Papers › Dial-MAE: ConTextual Masked Auto-Encoder for Retrieval-based Dialogue Systems
Dial-MAE: ConTextual Masked Auto-Encoder for Retrieval-based Dialogue Systems
Zhenpeng Su, Xing Wu, Wei Zhou, Guangyuan Ma, Songlin Hu
Dialogue response selection aims to select an appropriate response from several candidates based on a given user and system utterance history. Most existing works primarily focus on post-training and fine-tuning tailored for cross-encoders. However, there are no post-training methods tailored for dense encoders in dialogue response selection. We argue that when the current language model, based on dense dialogue systems (such as BERT), is employed as a dense encoder, it separately encodes dialogue context and response, leading to a struggle to achieve the alignment of both representations. Thus, we propose Dial-MAE (Dialogue Contextual Masking Auto-Encoder), a straightforward yet effective post-training technique tailored for dense encoders in dialogue response selection. Dial-MAE uses an asymmetric encoder-decoder architecture to compress the dialogue semantics into dense vectors, which achieves better alignment between the features of the dialogue context and response. Our experiments have demonstrated that Dial-MAE is highly effective, achieving state-of-the-art performance on two commonly evaluated benchmarks.
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Code
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conversational Response Selection | E-commerce | DialMAE | R10@1 | 0.930 | #2 of 15 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Conversational Response Selection | E-commerce | DialMAE | R10@2 | 0.977 | #2 of 15 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Conversational Response Selection | E-commerce | DialMAE | R10@5 | 0.997 | #2 of 15 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Conversational Response Selection | Ubuntu Dialogue (v1, Ranking) | Dial-MAE | R10@1 | 0.918 | #1 of 25 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Conversational Response Selection | Ubuntu Dialogue (v1, Ranking) | Dial-MAE | R10@2 | 0.964 | #1 of 25 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Conversational Response Selection | Ubuntu Dialogue (v1, Ranking) | Dial-MAE | R10@5 | 0.993 | #1 of 25 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
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