CHAI: A CHatbot AI for Task-Oriented Dialogue with Offline Reinforcement Learning
This addresses the challenge of developing efficient dialogue systems for applications like customer service, though it is incremental as it builds on existing offline RL methods.
The paper tackled the problem of training task-oriented dialogue agents without costly trial-and-error learning by using offline reinforcement learning on static human datasets, resulting in agents that better accomplish task goals.
Conventionally, generation of natural language for dialogue agents may be viewed as a statistical learning problem: determine the patterns in human-provided data and generate appropriate responses with similar statistical properties. However, dialogue can also be regarded as a goal directed process, where speakers attempt to accomplish a specific task. Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are designed specifically for solving such goal-directed problems, but the most direct way to apply RL -- through trial-and-error learning in human conversations, -- is costly. In this paper, we study how offline reinforcement learning can instead be used to train dialogue agents entirely using static datasets collected from human speakers. Our experiments show that recently developed offline RL methods can be combined with language models to yield realistic dialogue agents that better accomplish task goals.