Position Debiasing Fine-Tuning for Causal Perception in Long-Term Dialogue

The core of the dialogue system is to generate relevant, informative, and human-like responses based on extensive dialogue history. Recently, dialogue generation domain has seen mainstream adoption of large language models (LLMs), due to its powerful capability in generating utterances. However, there is a natural deficiency for such models, that is, inherent position bias, which may lead them to pay more attention to the nearby utterances instead of causally relevant ones, resulting in generating irrelevant and generic responses in long-term dialogue. To alleviate such problem, in this paper, we propose a novel method, named Causal Perception long-term Dialogue framework (CPD), which employs perturbation-based causal variable discovery method to extract casually relevant utterances from the dialogue history and enhances model causal perception during fine-tuning. Specifically, a local-position awareness method is proposed in CPD for inter-sentence position correlation elimination, which helps models extract causally relevant utterances based on perturbations. Then, a casual-perception fine-tuning strategy is also proposed, to enhance the capability of discovering the causal invariant factors, by differently perturbing causally relevant and non-casually relevant ones for response generation. Experimental results on two datasets prove that our proposed method can effectively alleviate the position bias for multiple LLMs and achieve significant progress compared with existing baselines.