# FutureTOD: Teaching Future Knowledge to Pre-trained Language Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.10315 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10315/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [data2vec: A General Framework for Self-supervised Learning in Speech, Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03555/) (2022)
- [A Theoretical Analysis of Contrastive Unsupervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09229/) (2019)
- [Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05855/) (2019)
- [Understanding the Behaviour of Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09740/) (2020)
- [An Evaluation Dataset for Intent Classification and Out-of-Scope Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02027/) (2019)
- [A Network-based End-to-End Trainable Task-oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04562/) (2016)
- [PeCo: Perceptual Codebook for BERT Pre-training of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12710/) (2021)
- [TransferTransfo: A Transfer Learning Approach for Neural Network Based Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08149/) (2019)
- [TOD-BERT: Pre-trained Natural Language Understanding for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06871/) (2020)
- [CERT: Contrastive Self-supervised Learning for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12766/) (2020)
- [Neural Belief Tracker: Data-Driven Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03777/) (2016)
- [Taskmaster-1: Toward a Realistic and Diverse Dialog Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05358/) (2019)
- [Key-Value Retrieval Networks for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05414/) (2017)
- [Boosting Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning with False Negative Cancellation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11765/) (2020)
- [ConveRT: Efficient and Accurate Conversational Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03688/) (2019)
- [Frames: A Corpus for Adding Memory to Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00057/) (2017)
- [Training Neural Response Selection for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01543/) (2019)
- [Incremental False Negative Detection for Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03719/) (2021)
- [Microsoft Dialogue Challenge: Building End-to-End Task-Completion Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11125/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ESAinsTOD: A Unified End-to-End Schema-Aware Instruction-Tuning Framework for Task-Oriented Dialog Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09691/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pre-trained language models based on general text enable huge success in the NLP scenario. But the intrinsical difference of linguistic patterns between general text and task-oriented dialogues makes existing pre-trained language models less useful in practice. Current dialogue pre-training methods rely on a contrastive framework and face the challenges of both selecting true positives and hard negatives. In this paper, we propose a novel dialogue pre-training model, FutureTOD, which distills future knowledge to the representation of the previous dialogue context using a self-training framework. Our intuition is that a good dialogue representation both learns local context information and predicts future information. Extensive experiments on diverse downstream dialogue tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, especially the generalization, robustness, and learning discriminative dialogue representations capabilities.