{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-unified-multi-task-learning-framework-for","title":"A Unified Multi-task Learning Framework for Multi-goal Conversational Recommender Systems","arxiv_id":"2204.06923","date":"2022-04-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yang Deng","Wenxuan Zhang","Weiwen Xu","Wenqiang Lei","Tat-Seng Chua","Wai Lam"],"abstract":"Recent years witnessed several advances in developing multi-goal conversational recommender systems (MG-CRS) that can proactively attract users' interests and naturally lead user-engaged dialogues with multiple conversational goals and diverse topics. Four tasks are often involved in MG-CRS, including Goal Planning, Topic Prediction, Item Recommendation, and Response Generation. Most existing studies address only some of these tasks. To handle the whole problem of MG-CRS, modularized frameworks are adopted where each task is tackled independently without considering their interdependencies. In this work, we propose a novel Unified MultI-goal conversational recommeNDer system, namely UniMIND. In specific, we unify these four tasks with different formulations into the same sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) paradigm. Prompt-based learning strategies are investigated to endow the unified model with the capability of multi-task learning. Finally, the overall learning and inference procedure consists of three stages, including multi-task learning, prompt-based tuning, and inference. Experimental results on two MG-CRS benchmarks (DuRecDial and TG-ReDial) show that UniMIND achieves state-of-the-art performance on all tasks with a unified model. Extensive analyses and discussions are provided for shedding some new perspectives for MG-CRS.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.06923v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.06923v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-unified-multi-task-learning-framework-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/dengyang17/unimind","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"multi-task-learning","task_name":"Multi-Task Learning"},{"task_slug":"recommendation-systems","task_name":"Recommendation Systems"},{"task_slug":"response-generation","task_name":"Response Generation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2204.06923","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}