# A Personalized Dialogue Generator with Implicit User Persona Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.07372 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07372/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (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)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [Generating Sentences from a Continuous Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06349/) (2015)
- [Importance Weighted Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00519/) (2015)
- [Benchmarking Zero-shot Text Classification: Datasets, Evaluation and Entailment Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00161/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Cyclical Annealing Schedule: A Simple Approach to Mitigating KL Vanishing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10145/) (2019)
- [TransferTransfo: A Transfer Learning Approach for Neural Network Based Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08149/) (2019)
- [Lagging Inference Networks and Posterior Collapse in Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05534/) (2019)
- [Attribute2Image: Conditional Image Generation from Visual Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00570/) (2015)
- [From Eliza to XiaoIce: Challenges and Opportunities with Social Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01957/) (2018)
- [You Impress Me: Dialogue Generation via Mutual Persona Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05388/) (2020)
- [Personalized Dialogue Generation with Diversified Traits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09672/) (2019)
- [A Pre-training Based Personalized Dialogue Generation Model with Persona-sparse Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04700/) (2019)
- [Generating Persona Consistent Dialogues by Exploiting Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05889/) (2019)
- [Guiding Variational Response Generator to Exploit Persona](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02390/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18231/) (2024)
- [Personalisation within bounds: A risk taxonomy and policy framework for the alignment of large language models with personalised feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05453/) (2023)
- [From Individual to Society: A Survey on Social Simulation Driven by Large Language Model-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03563/) (2024)
- [Modeling Human Subjectivity in LLMs Using Explicit and Implicit Human Factors in Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14462/) (2024)
- [Recent Trends in Personalized Dialogue Generation: A Review of Datasets, Methodologies, and Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17974/) (2024)
- [User Modeling in the Era of Large Language Models: Current Research and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11518/) (2023)
- [PersoBench: Benchmarking Personalized Response Generation in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03198/) (2024)
- [User-Specific Dialogue Generation with User Profile-Aware Pre-Training Model and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00887/) (2024)
- [Modeling and Optimizing User Preferences in AI Copilots: A Comprehensive Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21907/) (2025)
- [Know You Before You Speak: User-State Modeling for LLM Personalization in Multi-Turn Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24647/) (2026)
- [DeepTutor: Towards Agentic Personalized Tutoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26962/) (2026)
- [Deep RL with Hierarchical Action Exploration for Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13465/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Response Evaluation from Interlocutor's Eye for Open-Domain Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02256/) (2024)
- [The Emotional Spectrum of LLMs: Leveraging Empathy and Emotion-Based Markers for Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20068/) (2024)
- [From Simulation to Strategy: Automating Personalized Interaction Planning for Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08621/) (2025)
- [Personality-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Persuasive Dialogue with LLM-Driven Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06877/) (2026)
- [PersoDPO: Scalable Preference Optimization for Instruction-Adherent, Persona-Grounded Dialogue via Multi-LLM Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04493/) (2026)
- [Self-Stigma Is Not a Monolith, but Generic Empathy Is: Persona-Conditioned LLM Support for People Who Use Drugs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23387/) (2026)
- [Controlling and Assessing Appropriate Persona Use in LLM-based Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04676/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current works in the generation of personalized dialogue primarily contribute to the agent presenting a consistent personality and driving a more informative response. However, we found that the generated responses from most previous models tend to be self-centered, with little care for the user in the dialogue. Moreover, we consider that human-like conversation is essentially built based on inferring information about the persona of the other party. Motivated by this, we propose a novel personalized dialogue generator by detecting an implicit user persona. Because it is hard to collect a large number of detailed personas for each user, we attempted to model the user's potential persona and its representation from dialogue history, with no external knowledge. The perception and fader variables were conceived using conditional variational inference. The two latent variables simulate the process of people being aware of each other's persona and producing a corresponding expression in conversation. Finally, posterior-discriminated regularization was presented to enhance the training procedure. Empirical studies demonstrate that, compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach is more concerned with the user's persona and achieves a considerable boost across the evaluations.