# Enhancing Personalized Dialogue Generation with Contrastive Latent Variables: Combining Sparse and Dense Persona

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11482 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11482/

## Key facts

- Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2023.

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

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06155/) (2016)
- [Learning Discourse-level Diversity for Neural Dialog Models using Conditional Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10960/) (2017)
- [TransferTransfo: A Transfer Learning Approach for Neural Network Based Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08149/) (2019)
- [The Second Conversational Intelligence Challenge (ConvAI2)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00098/) (2019)
- [PLATO: Pre-trained Dialogue Generation Model with Discrete Latent Variable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07931/) (2019)
- [Dialogue Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00671/) (2018)
- [Recent Advances in Deep Learning Based Dialogue Systems: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04387/) (2021)
- [You Impress Me: Dialogue Generation via Mutual Persona Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05388/) (2020)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents via Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10033/) (2019)
- [BoB: BERT Over BERT for Training Persona-based Dialogue Models from Limited Personalized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06169/) (2021)
- [A Pre-training Based Personalized Dialogue Generation Model with Persona-sparse Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04700/) (2019)
- [Exploiting Persona Information for Diverse Generation of Conversational Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12188/) (2019)
- [Less is More: Learning to Refine Dialogue History for Personalized Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08128/) (2022)
- [One Chatbot Per Person: Creating Personalized Chatbots based on Implicit User Profiles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09355/) (2021)
- [Profile Consistency Identification for Open-domain Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09680/) (2020)
- [Fuse It More Deeply! A Variational Transformer with Layer-Wise Latent Variable Inference for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06130/) (2022)
- [Generating Relevant and Coherent Dialogue Responses using Self-separated Conditional Variational AutoEncoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03410/) (2021)
- [Think Twice: A Human-like Two-stage Conversational Agent for Emotional Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04907/) (2023)
- [Aligning Recommendation and Conversation via Dual Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02848/) (2022)
- [DLVGen: A Dual Latent Variable Approach to Personalized Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11363/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01171/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Recent Advances in LLM-Based Multi-turn Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18013/) (2024)
- [RoleBreak: Character Hallucination as a Jailbreak Attack in Role-Playing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16727/) (2024)
- [Recent Trends in Personalized Dialogue Generation: A Review of Datasets, Methodologies, and Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17974/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Potential of LLMs as Personalized Assistants: Dataset, Evaluation, and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01262/) (2025)
- [Thinking in Character: Advancing Role-Playing Agents with Role-Aware Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01748/) (2025)
- [MIRACLE: Towards Personalized Dialogue Generation with Latent-Space Multiple Personal Attribute Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18342/) (2023)
- ["In Dialogues We Learn": Towards Personalized Dialogue Without Pre-defined Profiles through In-Dialogue Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03102/) (2024)
- [The Rise of Darkness: Safety-Utility Trade-Offs in Role-Playing Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20757/) (2025)
- [DEMO: Reframing Dialogue Interaction with Fine-grained Element Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04905/) (2024)
- [MORPHEUS: Modeling Role from Personalized Dialogue History by Exploring and Utilizing Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02345/) (2024)
- [Character-R1: Enhancing Role-Aware Reasoning in Role-Playing Agents via RLVR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04611/) (2026)
- [Persona-SQ: A Personalized Suggested Question Generation Framework For Real-world Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12445/) (2024)
- [Towards Faithful and Controllable Personalization via Critique-Post-Edit Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18849/) (2025)
- [Know You Before You Speak: User-State Modeling for LLM Personalization in Multi-Turn Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24647/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Persona Following at Decoding Time via Dynamic Importance Estimation for Role-Playing Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01438/) (2026)
- [Score Before You Speak: Improving Persona Consistency in Dialogue Generation using Response Quality Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06886/) (2025)
- [Persona-Aware Alignment Framework for Personalized Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10215/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Evaluation in Retrieval-Augmented Personalized Dialogue: A Cognitive and Linguistic Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14217/) (2026)
- [Personality-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Persuasive Dialogue with LLM-Driven Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06877/) (2026)
- [Through the Lens of Character: Resolving Modality-Role Interference in Multimodal Role-Playing Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09443/) (2026)
- [An Annotation Scheme and Classifier for Personal Facts in Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10339/) (2026)
- [ZIPP:Zero-shot Image Personalization from Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08841/) (2026)
- [HyPE: Category-Aware Hypergraph Encoding with Persistent Edge Embeddings for Persona-Grounded Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13142/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The personalized dialogue explores the consistent relationship between dialogue generation and personality. Existing personalized dialogue agents model persona profiles from three resources: sparse or dense persona descriptions and dialogue histories. However, sparse structured persona attributes are explicit but uninformative, dense persona texts contain rich persona descriptions with much noise, and dialogue history query is both noisy and uninformative for persona modeling. In this work, we combine the advantages of the three resources to obtain a richer and more accurate persona. We design a Contrastive Latent Variable-based model (CLV) that clusters the dense persona descriptions into sparse categories, which are combined with the history query to generate personalized responses. Experimental results on Chinese and English datasets demonstrate our model's superiority in personalization.