DyBBT: Dynamic Balance via Bandit-inspired Targeting for Dialog Policy with Cognitive Dual Systems

Task oriented dialog systems often rely on static exploration strategies that do not adapt to dynamic dialog contexts, leading to inefficient exploration and suboptimal performance. We propose DyBBT 1 , a novel dialog policy learning framework that formalizes the exploration challenge through a structured cognitive state space C that captures dialog progression, user uncertainty, and slot dependency. DyBBT proposes a bandit-inspired meta-controller that dynamically switches between a fast intuitive inference (System 1) and a slow deliberative reasoner (System 2) based on real-time cognitive states and visitation counts. Extensive experiments on single-and multi-domain benchmarks show that DyBBT achieves SOTA performance in success rate, efficiency, and generalization, with human evaluations confirming that its decisions are well-aligned with expert judgment.