Pre-trained language models based on general text enable huge success in the NLP scenario. But the intrinsical difference of linguistic patterns between general text and task-oriented dialogues makes existing pre-trained language models less useful in practice. Current dialogue pre-training methods rely on a contrastive framework and face the challenges of both selecting true positives and hard negatives. In this paper, we propose a novel dialogue pre-training model, FutureTOD, which distills future knowledge to the representation of the previous dialogue context using a self-training framework. Our intuition is that a good dialogue representation both learns local context information and predicts future information. Extensive experiments on diverse downstream dialogue tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, especially the generalization, robustness, and learning discriminative dialogue representations capabilities.

本文提出了一种基于FutureTOD模型的对话预训练方法，该方法可通过自我训练并利用未来奖励来使模型学习到当下上下文信息和预测未来信息，从而提高对话表示的概括、鲁棒和学习判别性能力，并在不同的下游对话任务中获得了良好的表现。

FutureTOD：教授预训练语言模型未来知识用于任务导向对话