Clear Up Confusion: Iterative Differential Generation for Fine-grained Intent Detection with Contrastive Feedback

Feng Zhang, Wei Chen, Meng Gao, Fei Ding, Tengjiao Wang, Jiahui Yao, Jiabin Zheng

Abstract: Fine-grained intent detection involves identifying a large number of classes with subtle variations. Recently, generating pseudo samples via large language models has attracted increasing attention to alleviate the data scarcity caused by emerging new intents. However, these methods generate samples for each class independently and neglect the relationships between classes, leading to ambiguity in pseudo samples, particularly for fine-grained labels. And, they typically rely on one-time generation and overlook feedback from pseudo samples. In this paper, we propose an iterative differential generation framework with contrastive feedback to generate high-quality pseudo samples and accurately capture the crucial nuances in target class distribution. Specifically, we propose differential guidelines that include potential ambiguous labels to reduce confusion for similar labels. Then we conduct rubric-driven refinement, ensuring the validity and diversity of pseudo samples. Finally, despite one generation, we propose to iteratively generate new samples with contrastive feedback to achieve accurate identification and distillation of target knowledge. Extensive experiments in zero/few-shot and full-shot settings on three datasets verify the effectiveness of our method.