# "Do you follow me?": A Survey of Recent Approaches in Dialogue State Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.14627 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14627/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 77 of its 105 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 77)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Transferable Multi-Domain State Generator for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08743/) (2019)
- [MultiWOZ 2.2 : A Dialogue Dataset with Additional Annotation Corrections and State Tracking Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12720/) (2020)
- [TOD-BERT: Pre-trained Natural Language Understanding for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06871/) (2020)
- [Challenges in Building Intelligent Open-domain Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05709/) (2019)
- [Neural Belief Tracker: Data-Driven Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03777/) (2016)
- [Multi-Task Pre-Training for Plug-and-Play Task-Oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14739/) (2021)
- [TripPy: A Triple Copy Strategy for Value Independent Neural Dialog State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02877/) (2020)
- [Task-Oriented Dialogue as Dataflow Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11423/) (2020)
- [Learning End-to-End Goal-Oriented Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07683/) (2016)
- [MinTL: Minimalist Transfer Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12005/) (2020)
- [Dialogue State Tracking with a Language Model using Schema-Driven Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07506/) (2021)
- [MultiWOZ 2.4: A Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue Dataset with Essential Annotation Corrections to Improve State Tracking Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00773/) (2021)
- [Continual Learning in Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15504/) (2020)
- [Efficient Dialogue State Tracking by Selectively Overwriting Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03906/) (2019)
- [Find or Classify? Dual Strategy for Slot-Value Predictions on Multi-Domain Dialog State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03544/) (2019)
- [Action-Based Conversations Dataset: A Corpus for Building More In-Depth Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00783/) (2021)
- [CrossWOZ: A Large-Scale Chinese Cross-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11893/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Transfer Learning with Synthesized Data for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00891/) (2020)
- [Dialog State Tracking: A Neural Reading Comprehension Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01946/) (2019)
- [Leveraging Slot Descriptions for Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04222/) (2021)
- [SIMMC 2.0: A Task-oriented Dialog Dataset for Immersive Multimodal Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08667/) (2021)
- [BiToD: A Bilingual Multi-Domain Dataset For Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02787/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking via Cross-Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04655/) (2021)
- [MultiWOZ 2.3: A multi-domain task-oriented dialogue dataset enhanced with annotation corrections and co-reference annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05594/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01171/) (2024)
- [Minding Language Models' (Lack of) Theory of Mind: A Plug-and-Play Multi-Character Belief Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00924/) (2023)
- [ToolDial: Multi-turn Dialogue Generation Method for Tool-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00564/) (2025)
- [A Preliminary Evaluation of ChatGPT for Zero-shot Dialogue Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04256/) (2023)
- [A Survey of the Evolution of Language Model-Based Dialogue Systems: Data, Task and Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16789/) (2023)
- [WildSpeech-Bench: Benchmarking End-to-End SpeechLLMs in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21875/) (2025)
- [DiSTRICT: Dialogue State Tracking with Retriever Driven In-Context Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02851/) (2022)
- [The timing bottleneck: Why timing and overlap are mission-critical for conversational user interfaces, speech recognition and dialogue systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15493/) (2023)
- [A Desideratum for Conversational Agents: Capabilities, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16939/) (2025)
- [Open-Ended Goal Inference through Actions and Language for Human-Robot Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04453/) (2025)
- [Diable: Efficient Dialogue State Tracking as Operations on Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17020/) (2023)
- [StableToken: A Noise-Robust Semantic Speech Tokenizer for Resilient SpeechLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22220/) (2025)
- [Interpretable and Robust Dialogue State Tracking via Natural Language Summarization with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08857/) (2025)
- [Agreement Tracking for Multi-Issue Negotiation Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06524/) (2023)
- [Plan, Generate and Complicate: Improving Low-resource Dialogue State Tracking via Easy-to-Difficult Zero-shot Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08860/) (2024)
- [Can LLM Agents Stick to the Script? A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Consistency in Interactive Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08160/) (2026)
- [Vox-Infinity: Benchmarking the Limits of Long-Context Spoken Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22452/) (2026)
- [Who's in Charge? Roles and Responsibilities of Decision-Making Components in Conversational Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08470/) (2023)
- [Grounding Description-Driven Dialogue State Trackers with Knowledge-Seeking Turns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13448/) (2023)
- [Using Machine Mental Imagery for Representing Common Ground in Situated Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21144/) (2026)
- [No Action Without a NOD: A Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Architecture for Reliable Service Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12240/) (2026)
- [An Auditable Symbolic-RAG-Generative AI Architecture for Goal-Oriented Conversation Orchestration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07152/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While communicating with a user, a task-oriented dialogue system has to track the user's needs at each turn according to the conversation history. This process called dialogue state tracking (DST) is crucial because it directly informs the downstream dialogue policy. DST has received a lot of interest in recent years with the text-to-text paradigm emerging as the favored approach. In this review paper, we first present the task and its associated datasets. Then, considering a large number of recent publications, we identify highlights and advances of research in 2021-2022. Although neural approaches have enabled significant progress, we argue that some critical aspects of dialogue systems such as generalizability are still underexplored. To motivate future studies, we propose several research avenues.