Leveraging Explicit Procedural Instructions for Data-Efficient Action Prediction

Abstract: Task-oriented dialogues often require agents to enact complex, multi-step procedures in order to meet user requests. While LLMs have found success automating these dialogues in constrained environments, their widespread deployment is limited by the substantial quantities of task-specific data required for training. The following paper presents a data-efficient solution to constructing dialogue systems, leveraging explicit instructions derived from agent guidelines, such as company policies or customer service manuals. Our proposed Knowledge-Augmented Dialogue System (KADS) combines a LLM with a knowledge retrieval module that pulls documents outlining relevant procedures from a predefined set of policies, given a user-agent interaction. To train this system, we introduce a semi-supervised pre-training scheme that employs dialogue-document matching and action-oriented masked language modeling with partial parameter freezing. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on prominent task-oriented dialogue datasets, Action-Based Conversations Dataset and Schema-Guided Dialogue, for two dialogue tasks: action state tracking and workflow discovery. Our results demonstrate that procedural knowledge augmentation improves accuracy predicting in- and out-of-distribution actions while preserving high performance in settings with low or sparse data.