Planning with Diffusion Models for Target-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Du, Hanwen, Peng, Bo, Ning, Xia
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Du, Hanwen
Peng, Bo
Ning, Xia
author_facet Du, Hanwen
Peng, Bo
Ning, Xia
contents Target-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) remains a significant challenge in the LLM era, where strategic dialogue planning is crucial for directing conversations toward specific targets. However, existing dialogue planning methods generate dialogue plans in a step-by-step sequential manner, and may suffer from compounding errors and myopic actions. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel dialogue planning framework, DiffTOD, which leverages diffusion models to enable non-sequential dialogue planning. DiffTOD formulates dialogue planning as a trajectory generation problem with conditional guidance, and leverages a diffusion language model to estimate the likelihood of the dialogue trajectory. To optimize the dialogue action strategies, DiffTOD introduces three tailored guidance mechanisms for different target types, offering flexible guidance toward diverse TOD targets at test time. Extensive experiments across three diverse TOD settings show that DiffTOD can effectively perform non-myopic lookahead exploration and optimize action strategies over a long horizon through non-sequential dialogue planning, and demonstrates strong flexibility across complex and diverse dialogue scenarios. Our code and data are accessible through https://github.com/ninglab/DiffTOD.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_16858
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Planning with Diffusion Models for Target-Oriented Dialogue Systems
Du, Hanwen
Peng, Bo
Ning, Xia
Computation and Language
Target-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) remains a significant challenge in the LLM era, where strategic dialogue planning is crucial for directing conversations toward specific targets. However, existing dialogue planning methods generate dialogue plans in a step-by-step sequential manner, and may suffer from compounding errors and myopic actions. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel dialogue planning framework, DiffTOD, which leverages diffusion models to enable non-sequential dialogue planning. DiffTOD formulates dialogue planning as a trajectory generation problem with conditional guidance, and leverages a diffusion language model to estimate the likelihood of the dialogue trajectory. To optimize the dialogue action strategies, DiffTOD introduces three tailored guidance mechanisms for different target types, offering flexible guidance toward diverse TOD targets at test time. Extensive experiments across three diverse TOD settings show that DiffTOD can effectively perform non-myopic lookahead exploration and optimize action strategies over a long horizon through non-sequential dialogue planning, and demonstrates strong flexibility across complex and diverse dialogue scenarios. Our code and data are accessible through https://github.com/ninglab/DiffTOD.
title Planning with Diffusion Models for Target-Oriented Dialogue Systems
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16858