Chong Tian


2023

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Multi-level Adaptive Contrastive Learning for Knowledge Internalization in Dialogue Generation
Chenxu Yang | Zheng Lin | Lanrui Wang | Chong Tian | Liang Pang | Jiangnan Li | Qirong Ho | Yanan Cao | Weiping Wang
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Knowledge-grounded dialogue generation aims to mitigate the issue of text degeneration by incorporating external knowledge to supplement the context. However, the model often fails to internalize this information into responses in a human-like manner. Instead, it simply inserts segments of the provided knowledge into generic responses. As a result, the generated responses tend to be tedious, incoherent, and in lack of interactivity which means the degeneration problem is still unsolved. In this work, we first find that such copying-style degeneration is primarily due to the weak likelihood objective, which allows the model to “cheat” the objective by merely duplicating knowledge segments in a superficial pattern matching based on overlap. To overcome this challenge, we then propose a Multi-level Adaptive Contrastive Learning (MACL) framework that dynamically samples negative examples and subsequently penalizes degeneration behaviors at both the token-level and sequence-level. Extensive experiments on the WoW dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across various pre-trained models and decoding strategies.