A Task-oriented Dialogue Policy Learning Method of Improved Discriminative Deep Dyna-Q

As a pivotal part of the task-oriented dialogue system, dialogue policy can be trained by using the discriminative deep Dyna-Q framework. However, the framework uses vanilla deep Q-network method in the direct reinforcement learning phase and adopts MLPs as the basic network of world model, which limits the efficiency and stability of the dialogue policy learning. In this paper, we purpose an improved discriminative deep Dyna-Q method for task-oriented dialogue policy learning. In the improved direct RL phase, we first employ a NoisyNet to improve the exploration method, and then combine the dual-stream architecture of Dueling Network, Double-Q Network and n-step bootstrapping to optimize the calculation of the Q values. Moreover, we design a soft-attention-based model to replace the MLPs in the world model. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves better results than other baseline models in terms of task success rate, average dialog turns and average reward. We further validate the effectiveness of proposed method by conducting both ablation and robustness analysis.