Blending Reward Functions via Few Expert Demonstrations for Faithful and Accurate Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation
This work addresses the challenge of trustworthy conversational systems for information-seeking users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing reinforcement learning approaches with a novel reward function.
The paper tackled the problem of generating faithful and accurate responses in knowledge-grounded dialogue by addressing hallucinations and irrelevant knowledge distractions, achieving competitive performance with supervised baselines on two datasets.
The development of trustworthy conversational information-seeking systems relies on dialogue models that can generate faithful and accurate responses based on relevant knowledge texts. However, two main challenges hinder this task. Firstly, language models may generate hallucinations due to data biases present in their pretraining corpus. Secondly, knowledge texts often contain redundant and irrelevant information that distracts the model's attention from the relevant text span. Previous works use additional data annotations on the knowledge texts to learn a knowledge identification module in order to bypass irrelevant information, but collecting such high-quality span annotations can be costly. In this work, we leverage reinforcement learning algorithms to overcome the above challenges by introducing a novel reward function. Our reward function combines an accuracy metric and a faithfulness metric to provide a balanced quality judgment of generated responses, which can be used as a cost-effective approximation to a human preference reward model when only a few preference annotations are available. Empirical experiments on two conversational information-seeking datasets demonstrate that our method can compete with other strong supervised learning baselines.