Sparse Rewards Can Self-Train Dialogue Agents

Barrett Martin Lattimer, Varun Prashant Gangal, Ryan McDonald, Yi Yang

Keywords: Self-training, LLM, Simulation, Benchmark, Tool-calling, Dataset, Task Oriented Dialogue, Dialogue, User Simulation, Beam Search, Algorithm, Preference Tuning, Supervised Finetuning, JOSH, ToolWOZ

TL;DR: We introduce a self training procedure JOSH to train small and frontier models on tool-based dialogue interactions and a new tool calling agent benchmark ToolWOZ.

Abstract: Recent advancements in state-of-the-art (SOTA) Large Language Model (LLM) agents, especially in multi-turn dialogue tasks, have been primarily driven by supervised fine-tuning and high-quality human feedback. However, as base LLM models continue to improve, acquiring meaningful human feedback has become increasingly challenging and costly. In certain domains, base LLM agents may eventually exceed human capabilities, making traditional feedback-driven methods impractical. In this paper, we introduce a novel self-improvement paradigm that empowers LLM agents to autonomously enhance their performance without external human feedback. Our method, Juxtaposed Outcomes for Simulation Harvesting (JOSH), is a self-alignment algorithm that leverages a sparse reward simulation environment to extract ideal behaviors and further train the LLM on its own outputs. We present ToolWOZ, a sparse reward tool-calling simulation environment derived from MultiWOZ. We demonstrate that models trained with JOSH, both small and frontier, significantly improve tool-based interactions while preserving general model capabilities across diverse benchmarks. Our code and data are publicly available on GitHub.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

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Submission Number: 11167