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Main Authors: Zhao, Yangyang, Niu, Ben, Qin, Libo, Wang, Shihan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03519
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author Zhao, Yangyang
Niu, Ben
Qin, Libo
Wang, Shihan
author_facet Zhao, Yangyang
Niu, Ben
Qin, Libo
Wang, Shihan
contents Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is widely used in task-oriented dialogue systems to optimize dialogue policy, but it struggles to balance exploration and exploitation due to the high dimensionality of state and action spaces. This challenge often results in local optima or poor convergence. Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have been proven to effectively explore the solution space of neural networks by maintaining population diversity. Inspired by this, we innovatively combine the global search capabilities of EA with the local optimization of DRL to achieve a balance between exploration and exploitation. Nevertheless, the inherent flexibility of natural language in dialogue tasks complicates this direct integration, leading to prolonged evolutionary times. Thus, we further propose an elite individual injection mechanism to enhance EA's search efficiency by adaptively introducing best-performing individuals into the population. Experiments across four datasets show that our approach significantly improves the balance between exploration and exploitation, boosting performance. Moreover, the effectiveness of the EII mechanism in reducing exploration time has been demonstrated, achieving an efficient integration of EA and DRL on task-oriented dialogue policy tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_03519
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Efficient Task-Oriented Dialogue Policy: Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning Injected by Elite Individuals
Zhao, Yangyang
Niu, Ben
Qin, Libo
Wang, Shihan
Computation and Language
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is widely used in task-oriented dialogue systems to optimize dialogue policy, but it struggles to balance exploration and exploitation due to the high dimensionality of state and action spaces. This challenge often results in local optima or poor convergence. Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have been proven to effectively explore the solution space of neural networks by maintaining population diversity. Inspired by this, we innovatively combine the global search capabilities of EA with the local optimization of DRL to achieve a balance between exploration and exploitation. Nevertheless, the inherent flexibility of natural language in dialogue tasks complicates this direct integration, leading to prolonged evolutionary times. Thus, we further propose an elite individual injection mechanism to enhance EA's search efficiency by adaptively introducing best-performing individuals into the population. Experiments across four datasets show that our approach significantly improves the balance between exploration and exploitation, boosting performance. Moreover, the effectiveness of the EII mechanism in reducing exploration time has been demonstrated, achieving an efficient integration of EA and DRL on task-oriented dialogue policy tasks.
title An Efficient Task-Oriented Dialogue Policy: Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning Injected by Elite Individuals
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03519