Bootstrapping LLM-based Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents via Self-Talk

Dennis Thomas Ulmer, Elman Mansimov, Kaixiang Lin, Justin Sun, Xibin Gao, Yi Zhang

Research output: Conference Article in Proceeding or Book/Report chapterArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful dialogue agents, but specializing them towards fulfilling a specific function can be challenging. Instructing tuning, i.e. tuning models on instruction and sample responses generated by humans (Ouyang et al., 2022), has proven as an effective method to do so, yet requires a number of data samples that a) might not be available or b) costly to generate. Furthermore, this cost increases when the goal is to make the LLM follow a specific workflow within a dialogue instead of single instructions. Inspired by the self-play technique in reinforcement learning and the use of LLMs to simulate human agents, we propose a more effective method for data collection through LLMs engaging in a conversation in various roles. This approach generates a training data via "self-talk" of LLMs that can be refined and utilized for supervised fine-tuning. We introduce an automated way to measure the (partial) success of a dialogue. This metric is used to filter the generated conversational data that is fed back in LLM for training. Based on our automated and human evaluations of conversation quality, we demonstrate that such self-talk data improves results. In addition, we examine the various characteristics that showcase the quality of generated dialogues and how they can be connected to their potential utility as training data.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
EditorsLun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
VolumeFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Place of PublicationBangkok
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Publication dateAug 2024
Pages9500–9522
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2024

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