Abstract
Humans have multiple levels of temporal abstractions on daily interaction and thinking, such as concept perception and strategic planning. Inspired by this nature, we propose a two-level hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) framework for conversational agents, bridging the gap between previous token-level or utterance-level RL methods. Developed on a two-level MDP, the token-level response decoding is conditioned on the utterance-level action, the explicit textual strategies. Based on theoretical derivation and efficiency consideration, we use DQN to solve the high-level critic and PPO to solve the low-level actor-critic. To further alleviate the reward sparsity and facilitate the convergence, we also design the dual-granularity reward mechanism, in which the utterance-level satisfaction score is integrated with token-level intrinsic motivation and K-L penalty. Experiments on both daily and emotional support conversations show that our method outperforms versatile baselines in strategy determination and response quality. Our implementation is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21969
