Open-domain dialogue systems aim to interact with humans through natural language texts in an open-ended fashion. Despite the recent success of super large dialogue systems such as ChatGPT, using medium-to-small-sized dialogue systems remains the common practice as they are more lightweight and accessible; however, generating diverse dialogue responses is challenging, especially with smaller models. In this work, we propose an Equal-size Hard Expectation--Maximization (EqHard-EM) algorithm to train a multi-decoder model for diverse dialogue generation. Our algorithm assigns a sample to a decoder in a hard manner and additionally imposes an equal-assignment constraint to ensure that all decoders are well-trained. We provide detailed theoretical analysis to justify our approach. Further, experiments on two large-scale open-domain dialogue datasets verify that our EqHard-EM algorithm generates high-quality diverse responses.
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