Papers › SOLOIST: Building Task Bots at Scale with Transfer Learning and Machine Teaching
SOLOIST: Building Task Bots at Scale with Transfer Learning and Machine Teaching
Baolin Peng, Chunyuan Li, Jinchao Li, Shahin Shayandeh, Lars Liden, Jianfeng Gao
We present a new method SOLOIST that uses transfer learning and machine teaching to build task bots at scale. We parameterize classical modular task-oriented dialog systems using a Transformer-based auto-regressive language model, which subsumes different dialog modules into a single neural model. We pre-train, on heterogeneous dialog corpora, a task-grounded response generation model, which can generate dialog responses grounded in user goals and real-world knowledge for task completion. The pre-trained model can be efficiently adapted to accomplish new tasks with a handful of task-specific dialogs via machine teaching, where training samples are generated by human teachers interacting with the system. Experiments show that (i) SOLOIST creates new state-of-the-art on well-studied task-oriented dialog benchmarks, including CamRest676 and MultiWOZ; (ii) in the few-shot fine-tuning settings, SOLOIST significantly outperforms existing methods, and (iii) the use of machine teaching substantially reduces the labeling cost of fine-tuning. The pre-trained models and codes are available at https://aka.ms/soloist.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| End-To-End Dialogue Modelling | MULTIWOZ 2.0 | SOLOIST | BLEU | 16.5 | #4 of 6 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| End-To-End Dialogue Modelling | MULTIWOZ 2.0 | SOLOIST | MultiWOZ (Inform) | 85.5 | #4 of 6 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| End-To-End Dialogue Modelling | MULTIWOZ 2.0 | SOLOIST | MultiWOZ (Success) | 72.9 | #4 of 6 | 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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