mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

DiffusEmp: A Diffusion Model-Based Framework with Multi-Grained Control for Empathetic Response Generation

arXiv 2306.01657 ↗First posted 2 Jun 2023cs.CL cs.AIcited by 9

On the map: Diffusion models → Audio, speech and music

Abstract (arXiv)

Empathy is a crucial factor in open-domain conversations, which naturally shows one's caring and understanding to others. Though several methods have been proposed to generate empathetic responses, existing works often lead to monotonous empathy that refers to generic and safe expressions. In this paper, we propose to use explicit control to guide the empathy expression and design a framework DiffusEmp based on conditional diffusion language model to unify the utilization of dialogue context and attribute-oriented control signals. Specifically, communication mechanism, intent, and semantic frame are imported as multi-grained signals that control the empathy realization from coarse to fine levels. We then design a specific masking strategy to reflect the relationship between multi-grained signals and response tokens, and integrate it into the diffusion model to influence the generative process. Experimental results on a benchmark dataset EmpatheticDialogue show that our framework outperforms competitive baselines in terms of controllability, informativeness, and diversity without the loss of context-relatedness.

Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 39 of its 60 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2023.

Builds on

39 of 60 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2022Diffsound: Discrete Diffusion Model for Text-to-sound Generation20 Jul
  2. 2021EdiTTS: Score-based Editing for Controllable Text-to-Speech6 Oct
  3. 2021Grad-TTS: A Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Text-to-Speech13 May

Other references · 36

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
  2. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  3. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
  4. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
  5. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,694
  6. 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,266
  7. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,655
  8. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,185
  9. 2019BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehensioncited by 5,874
  10. 2019BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERTcited by 5,462
  11. 2021GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Modelscited by 3,595
  12. 2021Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spacescited by 1,665
24 more
  1. 2015A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Modelscited by 1,068
  2. 2022Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generationcited by 1,006
  3. 2019DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generationcited by 842
  4. 2021Score-based Generative Modeling in Latent Spacecited by 634
  5. 2021Argmax Flows and Multinomial Diffusion: Learning Categorical Distributionscited by 566
  6. 2018Texygen: A Benchmarking Platform for Text Generation Modelscited by 484
  7. 2022DiffuSeq: Sequence to Sequence Text Generation with Diffusion Modelscited by 439
  8. 2016How NOT To Evaluate Your Dialogue System: An Empirical Study of Unsupervised Evaluation Metrics for Dialogue Response Generationcited by 356
  9. 2022Analytic-DPM: an Analytic Estimate of the Optimal Reverse Variance in Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 331
  10. 2022DiffusionBERT: Improving Generative Masked Language Models with Diffusion Modelscited by 214
  11. 2019TransferTransfo: A Transfer Learning Approach for Neural Network Based Conversational Agentscited by 188
  12. 2020A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Supportcited by 182
  13. 2018Generating Informative and Diverse Conversational Responses via Adversarial Information Maximizationcited by 114
  14. 2020MIME: MIMicking Emotions for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 114
  15. 2019MoEL: Mixture of Empathetic Listenerscited by 91
  16. 2021CEM: Commonsense-aware Empathetic Response Generationcited by 89
  17. 2020A Taxonomy of Empathetic Response Intents in Human Social Conversationscited by 51
  18. 2020Knowledge Bridging for Empathetic Dialogue Generationcited by 50
  19. 2021Perspective-taking and Pragmatics for Generating Empathetic Responses Focused on Emotion Causescited by 43
  20. 2021CoMAE: A Multi-factor Hierarchical Framework for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 42
  21. 2017Frame-Semantic Parsing with Softmax-Margin Segmental RNNs and a Syntactic Scaffoldcited by 33
  22. 2019Improving Neural Response Diversity with Frequency-Aware Cross-Entropy Losscited by 29
  23. 2022EmpHi: Generating Empathetic Responses with Human-like Intentscited by 9
  24. 2022COMMA: Modeling Relationship among Motivations, Emotions and Actions in Language-based Human Activitiescited by 4

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 5; 2025: 2; 2026: 1.

9 papers.

  1. 2025A Survey on Diffusion Language Modelscited by 75
  2. 2023Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models for Empathetic Response Generation: Empirical Investigations and Improvementscited by 42
  3. 2024A Review of Human Emotion Synthesis Based on Generative Technologycited by 7
  4. 2024ReflectDiffu:Reflect between Emotion-intent Contagion and Mimicry for Empathetic Response Generation via a RL-Diffusion Frameworkcited by 6
  5. 2024EmPO: Emotion Grounding for Empathetic Response Generation through Preference Optimizationcited by 3
  6. 2024StyEmp: Stylizing Empathetic Response Generation via Multi-Grained Prefix Encoder and Personality Reinforcementcited by 3
  7. 2024IPED: An Implicit Perspective for Relational Triple Extraction based on Diffusion Modelcited by 1
  8. 2025Following the TRACE: A Structured Path to Empathetic Response Generation with Multi-Agent Modelscited by 0
  9. 2026Towards High-Level Semantic Intelligencecited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024Cause-Aware Empathetic Response Generation via Chain-of-Thought Fine-Tuning
  2. 2024TOOL-ED: Enhancing Empathetic Response Generation with the Tool Calling Capability of LLM
  3. 2025From Measurement to Expertise: Empathetic Expert Adapters for Context-Based Empathy in Conversational AI Agents
  4. 2025E3RG: Building Explicit Emotion-driven Empathetic Response Generation System with Multimodal Large Language Model
  5. 2025Leveraging Chain of Thought towards Empathetic Spoken Dialogue without Corresponding Question-Answering Data
  6. 2026PERM: Psychology-grounded Empathetic Reward Modeling for Large Language Models
  7. 2025PEER: Unified Process-Outcome Reinforcement Learning for Structured Empathetic Reasoning
  8. 2025Empathic Prompting: Non-Verbal Context Integration for Multimodal LLM Conversations