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### Adaptive Dialog Policy Learning with Hindsight and User Modeling

Reinforcement learning methods have been used to compute dialog policies from language-based interaction experiences. Efficiency is of particular importance in dialog policy learning, because of the considerable cost of interacting with people, and the very poor user experience from low-quality conversations. Aiming at improving the efficiency of dialog policy learning, we develop algorithm LHUA (Learning with Hindsight, User modeling, and Adaptation) that, for the first time, enables dialog agents to adaptively learn with hindsight from both simulated and real users. Simulation and hindsight provide the dialog agent with more experience and more (positive) reinforcements respectively. Experimental results suggest that, in success rate and policy quality, LHUA outperforms competitive baselines from the literature, including its no-simulation, no-adaptation, and no-hindsight counterparts.

### BBQ-Networks: Efficient Exploration in Deep Reinforcement Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

We present a new algorithm that significantly improves the efficiency of exploration for deep Q-learning agents in dialogue systems. Our agents explore via Thompson sampling, drawing Monte Carlo samples from a Bayes-by-Backprop neural network. Our algorithm learns much faster than common exploration strategies such as $\epsilon$-greedy, Boltzmann, bootstrapping, and intrinsic-reward-based ones. Additionally, we show that spiking the replay buffer with experiences from just a few successful episodes can make Q-learning feasible when it might otherwise fail.

### Subgoal Discovery for Hierarchical Dialogue Policy Learning

Developing conversational agents to engage in complex dialogues is challenging partly because the dialogue policy needs to explore a large state-action space. In this paper, we propose a divide-and-conquer approach that discovers and exploits the hidden structure of the task to enable efficient policy learning. First, given a set of successful dialogue sessions, we present a Subgoal Discovery Network (SDN) to divide a complex goal-oriented task into a set of simpler subgoals in an unsupervised fashion. We then use these subgoals to learn a hierarchical policy which consists of 1) a top-level policy that selects among subgoals, and 2) a low-level policy that selects primitive actions to accomplish the subgoal. We exemplify our method by building a dialogue agent for the composite task of travel planning. Experiments with simulated and real users show that an agent trained with automatically discovered subgoals performs competitively against an agent with human-defined subgoals, and significantly outperforms an agent without subgoals. Moreover, we show that learned subgoals are human comprehensible.

### Deep Dyna-Q: Integrating Planning for Task-Completion Dialogue Policy Learning

Training a task-completion dialogue agent via reinforcement learning (RL) is costly because it requires many interactions with real users. One common alternative is to use a user simulator. However, a user simulator usually lacks the language complexity of human interlocutors and the biases in its design may tend to degrade the agent. To address these issues, we present Deep Dyna-Q, which to our knowledge is the first deep RL framework that integrates planning for task-completion dialogue policy learning. We incorporate into the dialogue agent a model of the environment, referred to as the world model, to mimic real user response and generate simulated experience. During dialogue policy learning, the world model is constantly updated with real user experience to approach real user behavior, and in turn, the dialogue agent is optimized using both real experience and simulated experience. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated on a movie-ticket booking task in both simulated and human-in-the-loop settings.

### Discriminative Deep Dyna-Q: Robust Planning for Dialogue Policy Learning

This paper presents a Discriminative Deep Dyna-Q (D3Q) approach to improving the effectiveness and robustness of Deep Dyna-Q (DDQ), a recently proposed framework that extends the Dyna-Q algorithm to integrate planning for task-completion dialogue policy learning. To obviate DDQ's high dependency on the quality of simulated experiences, we incorporate an RNN-based discriminator in D3Q to differentiate simulated experience from real user experience in order to control the quality of training data. Experiments show that D3Q significantly outperforms DDQ by controlling the quality of simulated experience used for planning. The effectiveness and robustness of D3Q is further demonstrated in a domain extension setting, where the agent's capability of adapting to a changing environment is tested.