Prosodic cues can convey task-relevant information that alters the trajectory and outcome of a task-oriented dialogue, even when the words themselves remain unchanged. Yet existing benchmarks typically evaluate prosodic perception, response appropriateness, and task-oriented dialogue in isolation, making it difficult to test whether prosodic evidence changes downstream decisions.
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:2608. 19515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prosodic cues can convey task-relevant information that alters the trajectory and outcome of a task-oriented dialogue, even when the words themselves remain unchanged.
By Xinyi Liu, Hooshang Nayyeri, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Emine Yilmaz, JK Kim, Yifei Zhang, Charith Peris, Hari Thadakamalla
arXiv:2607. 11053v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fruitful collaborations rely on cooperative communications, including of contextual cues to incorporate into reasoning.
By Hannah VanderHoeven, Abhijnan Nath, Nikhil Krishnaswamy
arXiv:2606. 01845v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have shown considerable progress in pragmatic language understanding, prior research has focused mainly on their comprehension of verbal behavior.
By Sugyeong Eo, Heuiseok Lim
Pragmatic language use requires reasoning about alternatives: the alternative expressions a speaker might have chosen, or the alternative interpretations a listener might entertain. Formal and computational models of pragmatics must therefore specify the sets of alternatives that interlocutors reason over, which is often done through manual specification.
arXiv:2606. 03135v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents often operate under underspecified user instructions, where latent uncertainty over user intent leads to erroneous tool actions.
By Mengyi Deng, Zhiwei Li, Xin Li, Tingyu Zhu, Ying Zhao, Zhijiang Guo, Wei Wang
arXiv:2607. 11363v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-based evaluations of Theory of Mind (ToM) in Large Language Models (LLMs) often involve cognitive tests akin to the Sally-Anne task that can be gamed due to exposure to relevantly similar tasks in pre-training and do not obviously test models' functional ToM abilities in ways that generalize to naturalistic settings.
By Roberta Rocca, Sami Boukortt, Geoff Keeling, Winnie Street
arXiv:2608. 08210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collaborative dialogue can end with apparent agreement while participants still differ on goals, assumptions, or execution plans, creating an \textbf{illusion of alignment (IoA)}.
By Kaiming Liu, Fuwen Luo, Ziyue Wang, Jinrui Ju, Yuxuan Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Yunghwei Lai, Peng Li, Yang Liu
arXiv:2602. 23971v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sycophancy, the tendency of large language models to favour user-affirming responses over critical engagement, has been identified as an alignment failure, particularly in high-stakes advisory and social contexts.
By Magda Dubois, Cozmin Ududec, Christopher Summerfield, Lennart Luettgau
Theory of Mind (ToM) benchmarks for Large Language Models (LLMs) typically rely on passive question-answering formats, but the deployment of LLMs in increasingly agentic and autonomous forms demands new evaluations. In this paper we evaluate an agent's ability to induce specific belief states in other agents by taking actions rather than using conversational persuasion, a capability we call Non-Conversational Planning ToM (NCP-ToM).
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