arXiv AI

Proactive Service Agents: A Unified Decision Framework, Methods, and Evaluation

The paper presents a unified framework for proactive service agents, defining proactivity as an agent’s ability to infer service opportunities from incomplete signals and decide whether to remain silent, ask, assist, or act. It models this as a partially observable sequential decision process constrained by authorization and risk, integrating timing, content, and delivery into a single structured action. The authors categorize existing methods along a decision pipeline—state and need estimation, intervention gating, action construction, and feedback adaptation—and propose standardized metrics for evaluating triggering, timing, calibration, user burden, safety, and policy value across diverse interaction modalities.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

Why2Speak: Faithful Reasoning for Abstaining Action Policies

The paper investigates how agentic systems decide between acting and abstaining, focusing on the fidelity of their reasoning explanations. Using Qwen3‑8B in a multi‑party conversation setting, the authors compare direct decision policies, reasoning policies, supervised fine‑tuning, and reinforcement learning, finding a trade‑off: strong direct policies yield higher performance but no traceable reasoning, while reasoning policies provide an audit trail at the cost of lower recall. The study also uncovers that exposing reasoning can alter the agent’s policy and that common faithfulness metrics may overstate the alignment between reasoning and decisions.

By Shreya Mendi, Brinnae Bent
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Consilience: Conformally Calibrated Communication Control for Hidden-Profile Multi-Agent Reasoning

Consilience is an inference‑time orchestration framework that steers and certifies communication among multi‑agent large language models in hidden‑profile settings. It summarizes each discussion turn with a compact state of uncertainty, disagreement, evidence gain, redundancy, and premature consensus, then selects a communication intervention (challenge, clarify, seek evidence, or route) and speaker. A round‑wise conformal calibration procedure guarantees that the controller’s proposed action has bounded one‑step regret with high probability, and an acceptance mechanism enforces this guarantee for the executed action. Experiments on HiddenBench‑style tasks show that Consilience improves decision accuracy and communication efficiency over fixed and unstructured protocols, sometimes outperforming a full‑information baseline.

By Abhijith Babu, Ramneet Kaur, Vishal Pramanik, Olivera Kotevska, Nathaniel D. Bastian, Susmit Jha, Sunny Raj, Yanzhao Wu, Sumit Kumar Jha, Anirban Roy
arXiv AI
Jul 29

ProcAgent: An Agentic Framework for Procedural Task Guidance on Edge with Human-in-the-Loop

arXiv:2607. 24770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Procedural tasks such as furniture assembly and home repair impose substantial cognitive demands because users must interpret instructions, track task progress, reason about spatial state, and recover from errors while performing physical actions.

By Azizul Zahid, Subrata Biswas, Bashima Islam, Sai Swaminathan
arXiv AI
Jun 15

Communication Policy Evolution for Proactive LLM Agents

arXiv:2606. 14314v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents have rapidly evolved into autonomous systems, yet a persistent information gap remains between users and agents: communication is costly, while users' identical preferences further limit information exchange.

By Xinbei Ma, Jiyang Qiu, Yao Yao, Zheng Wu, Yijie Lu, Xiangmou Qu, Jiaxin Yin, Xingyu Lou, Jun Wang, Weiwen Liu, Weinan Zhang, Zhuosheng Zhang, Hai Zhao
arXiv AI
Jun 30

Pushing Forward Pareto Frontiers of Proactive Agents with Behavioral Agentic Optimization

arXiv:2602. 11351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Proactive large language model (LLM) agents aim to actively plan, query, and interact over multiple turns, enabling efficient task completion beyond passive instruction following and making them essential for real-world, user-centric applications.

By Yihang Yao, Zhepeng Cen, Haohong Lin, Shiqi Liu, Zuxin Liu, Jiacheng Zhu, Zhang-Wei Hong, Laixi Shi, Ding Zhao