# DiactTOD: Learning Generalizable Latent Dialogue Acts for Controllable Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00878 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00878/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2023.

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

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05855/) (2019)
- [A Simple Language Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00796/) (2020)
- [MultiWOZ 2.2 : A Dialogue Dataset with Additional Annotation Corrections and State Tracking Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12720/) (2020)
- [Structured Prediction as Translation between Augmented Natural Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05779/) (2021)
- [PLATO: Pre-trained Dialogue Generation Model with Discrete Latent Variable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07931/) (2019)
- [Multi-Task Pre-Training for Plug-and-Play Task-Oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14739/) (2021)
- [UBAR: Towards Fully End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Systems with GPT-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03539/) (2020)
- [GALAXY: A Generative Pre-trained Model for Task-Oriented Dialog with Semi-Supervised Learning and Explicit Policy Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14592/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Action Spaces for Reinforcement Learning in End-to-end Dialog Agents with Latent Variable Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08858/) (2019)
- [GODEL: Large-Scale Pre-Training for Goal-Directed Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11309/) (2022)
- [Shades of BLEU, Flavours of Success: The Case of MultiWOZ](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05555/) (2021)
- [Microsoft Dialogue Challenge: Building End-to-End Task-Completion Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11125/) (2018)
- [STAR: A Schema-Guided Dialog Dataset for Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11853/) (2020)
- [DialogVED: A Pre-trained Latent Variable Encoder-Decoder Model for Dialog Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13031/) (2022)
- [LAVA: Latent Action Spaces via Variational Auto-encoding for Dialogue Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09378/) (2020)
- [Modelling Hierarchical Structure between Dialogue Policy and Natural Language Generator with Option Framework for Task-oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06814/) (2020)
- [Multi-Domain Dialogue Acts and Response Co-Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12363/) (2020)
- [Alternating Recurrent Dialog Model with Large-scale Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03756/) (2019)
- [BORT: Back and Denoising Reconstruction for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02471/) (2022)
- [KRLS: Improving End-to-End Response Generation in Task Oriented Dialog with Reinforced Keywords Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16773/) (2022)
- [Efficient Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems with Response Selection as an Auxiliary Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07097/) (2022)
- [Towards Universal Dialogue Act Tagging for Task-Oriented Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03020/) (2019)
- [A Frame Tracking Model for Memory-Enhanced Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01690/) (2017)
- [Using Textual Interface to Align External Knowledge for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13710/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Learning to Clarify: Multi-turn Conversations with Action-Based Contrastive Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00222/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Large Language Model Induced Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems Through Look-Forward Motivated Goals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08949/) (2023)
- [Sparse Rewards Can Self-Train Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04617/) (2024)
- [Data-Centric Improvements for Enhancing Multi-Modal Understanding in Spoken Conversation Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15995/) (2024)
- [Many Hands Make Light Work: Task-Oriented Dialogue System with Module-Based Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09744/) (2024)
- [Impact of enriched meaning representations for language generation in dialogue tasks: A comprehensive exploration of the relevance of tasks, corpora and metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29518/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dialogue act annotations are important to improve response generation quality in task-oriented dialogue systems. However, it can be challenging to use dialogue acts to control response generation in a generalizable way because different datasets and tasks may have incompatible annotations. While alternative methods that utilize latent action spaces or reinforcement learning do not require explicit annotations, they may lack interpretability or face difficulties defining task-specific rewards. In this work, we present a novel end-to-end latent dialogue act model (DiactTOD) that represents dialogue acts in a latent space. DiactTOD, when pre-trained on a large corpus, is able to predict and control dialogue acts to generate controllable responses using these latent representations in a zero-shot fashion. Our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of experimental settings on the MultiWOZ dataset, including zero-shot, few-shot, and full data fine-tuning with both end-to-end and policy optimization configurations.