# Schema Augmentation for Zero-Shot Domain Adaptation in Dialogue State Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00150 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00150/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [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)
- [A Survey on Recent Advances in LLM-Based Multi-turn Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18013/) (2024)
- [Dialogue State Tracking with a Language Model using Schema-Driven Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07506/) (2021)
- [SpokenWOZ: A Large-Scale Speech-Text Benchmark for Spoken Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13040/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking via Cross-Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04655/) (2021)
- [Description-Driven Task-Oriented Dialog Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08904/) (2022)
- [ChatGPT for Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracking: A Solution or an Opportunity?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01386/) (2023)
- [Zero-shot Generalization in Dialog State Tracking through Generative Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08333/) (2021)
- [Scaling Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking via Query Reformulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05164/) (2019)
- [An End-to-End Dialogue State Tracking System with Machine Reading Comprehension and Wide & Deep Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09297/) (2019)
- [Few Shot Dialogue State Tracking using Meta-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06779/) (2021)
- [Prompter: Zero-shot Adaptive Prefixes for Dialogue State Tracking Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04724/) (2023)
- [mForms : Multimodal Form-Filling with Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12340/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue State Tracking via Dual Low-Rank Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21633/) (2024)

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

- [Approaching Dialogue State Tracking via Aligning Speech Encoders and LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08633/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Zero-shot domain adaptation for dialogue state tracking (DST) remains a challenging problem in task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, where models must generalize to target domains unseen at training time. Current large language model approaches for zero-shot domain adaptation rely on prompting to introduce knowledge pertaining to the target domains. However, their efficacy strongly depends on prompt engineering, as well as the zero-shot ability of the underlying language model. In this work, we devise a novel data augmentation approach, Schema Augmentation, that improves the zero-shot domain adaptation of language models through fine-tuning. Schema Augmentation is a simple but effective technique that enhances generalization by introducing variations of slot names within the schema provided in the prompt. Experiments on MultiWOZ and SpokenWOZ showed that the proposed approach resulted in a substantial improvement over the baseline, in some experiments achieving over a twofold accuracy gain over unseen domains while maintaining equal or superior performance over all domains.