# Few-Shot Dialogue Summarization via Skeleton-Assisted Prompt Transfer in Prompt Tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12077 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12077/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [Abstractive Text Summarization Using Sequence-to-Sequence RNNs and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.06023/) (2016)
- [An Overview of Multi-Task Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05098/) (2017)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01326/) (2019)
- [Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11504/) (2019)
- [What BERT is not: Lessons from a new suite of psycholinguistic diagnostics for language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13528/) (2019)
- [Factual Probing Is [MASK]: Learning vs. Learning to Recall](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05240/) (2021)
- [SPoT: Better Frozen Model Adaptation through Soft Prompt Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07904/) (2021)
- [Fine-grained Analysis of Sentence Embeddings Using Auxiliary Prediction Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04207/) (2016)
- [MultiWOZ 2.2 : A Dialogue Dataset with Additional Annotation Corrections and State Tracking Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12720/) (2020)
- [Assessing BERT's Syntactic Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05287/) (2019)
- [oLMpics -- On what Language Model Pre-training Captures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13283/) (2019)
- [On Transferability of Prompt Tuning for Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06719/) (2021)
- [Multi-View Sequence-to-Sequence Models with Conversational Structure for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01672/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Slot Descriptions for Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04222/) (2021)
- [Improving Zero and Few-Shot Abstractive Summarization with Intermediate Fine-tuning and Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12836/) (2020)
- [AdaptSum: Towards Low-Resource Domain Adaptation for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11332/) (2021)
- [Do Neural Dialog Systems Use the Conversation History Effectively? An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01603/) (2019)
- [Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Sentence-Gated Modeling Optimized by Dialogue Acts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05715/) (2018)
- [Topic-aware Pointer-Generator Networks for Summarizing Spoken Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01335/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Opinion Summarization with Noising and Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10150/) (2020)
- [TED: A Pretrained Unsupervised Summarization Model with Theme Modeling and Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00725/) (2020)
- [Automatic Generation of Contrast Sets from Scene Graphs: Probing the Compositional Consistency of GQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09591/) (2021)

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

- [CoMMIT: Coordinated Multimodal Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20454/) (2024)
- [Mutual Reinforcement of LLM Dialogue Synthesis and Summarization Capabilities for Few-Shot Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17328/) (2025)
- [Paired by the Teacher: Turning Unpaired Data into High-Fidelity Pairs for Low-Resource Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25144/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In real-world scenarios, labeled samples for dialogue summarization are usually limited (i.e., few-shot) due to high annotation costs for high-quality dialogue summaries. To efficiently learn from few-shot samples, previous works have utilized massive annotated data from other downstream tasks and then performed prompt transfer in prompt tuning so as to enable cross-task knowledge transfer. However, existing general-purpose prompt transfer techniques lack consideration for dialogue-specific information. In this paper, we focus on improving the prompt transfer from dialogue state tracking to dialogue summarization and propose Skeleton-Assisted Prompt Transfer (SAPT), which leverages skeleton generation as extra supervision that functions as a medium connecting the distinct source and target task and resulting in the model's better consumption of dialogue state information. To automatically extract dialogue skeletons as supervised training data for skeleton generation, we design a novel approach with perturbation-based probes requiring neither annotation effort nor domain knowledge. Training the model on such skeletons can also help preserve model capability during prompt transfer. Our method significantly outperforms existing baselines. In-depth analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in facilitating cross-task knowledge transfer in few-shot dialogue summarization.