Are Large Language Models All You Need for Task-Oriented Dialogue?

Instruction-finetuned large language models (LLMs) gained a huge popularity recently, thanks to their ability to interact with users through conversation. In this work, we aim to evaluate their ability to complete multi-turn tasks and interact with external databases in the context of established task-oriented dialogue benchmarks. We show that in explicit belief state tracking, LLMs underperform compared to specialized task-specific models. Nevertheless, they show some ability to guide the dialogue to a successful ending through their generated responses if they are provided with correct slot values. Furthermore, this ability improves with few-shot in-domain examples.