A Randomized Link Transformer for Diverse Open-Domain Dialogue Generation

A major issue in open-domain dialogue generation is the agent’s tendency to generate repetitive and generic responses. The lack in response diversity has been addressed in recent years via the use of latent variable models, such as the Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (CVAE), which typically involve learning a latent Gaussian distribution over potential response intents. However, due to latent variable collapse, training latent variable dialogue models are notoriously complex, requiring substantial modification to the standard training process and loss function. Other approaches proposed to improve response diversity also largely entail a significant increase in training complexity. Hence, this paper proposes a Randomized Link (RL) Transformer as an alternative to the latent variable models. The RL Transformer does not require any additional enhancements to the training process or loss function. Empirical results show that, when it comes to response diversity, the RL Transformer achieved comparable performance compared to latent variable models.