arXiv Computation and Language

RL-ADA: A World-Feedback Framework for Adversarially Robust Enterprise Dialogue Agents

RL-ADA introduces a co‑evolutionary training framework that replaces costly human annotations with world‑feedback rewards derived from interaction outcomes. In this system, a large Customer Support Agent and an Adversarial Customer Agent train together, guided by an automated judge that rewards successful resolution and realistic intent‑concealing utterances, respectively. Applied to a banking support proof of concept, the method eliminates routing errors and doubles the end‑to‑end PASS rate over five cycles, while also revealing a new adversarial strategy called Contextual Camouflage.

arXiv AI
2d ago

Beyond Surface Style: Aligning Multi-Turn User Simulators with Behavioral Consistency

The paper introduces TRACER, a multi‑turn user simulator that models evolving user intent and aligns simulated behavior with real interaction trajectories. TRACER is trained first with supervised fine‑tuning on real dialogues and then with reinforcement learning that uses hierarchical outcome‑ and trajectory‑level rewards to address reward sparsity and credit assignment. In real customer‑service sessions, TRACER‑7B outperforms the best baseline by 11.4 conversion F1, achieves the lowest group‑level conversion‑rate error and semantic trajectory distance, and generalizes to out‑of‑distribution scenarios, while human Turing tests show its conversations appear natural. The authors also present the Dynamic Marketing Benchmark, which evaluates both persuasion effectiveness and response quality of large language models through simulated interactions, demonstrating that higher response quality does not always lead to higher conversion rates.

By Geng Chen, Ruotong Pan, Zhirui Yang, Qiqi He, Jiawei Chen, Zhang Yunfei, Chongyuan Chen, Minxuan Lv, Zheng Yang, Win-Bin Huang, Xiangyu Wu, Wenwu Ou
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 26

IAPO: Influence-Aware Policy Optimization for Credit Assignment in Multi-Turn Service Agents

The paper introduces Influence-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), a method that models multi‑turn agent rollouts as typed influence‑dependency graphs to better assign credit to actions based on how information and errors flow through user and tool interactions. IAPO transforms the structure of support and failure usage into routing weights that redistribute trajectory‑level advantage, enabling more effective learning from sparse final rewards. Experiments with Qwen3‑4B and Qwen3‑8B on three service‑agent benchmarks show that IAPO outperforms existing multi‑turn reinforcement learning baselines without harming function‑calling performance.

By Bo Ren, Yirong Mao, Yi Yang, Wenhui Que
arXiv AI
Aug 17

ARC: Fair Relative Advantage Comparison in Open-Ended Real-World Interaction

arXiv:2608. 13622v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended real-world interaction admits multiple valid behaviors: an agent may answer directly, ask for clarification, provide progress updates, or confirm before acting.

By Yongqi Tong, Tan Li Hui Faith, Choy Zhen Wen Marcus, Zhou Jin, Kewei Fu, Jiang-Ming Yang, Jianshe Li, Xin Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Co-RL: Unsupervised Reasoning Emerges from Diverse Cohort in Multi-agent RL

Co‑RL is a multi‑agent reinforcement learning framework that trains several decoupled models without shared parameters, using rewards generated by their peers. By increasing cohort diversity—through heterogeneous model families, varying sizes, and rephrased training samples—Co‑RL reduces self‑reinforcing feedback loops, preserves behavioral diversity, and prevents training collapse. Across both text‑only and multimodal benchmarks, Co‑RL outperforms base models and prior label‑free methods, achieving gains of 3.0‑8.6% on seven text benchmarks and 2.3‑7.2% on four multimodal benchmarks, while matching or surpassing supervised approaches without any ground‑truth labels.

By Yunhao Yang, Yuexin Bian, Yunjie Tian, Di Fu, Tianjin Huang, Yuanyuan Shi, Ziang Xiao, Nuno Vasconcelos, Yijiang Li