@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2019-budgeted,
    title = "Budgeted Policy Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems",
    author = "Zhang, Zhirui  and
      Li, Xiujun  and
      Gao, Jianfeng  and
      Chen, Enhong",
    editor = "Korhonen, Anna  and
      Traum, David  and
      M{\`a}rquez, Llu{\'i}s",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = jul,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Florence, Italy",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/P19-1364/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/P19-1364",
    pages = "3742--3751",
    abstract = "This paper presents a new approach that extends Deep Dyna-Q (DDQ) by incorporating a Budget-Conscious Scheduling (BCS) to best utilize a fixed, small amount of user interactions (budget) for learning task-oriented dialogue agents. BCS consists of (1) a Poisson-based global scheduler to allocate budget over different stages of training; (2) a controller to decide at each training step whether the agent is trained using real or simulated experiences; (3) a user goal sampling module to generate the experiences that are most effective for policy learning. Experiments on a movie-ticket booking task with simulated and real users show that our approach leads to significant improvements in success rate over the state-of-the-art baselines given the fixed budget."
}