Score: 4

PyTOD: Programmable Task-Oriented Dialogue with Execution Feedback

Published: August 21, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2508.15456v1

By: Alexandru Coca , Bo-Hsiang Tseng , Pete Boothroyd and more

BigTech Affiliations: Apple

Potential Business Impact:

Helps computers understand conversations better.

Business Areas:
Natural Language Processing Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Software

Programmable task-oriented dialogue (TOD) agents enable language models to follow structured dialogue policies, but their effectiveness hinges on accurate state tracking. We present PyTOD, an agent that generates executable code to track dialogue state and uses policy and execution feedback for efficient error correction. To this end, PyTOD employs a simple constrained decoding approach, using a language model instead of grammar rules to follow API schemata. This leads to state-of-the-art state tracking performance on the challenging SGD benchmark. Our experiments show that PyTOD surpasses strong baselines in both accuracy and robust user goal estimation as the dialogue progresses, demonstrating the effectiveness of execution-aware state tracking.

Country of Origin
🇺🇸 🇬🇧 United Kingdom, United States

Repos / Data Links

Page Count
20 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Computation and Language