Zero-shot cross-domain dialogue state tracking (DST) enables us to manage task-oriented dialogues in new, unseen domains without the cost of collecting in-domain data. Previous studies have implemented slot-based input improvements, such as schema-driven descriptions and question-answering formats, but still suffer from negative transfer for seen slots and inefficient transfer for unseen slots due to the significant source-target domain gap. To address these issues, we introduce a novel framework called Context-aware Auto-prompting and Instruction-following Contrastive Decoding (CAPID). This framework generates dynamic, context-aware slot queries, effectively improving the model’s transferability. Our context-aware auto-prompting approach tailors slot queries to the current dialogue context, increasing flexibility and reducing ambiguities. Additionally, an instruction-following contrastive decoding strategy helps reduce errors related to off-topic slots by penalizing deviations from the provided instructions. Extensive experiments on two datasets, with varying model sizes (from 60M to 7B), demonstrate the superior performance of CAPID. The source code is provided for reproducibility.

A practical dialogue system requires the capacity for ongoing skill acquisition and adaptability to new tasks while preserving prior knowledge. However, current methods for Continual Dialogue State Tracking (DST), a crucial function of dialogue systems, struggle with the catastrophic forgetting issue and knowledge transfer between tasks. We present TaSL, a novel framework for task skill localization and consolidation that enables effective knowledge transfer without relying on memory replay. TaSL uses a novel group-wise technique to pinpoint task-specific and task-shared areas. Additionally, a fine-grained skill consolidation strategy protects task-specific knowledge from being forgotten while updating shared knowledge for bi-directional knowledge transfer. As a result, TaSL strikes a balance between preserving previous knowledge and excelling at new tasks. Comprehensive experiments on various backbones highlight the significant performance improvements of TaSL, with a 7.6% absolute increase in Avg. JGA and an 11% absolute rise in BWT metrics over existing state-of-the-art methods. The source code is provided for reproducibility.

We present EasyGen, an efficient model designed to enhance multimodal understanding and generation by harnessing the capabilities of diffusion models and large language models (LLMs). Unlike existing multimodal models that predominately depend on encoders like CLIP or ImageBind and need ample amounts of training data to bridge modalities, EasyGen leverages BiDiffuser, a bidirectional conditional diffusion model, to foster more efficient modality interactions. EasyGen achieves text generation by training a projection layer linking BiDiffuser and an LLM, and facilities image generation by training an adapter to align the LLM’s text space with the BiDiffuser’s image space. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments show that EasyGen excels in data-efficient training, high-quality image generation, and extendibility, effectively addressing the challenges in multimodal generation.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of pre-training for few-shot intent classification. While existing paradigms commonly further pre-train language models such as BERT on a vast amount of unlabeled corpus, we find it highly effective and efficient to simply fine-tune BERT with a small set of labeled utterances from public datasets. Specifically, fine-tuning BERT with roughly 1,000 labeled data yields a pre-trained model – IntentBERT, which can easily surpass the performance of existing pre-trained models for few-shot intent classification on novel domains with very different semantics. The high effectiveness of IntentBERT confirms the feasibility and practicality of few-shot intent detection, and its high generalization ability across different domains suggests that intent classification tasks may share a similar underlying structure, which can be efficiently learned from a small set of labeled data. The source code can be found at https://github.com/hdzhang-code/IntentBERT.