An Equal-Size Hard EM Algorithm for Diverse Dialogue Generation
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
Open-domain dialogue systems aim to interact with humans through natural language texts in an open-ended fashion. Despite the recent success of super large dialogue systems such as ChatGPT, using medium-to-small-sized dialogue systems remains the common practice as they are more lightweight and accessible; however, generating diverse dialogue responses is challenging, especially with smaller models. In this work, we propose an Equal-size Hard Expectation--Maximization (EqHard-EM) algorithm to train a multi-decoder model for diverse dialogue generation. Our algorithm assigns a sample to a decoder in a hard manner and additionally imposes an equal-assignment constraint to ensure that all decoders are well-trained. We provide detailed theoretical analysis to justify our approach. Further, experiments on two large-scale open-domain dialogue datasets verify that our EqHard-EM algorithm generates high-quality diverse responses.
Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 40 of its 61 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2022.
Builds on
40 of 61 references.
References · 40
- 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
- 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
- 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,491
- 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
- 2019Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLPcited by 4,195
- 2017Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layercited by 3,413
- 2016Improved Techniques for Training GANscited by 2,938
- 2019The Curious Case of Neural Text Degenerationcited by 2,881
- 2015A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Modelscited by 1,068
- 2017DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Datasetcited by 649
- 2015Generating Sentences from a Continuous Spacecited by 607
- 2019On the Cross-lingual Transferability of Monolingual Representationscited by 575
28 more
- 2016How NOT To Evaluate Your Dialogue System: An Empirical Study of Unsupervised Evaluation Metrics for Dialogue Response Generationcited by 356
- 2020K-Adapter: Infusing Knowledge into Pre-Trained Models with Adapterscited by 318
- 2016Diverse Beam Search: Decoding Diverse Solutions from Neural Sequence Modelscited by 299
- 2016Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Generationcited by 286
- 2017Learning Discourse-level Diversity for Neural Dialog Models using Conditional Variational Autoencoderscited by 222
- 2015Building End-To-End Dialogue Systems Using Generative Hierarchical Neural Network Modelscited by 207
- 2017VEEGAN: Reducing Mode Collapse in GANs using Implicit Variational Learningcited by 199
- 2015A Neural Conversational Modelcited by 195
- 2018The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbotcited by 172
- 2019Expectation-Maximization Attention Networks for Semantic Segmentationcited by 147
- 2019PLATO: Pre-trained Dialogue Generation Model with Discrete Latent Variablecited by 145
- 2020Optimus: Organizing Sentences via Pre-trained Modeling of a Latent Spacecited by 114
- 2017Adversarial Learning for Neural Dialogue Generationcited by 103
- 2017RUBER: An Unsupervised Method for Automatic Evaluation of Open-Domain Dialog Systemscited by 88
- 2019Mixture Models for Diverse Machine Translation: Tricks of the Tradecited by 77
- 2020Learning an Unreferenced Metric for Online Dialogue Evaluationcited by 52
- 2018DialogWAE: Multimodal Response Generation with Conditional Wasserstein Auto-Encodercited by 44
- 2020DialogBERT: Discourse-Aware Response Generation via Learning to Recover and Rank Utterancescited by 36
- 2016Sequence to Backward and Forward Sequences: A Content-Introducing Approach to Generative Short-Text Conversationcited by 35
- 2022DialogVED: A Pre-trained Latent Variable Encoder-Decoder Model for Dialog Response Generationcited by 35
- 2017Variational Attention for Sequence-to-Sequence Modelscited by 29
- 2021Diversifying Dialog Generation via Adaptive Label Smoothingcited by 25
- 2021Thinking Clearly, Talking Fast: Concept-Guided Non-Autoregressive Generation for Open-Domain Dialogue Systemscited by 17
- 2018Generating Multiple Diverse Responses for Short-Text Conversationcited by 13
- 2017Why Do Neural Dialog Systems Generate Short and Meaningless Replies? A Comparison between Dialog and Translationcited by 12
- 2020Posterior-GAN: Towards Informative and Coherent Response Generation with Posterior Generative Adversarial Networkcited by 9
- 2022An Empirical Study on the Overlapping Problem of Open-Domain Dialogue Datasetscited by 8
- 2021Generalized Equivariance and Preferential Labeling for GNN Node Classificationcited by 7
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 3; 2024: 4; 2025: 2; 2026: 1.
11 papers.
- 2023f-Divergence Minimization for Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillationcited by 112
- 2022Teacher Forcing Recovers Reward Functions for Text Generationcited by 11
- 2024DiVERT: Distractor Generation with Variational Errors Represented as Text for Math Multiple-choice Questionscited by 7
- 2023Ensemble Distillation for Unsupervised Constituency Parsingcited by 6
- 2023MADNet: Maximizing Addressee Deduction Expectation for Multi-Party Conversation Generationcited by 5
- 2024LLMR: Knowledge Distillation with a Large Language Model-Induced Rewardcited by 3
- 2024Multi-modal Data based Semi-Supervised Learning for Vehicle Positioningcited by 2
- 2025Multiple Choice Learning of Low-Rank Adapters for Language Modelingcited by 2
- 2024EBBS: An Ensemble with Bi-Level Beam Search for Zero-Shot Machine Translationcited by 1
- 2025PMODE: Theoretically Grounded and Modular Mixture Modelingcited by 1
- 2026Hidden Human-Like Nature of Machine-Generated Texts: Theory and Detection Enhancementcited by 0
- 2026Hidden Human-Like Nature of Machine-Generated Texts: Theory and Detection Enhancement22 May 2026
- 2025PMODE: Theoretically Grounded and Modular Mixture Modeling29 Aug 2025
- 2025Multiple Choice Learning of Low-Rank Adapters for Language Modeling14 Jul 2025
- 2024Multi-modal Data based Semi-Supervised Learning for Vehicle Positioning15 Oct 2024
- 2024LLMR: Knowledge Distillation with a Large Language Model-Induced Reward19 Sep 2024
- 2024DiVERT: Distractor Generation with Variational Errors Represented as Text for Math Multiple-choice Questions27 Jun 2024
- 2024EBBS: An Ensemble with Bi-Level Beam Search for Zero-Shot Machine Translation29 Feb 2024
- 2023Ensemble Distillation for Unsupervised Constituency Parsing3 Oct 2023
- 2023f-Divergence Minimization for Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation27 Jul 2023
- 2023MADNet: Maximizing Addressee Deduction Expectation for Multi-Party Conversation Generation22 May 2023
- 2022Teacher Forcing Recovers Reward Functions for Text Generation17 Oct 2022