# Advancing Semi-Supervised Task Oriented Dialog Systems by JSA Learning of Discrete Latent Variable Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.12235 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12235/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05855/) (2019)
- [A Simple Language Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00796/) (2020)
- [PLATO: Pre-trained Dialogue Generation Model with Discrete Latent Variable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07931/) (2019)
- [Taskmaster-1: Toward a Realistic and Diverse Dialog Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05358/) (2019)
- [Multi-Task Pre-Training for Plug-and-Play Task-Oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14739/) (2021)
- [UBAR: Towards Fully End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Systems with GPT-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03539/) (2020)
- [Task-Oriented Dialog Systems that Consider Multiple Appropriate Responses under the Same Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10484/) (2019)
- [Frames: A Corpus for Adding Memory to Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00057/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Action Spaces for Reinforcement Learning in End-to-end Dialog Agents with Latent Variable Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08858/) (2019)
- [Shades of BLEU, Flavours of Success: The Case of MultiWOZ](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05555/) (2021)
- [Microsoft Dialogue Challenge: Building End-to-End Task-Completion Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11125/) (2018)
- [A Probabilistic End-To-End Task-Oriented Dialog Model with Latent Belief States towards Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08115/) (2020)
- [Markovian Score Climbing: Variational Inference with KL(p||q)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10374/) (2020)
- [Structured Fusion Networks for Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10016/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Variational Reasoning for Medical Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06071/) (2021)
- [Explicit State Tracking with Semi-Supervision for Neural Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10596/) (2018)
- [Latent Intention Dialogue Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10229/) (2017)
- [Variational Latent-State GPT for Semi-Supervised Task-Oriented Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04314/) (2021)
- [Joint Stochastic Approximation and Its Application to Learning Discrete Latent Variable Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14001/) (2020)
- [Joint Stochastic Approximation learning of Helmholtz Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06170/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Knowledge-Retrieval Task-Oriented Dialog Systems with Semi-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13199/) (2023)
- [Pronunciation-Lexicon Free Training for Phoneme-based Crosslingual ASR via Joint Stochastic Approximation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06249/) (2025)
- [The 2nd FutureDial Challenge: Dialog Systems with Retrieval Augmented Generation (FutureDial-RAG)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13084/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Developing semi-supervised task-oriented dialog (TOD) systems by leveraging unlabeled dialog data has attracted increasing interests. For semi-supervised learning of latent state TOD models, variational learning is often used, but suffers from the annoying high-variance of the gradients propagated through discrete latent variables and the drawback of indirectly optimizing the target log-likelihood. Recently, an alternative algorithm, called joint stochastic approximation (JSA), has emerged for learning discrete latent variable models with impressive performances. In this paper, we propose to apply JSA to semi-supervised learning of the latent state TOD models, which is referred to as JSA-TOD. To our knowledge, JSA-TOD represents the first work in developing JSA based semi-supervised learning of discrete latent variable conditional models for such long sequential generation problems like in TOD systems. Extensive experiments show that JSA-TOD significantly outperforms its variational learning counterpart. Remarkably, semi-supervised JSA-TOD using 20% labels performs close to the full-supervised baseline on MultiWOZ2.1.