BootTOD: Bootstrap Task-oriented Dialogue Representations by Aligning Diverse Responses
On the map: Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs → Code and instruction data synthesis
Abstract (arXiv)
Pre-trained language models have been successful in many scenarios. However, their usefulness in task-oriented dialogues is limited due to the intrinsic linguistic differences between general text and task-oriented dialogues. Current task-oriented dialogue pre-training methods rely on a contrastive framework, which faces challenges such as selecting true positives and hard negatives, as well as lacking diversity. In this paper, we propose a novel dialogue pre-training model called BootTOD. It learns task-oriented dialogue representations via a self-bootstrapping framework. Unlike contrastive counterparts, BootTOD aligns context and context+response representations and dismisses the requirements of contrastive pairs. BootTOD also uses multiple appropriate response targets to model the intrinsic one-to-many diversity of human conversations. Experimental results show that BootTOD outperforms strong TOD baselines on diverse downstream dialogue tasks.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Code and instruction data synthesis, one of 13 directions in Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs. Builds on 39 of its 73 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2024.
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39 of 73 references.
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