# DialGuide: Aligning Dialogue Model Behavior with Developer Guidelines

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10557 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10557/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [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)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Right for the Wrong Reasons: Diagnosing Syntactic Heuristics in Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01007/) (2019)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [Plug and Play Language Models: A Simple Approach to Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02164/) (2019)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [Fast Model Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11309/) (2021)
- [DExperts: Decoding-Time Controlled Text Generation with Experts and Anti-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03023/) (2021)
- [Recipes for Safety in Open-domain Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07079/) (2020)
- [Editable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00345/) (2020)
- [Queens are Powerful too: Mitigating Gender Bias in Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03842/) (2019)
- [RedditBias: A Real-World Resource for Bias Evaluation and Debiasing of Conversational Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03521/) (2021)
- [Dialogue Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00671/) (2018)
- [Can You Put it All Together: Evaluating Conversational Agents' Ability to Blend Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08449/) (2020)
- [ProsocialDialog: A Prosocial Backbone for Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12688/) (2022)
- [Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08824/) (2020)
- [PLATO-2: Towards Building an Open-Domain Chatbot via Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16779/) (2020)
- [Do Language Models Have Beliefs? Methods for Detecting, Updating, and Visualizing Model Beliefs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13654/) (2021)
- [Anticipating Safety Issues in E2E Conversational AI: Framework and Tooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03451/) (2021)
- [Speaker-Aware BERT for Multi-Turn Response Selection in Retrieval-Based Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03588/) (2020)
- [I like fish, especially dolphins: Addressing Contradictions in Dialogue Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13391/) (2020)
- [Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11553/) (2019)
- [DialFact: A Benchmark for Fact-Checking in Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08222/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Using In-Context Learning to Improve Dialogue Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00871/) (2023)
- [Position: Towards Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09264/) (2024)
- [Interpreting User Requests in the Context of Natural Language Standing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09796/) (2023)
- [Multi-Objective Aligned Small Language Model Framework for SUD Patient Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09209/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dialogue models are able to generate coherent and fluent responses, but they can still be challenging to control and may produce non-engaging, unsafe results. This unpredictability diminishes user trust and can hinder the use of the models in the real world. To address this, we introduce DialGuide, a novel framework for controlling dialogue model behavior using natural language rules, or guidelines. These guidelines provide information about the context they are applicable to and what should be included in the response, allowing the models to generate responses that are more closely aligned with the developer's expectations and intent. We evaluate DialGuide on three tasks in open-domain dialogue response generation: guideline selection, response generation, and response entailment verification. Our dataset contains 10,737 positive and 15,467 negative dialogue context-response-guideline triplets across two domains - chit-chat and safety. We provide baseline models for the tasks and benchmark their performance. We also demonstrate that DialGuide is effective in the dialogue safety domain, producing safe and engaging responses that follow developer guidelines.