Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Conversation Knowledge for Dialogue Management

Abstract

Dialogue management plays a vital role in task-oriented dialogue systems, which has become an active area of research in recent years. Despite the promising results brought from deep reinforcement learning, most of the studies need to develop a manual user simulator additionally. To address the time-consuming development of simulator policy, we propose a multi-agent dialogue model where an end-to-end dialogue manager and a user simulator are optimized simultaneously. Different from prior work, we optimize the two-agents from scratch and apply the reward shaping technology based on adjacency pairs constraints in conversational analysis to speed up learning and to avoid the derivation from normal human-human conversation. In addition, we generalize the one-to-one learning strategy to one-to-many learning strategy, where a dialogue manager can be concurrently optimized with various user simulators, to improve the performance of trained dialogue manager. The experimental results show that one-to-one agents trained with adjacency pairs constraints can converge faster and avoid derivation. In cross-model evaluation with human users involved, the dialogue manager trained in one-to-many strategy achieves the best performance.

Keywords

• dialogue management
• user simulation
• reward shaping
• conversation knowledge
• multi-agent reinforcement learning