  Pre-trained language models based on general text enable huge success in the
NLP scenario. But the intrinsical difference of linguistic patterns between
general text and task-oriented dialogues makes existing pre-trained language
models less useful in practice. Current dialogue pre-training methods rely on a
contrastive framework and face the challenges of both selecting true positives
and hard negatives. In this paper, we propose a novel dialogue pre-training
model, FutureTOD, which distills future knowledge to the representation of the
previous dialogue context using a self-training framework. Our intuition is
that a good dialogue representation both learns local context information and
predicts future information. Extensive experiments on diverse downstream
dialogue tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, especially the
generalization, robustness, and learning discriminative dialogue
representations capabilities.
