ParlAI is a comprehensive research platform for building, training, and evaluating dialogue agents across a wide variety of tasks and datasets. It provides a unified interface—agents, teachers, and worlds—so the same model can be trained on multi-turn chit-chat, question answering, task-oriented dialogue, retrieval, or safety-focused datasets without changing core code. The library integrates tightly with PyTorch and supports both generative and retrieval-augmented models, along with utilities for multitask training and model selection. A large set of built-in tasks and dataset loaders (with consistent preprocessing and metrics) makes it easy to compare methods under shared conditions. Tools for distributed training, mixed precision, and model zoos help scale experiments from laptops to multi-GPU clusters.
Features
- Unified agent/teacher/world abstractions for many dialogue tasks and datasets
- Support for both generative and retrieval-based models with PyTorch integration
- Multitask and multi-domain training to improve transfer and robustness
- Extensive dataset zoo with consistent preprocessors, metrics, and evaluators
- Utilities for distributed training, mixed precision, and experiment management
- Interactive evaluation tools, human-in-the-loop testing, and safety checks