialogs and Information Seeking Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12449/) (2022)
- [MIGA: A Unified Multi-task Generation Framework for Conversational Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09278/) (2022)
- [Multi-grained Hypergraph Interest Modeling for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04798/) (2023)
- [Knowledge-Enhanced Conversational Recommendation via Transformer-based Sequential Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02415/) (2024)
- [Towards a Unified Conversational Recommendation System: Multi-task Learning via Contextualized Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18119/) (2023)
- [A Conversation is Worth A Thousand Recommendations: A Survey of Holistic Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07682/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Goal-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems via Consistency Reflection and Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13366/) (2025)
- [Multi-Type Context-Aware Conversational Recommender Systems via Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13655/) (2025)
- [Proactive Guidance of Multi-Turn Conversation in Industrial Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24251/) (2025)
- [HyCoRec: Hypergraph-Enhanced Multi-Preference Learning for Alleviating Matthew Effect in Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17461/) (2026)
- [Mitigating Matthew Effect: Multi-Hypergraph Boosted Multi-Interest Self-Supervised Learning for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18609/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent years witnessed several advances in developing multi-goal conversational recommender systems (MG-CRS) that can proactively attract users' interests and naturally lead user-engaged dialogues with multiple conversational goals and diverse topics. Four tasks are often involved in MG-CRS, including Goal Planning, Topic Prediction, Item Recommendation, and Response Generation. Most existing studies address only some of these tasks. To handle the whole problem of MG-CRS, modularized frameworks are adopted where each task is tackled independently without considering their interdependencies. In this work, we propose a novel Unified MultI-goal conversational recommeNDer system, namely UniMIND. In specific, we unify these four tasks with different formulations into the same sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) paradigm. Prompt-based learning strategies are investigated to endow the unified model with the capability of multi-task learning. Finally, the overall learning and inference procedure consists of three stages, including multi-task learning, prompt-based tuning, and inference. Experimental results on two MG-CRS benchmarks (DuRecDial and TG-ReDial) show that UniMIND achieves state-of-the-art performance on all tasks with a unified model. Extensive analyses and discussions are provided for shedding some new perspectives for MG-CRS.