# PICK: Polished & Informed Candidate Scoring for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10413 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10413/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [Right for the Wrong Reasons: Diagnosing Syntactic Heuristics in Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01007/) (2019)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [Retrieval Augmentation Reduces Hallucination in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07567/) (2021)
- [Wizard of Wikipedia: Knowledge-Powered Conversational agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01241/) (2018)
- [Way Off-Policy Batch Deep Reinforcement Learning of Implicit Human Preferences in Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00456/) (2019)
- [Learning Discourse-level Diversity for Neural Dialog Models using Conditional Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10960/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Evaluation of Interactive Dialog with DialoGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12719/) (2020)
- [Dialogue Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00671/) (2018)
- [Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08824/) (2020)
- [Learning from Dialogue after Deployment: Feed Yourself, Chatbot!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05415/) (2019)
- [Language Models that Seek for Knowledge: Modular Search & Generation for Dialogue and Prompt Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13224/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Assessment of Dialog Evaluation Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03706/) (2021)
- [Sequential Latent Knowledge Selection for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07510/) (2020)
- [Evaluating Attribution in Dialogue Systems: The BEGIN Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00071/) (2021)
- [Increasing Faithfulness in Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue with Controllable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06963/) (2021)
- [Low-Resource Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10348/) (2020)
- [Deconstruct to Reconstruct a Configurable Evaluation Metric for Open-Domain Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00483/) (2020)
- [The Dialogue Dodecathlon: Open-Domain Knowledge and Image Grounded Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03768/) (2019)
- [Towards Coherent and Engaging Spoken Dialog Response Generation Using Automatic Conversation Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.13015/) (2019)
- [Zero-Resource Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12918/) (2020)
- [Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with a Unified Knowledge Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07924/) (2021)
- [Retrieval-Free Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Response Generation with Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06232/) (2021)
- [A Three-Stage Learning Framework for Low-Resource Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04096/) (2021)
- [KILM: Knowledge Injection into Encoder-Decoder Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09170/) (2023)
- [There Are a Thousand Hamlets in a Thousand People's Eyes: Enhancing Knowledge-grounded Dialogue with Personal Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02624/) (2022)

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

- [Investigating Content Planning for Navigating Trade-offs in Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02077/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Grounding dialogue response generation on external knowledge is proposed to produce informative and engaging responses. However, current knowledge-grounded dialogue (KGD) systems often fail to align the generated responses with human-preferred qualities due to several issues like hallucination and the lack of coherence. Upon analyzing multiple language model generations, we observe the presence of alternative generated responses within a single decoding process. These alternative responses are more faithful and exhibit a comparable or higher level of relevance to prior conversational turns compared to the optimal responses prioritized by the decoding processes. To address these challenges and driven by these observations, we propose Polished & Informed Candidate Scoring (PICK), a generation re-scoring framework that empowers models to generate faithful and relevant responses without requiring additional labeled data or model tuning. Through comprehensive automatic and human evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of PICK in generating responses that are more faithful while keeping them relevant to the dialogue history. Furthermore, PICK consistently improves the system's performance with both oracle and retrieved knowledge in all decoding strategies. We provide the detailed implementation in https://github.com/bryanwilie/pick .