arXiv AI

DialFork: Going Beyond Factuality to Evaluate Procedural Hallucination in Conversational Agents

DialFork is a new benchmark that evaluates procedural hallucination in conversational agents, a failure mode where agents produce fluent, factually plausible utterances but deviate from the intended dialogue process. The benchmark consists of 36,278 dialogues across 24 tasks in 12 domains, created by forking conformant dialogues and injecting one of four hallucination types, with validation by 30 human annotators. Three evaluation tasks are defined—monitoring overall deviation, procedural retrieval of a single dialogue, and real‑time detection of off‑track turns—using dialog‑flow‑aware metrics FlowKL and FlowScore, which outperform baseline semantic similarity metrics.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

TalkFa: A Unified Benchmark for Farsi Dialogue Generation and Understanding

TalkFa introduces a unified benchmark for Farsi dialogue generation and understanding, comprising three datasets: WIKI‑FADIAL (4.2K Wikipedia‑grounded dialogues), DAILYDIALOG‑FA (6.6K dialogues with dialogue‑act and emotion annotations), and PLAYDIAL‑FA (2.1K theatrical dialogues with sentiment labels). All dialogues are curated through multi‑stage review by native speakers, ensuring high quality. Experiments show that LoRA fine‑tuning improves generation performance with less data, while specific models excel on classification tasks, and human evaluation confirms the benchmark’s reliability.

By Neda Jamshidi, Kamyar Zeinalipour, Fahimeh Akbari, Monica Bianchini, Marco Maggini, Marco Gori
arXiv AI
Jul 15

Operationalising Multi-Dimensional Evaluation for Conversational Agents: A Scalable, Governed Pipeline with Selective Re-evaluation and Model Benchmarking

arXiv:2607. 12085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating retail conversational agents requires methods beyond lexical-overlap metrics to assess intent alignment, factuality, helpfulness, clarity, tone, and overall response quality.

By Niranjan Kumar M, Balaji Nagarajan, Karthik Nair, Faysal Satter, Nithin Surendran
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Evaluating Communicative Success in Machine-Translated Conversation

The paper introduces a three‑layer checklist-and-judge framework to evaluate interpreter agents that mediate live conversation across languages. It assesses semantic, pragmatic, and cultural‑social dimensions—naturalness, intent, and social appropriateness—rather than just fidelity, in both single‑turn and multi‑turn settings. Extensive validation shows that conventional MT metrics miss failures in stronger interpreters, and that context, structured instructions, and cultural cues influence communicative success.

By Faiz Ghifari Haznitrama, Alice Oh
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Evaluating Language Models in Realistic Conversational Contexts

The paper introduces UPHELD, a large benchmark of human-to-human dialogues written by professional script writers, featuring realistic turn densities and over 36,000 per-turn human annotations. It evaluates existing automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-judge methods, finding them unreliable against expert human judgment. Using UPHELD, the authors develop a Mixture-of-Judges framework that improves correlation with human assessments by about 30%.

By Ilija Subasic, Andrew Rabinovich, Zhao Chen
arXiv AI
Jul 16

Not All Needles Are Found: How Fact Distribution and Don't Make It Up Prompts Shape Retrieval, Reasoning, and Hallucination in Long-Context LLMs

arXiv:2601. 02023v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly utilize massive context windows as working memory for autonomous tasks, their reliability fluctuates significantly depending on how information is distributed in real-world corpora.

By Amirali Ebrahimzadeh, Seyyed M. Salili
arXiv AI
Aug 28

When Text Misleads: Inconsistent-Aware Reasoning for Audio-Grounded Dialogue

The paper introduces ContraTalk, a benchmark that tests whether dialogue models truly use acoustic cues or rely on transcript shortcuts. It formalizes cross‑modal disagreement, creates conflict and consistent QA examples, and proposes an Audio Twin representation to expose acoustic evidence to models. Experiments show that while text‑only LLMs perform well on consistent cases, they falter on conflict cases, and AudioLLMs only partially mitigate this issue.

By Yen-Ju Lu, Yuzhe Wang, Yaohan Guan, Xiluo He, Jiarui Hai, Mingrui Liang, Kaavya Chaparala, Thomas Thebaud, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Najim Dehak, Jesus Villalba
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Pander Score: A Continuous Measure of Sycophancy as Epistemic Deference

The paper introduces the Pander Score, a continuous metric that quantifies how much a language model’s expressed support for a claim changes in response to the user’s attitude. It uses a new protocol to estimate probabilities from natural language outputs, validated against human judgment, and applies this to a dataset of 349 propositions with 11,000 prompts across 18 models. Results show varying degrees of sycophancy, with Z.ai’s GLM‑5.2 pandering the most and Claude Fable 5 the least, and demonstrate that models are more likely to comply with claims under instructional prompts than conversational ones.

By Alejandro Botas, Paul de Font-Reaulx, Luke Hewitt
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 8

ToolRACER: A Robust Agentic Conversation Emulation Resource for Agent Training and Evaluation

arXiv:2610.09163v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Task-oriented conversational agents remain fragile under real world conversation scenarios as they rarely follow a predictable script, especially when...

By Arkajyoti Chakraborty, Aryan Tayal, Ishika Agarwal, Tanner Sorensen, Justin Chiu, Alessandro Di Bari, Neha Gupta, Andreas Stolcke
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Agent Seer: Synthesizing Scenarios from Specification Understanding

Agent Seer is a pipeline that automatically synthesizes realistic evaluation scenarios for AI agents that use external tools, using only the tool’s specification (function names, natural‑language descriptions, and typed parameter schemas). Starting from a single Model Context Protocol (MCP) specification, it enriches raw schemas, generates graded scenarios with synthetic tool outputs, and expands them into mock‑data‑grounded multi‑turn dialogues that demonstrate strong tool‑calling correctness and conversational coherence. Across seven diverse MCP specifications, the pipeline achieves high quality, with parameter‑schema complexity emerging as the main driver of quality variation and argument‑value accuracy identified as the dominant failure mode.

By Harish Karumuri, Mahesh Vemula, David Lopes Pegna
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Unified Hallucination Fuzzing for Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 07525v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hallucination remains a persistent challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), severely limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications.

By Pengfei Zhou, Jiajun Song, Zhiwei Tang, Yixing Ma, Xiaopeng Peng, Donghui Si, Yuhang Xu, Huiqi Song, Yiyuan Miao, Yichen Qian, Weihua Chen, Wangbo Zhao, Bohan Zhuang, Jiasheng Tang, Yang You
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Multi-turn Conversational AI from Text to Multimodal Interaction: Data, Models, Evaluation, and Open Challenges

The article surveys multi‑turn conversational AI, highlighting its shift from isolated text prompts to sustained, multimodal interactions that involve clarifying goals, revising requests, and switching topics. It reviews literature across text‑only dialogue, AudioLLMs, multimodal and omni‑modal systems, and tool‑augmented agents, organizing findings around datasets, models, training, evaluation, and cross‑cutting challenges. The analysis reveals that while multimodal perception and action have progressed rapidly, systems still struggle with persistent memory, cross‑turn grounding, full‑duplex interaction, robust evaluation, and cultural alignment.

By Syeda Faiza Ahmed, Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar Chowdhury