arXiv Computation and Language

Stop Training Against Soft Users: Mentalized Adversarial Self-Play for Proactive Dialogue

The paper introduces Mentalized Adversarial Self-Play (MASP), a framework for training proactive dialogue agents by modeling the user as a rationally resisting participant with an evolving mental state. MASP separates teacher and student mentalization, alternates self‑play updates for system and user policies, and treats robustness to rational resistance as a training objective. Experiments on proactive dialogue benchmarks show MASP improves success rate, rationality‑constrained success, reduces average turns, and performs better against hard users compared to SFT and Planner‑only approaches.

arXiv AI
Jun 4

Unlocking Proactivity in Task-Oriented Dialogue

arXiv:2605. 22240v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Proactive task-oriented dialogue (TOD), such as outbound sales, demands a persuasive agent that actively probes the user's concerns and steers the conversation toward acceptance within a bounded number of turns.

By Azure Zhang, Ning Gao, Yuqin Dai, Ruiyuan Wu, Jinpeng Wang, Rena Wei Gao, Bingdong Tan, Shuzheng Gao, Zongjie Li, Chaozheng Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 9

MIMESIS: Learning User Simulators as Training Environments for Interactive Agents

MIMESIS is a user simulator designed to train interactive language agents by mimicking real user behavior. It is trained on human conversations with explicit reasoning supervision and incorporates 13 realistic behavioral patterns. Experiments show that agents trained with MIMESIS outperform those trained with GPT-5.5 across multiple unseen simulators, and the proposed Coached On-Policy Self-Distillation further improves agent performance by providing dense, token-level supervision.

By Hoang Phan, Dat Huynh, Andrey Zhmoginov, Qi Zeng, Wancen Mu, Yue Cao, Shengjie Bi, Yun He, Changdae Oh, Deren Lei
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
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

Training User Simulators with Latent Intrinsic Feedback

The paper introduces user simulators that provide intrinsic feedback by incorporating latent evaluation states such as internal thoughts, reactions, and scalar ratings. These simulators, trained on real user–assistant interaction logs, outperform prompted baselines in realism and critiquing behaviors, and their turn‑level evaluations better align with human judgments. Additionally, the intrinsic feedback serves as an effective reward signal for multi‑turn reinforcement learning, reducing compute requirements by over 50% compared to setups using external judge LLMs.

By Tarek Naous, Craig Boutilier, Wei Xu, Ofer Meshi
arXiv AI
Sep 18

UnifiedPlayers: Enhance Tool-Integrated Reasoning in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

UnifiedPlayers is a cooperative framework that jointly adapts planning, execution, and evaluation for tool-integrated reinforcement learning agents. It consists of a Planning Player that generates tasks, an Execution Player that creates multi-turn trajectories with Python tool calls, and an Evaluation Player that builds executable verifiers, all coordinated by role‑specific rewards under GRPO. The approach outperforms prior baselines on mathematical and general reasoning benchmarks and yields a verifier with high adversarial detection accuracy and more discriminative reward signals.

By Wenjie Liao, Liangjie Zhao, Zehong Cao
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

First Make It Playable, Then Make It Good: Staged Interaction Learning for Small Dialogue-Game Agents

The paper introduces Qwen-GuidePlay-2B, a 2B‑parameter language model fine‑tuned for dialogue‑game interaction. The training pipeline consists of three stages: supervised fine‑tuning on successful game trajectories, weighted turn‑level fine‑tuning, and teacher‑guided fine‑tuning that corrects formatting and evaluates examples. The resulting model achieves a clemscore of 57.12 and a statscore of 42.68 on Playpen’s public validation, ranking second in the official challenge and demonstrating that careful curation can outperform more aggressive procedural methods.

By Syed Mahbubul Huq, Pranava Madhyastha
arXiv AI
Sep 25

CounterRoute: Self-Routed Reasoning via Hierarchical Counterfactual Credit Assignment

CounterRoute is an online reinforcement‑learning framework that jointly learns how to route a language model’s reasoning between a ‘think’ and a ‘direct answer’ mode, using a single shared policy derived from a dual‑mode checkpoint. It employs counterfactual rollouts to credit routing decisions and a curriculum that starts with forced dual‑mode rollouts before shifting to self‑routed updates, achieving better accuracy‑efficiency trade‑offs across nine benchmarks. The method reduces generated tokens by up to 51% on Qwen3‑8B while improving macro‑average accuracy, and its routing strategy generalizes to unseen coding, science, and commonsense tasks.

By Ruochen Jiao, Besnik Fetahu, Zhenyu Shi, Priyanka Nigam
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Acquire, Repair, Preserve: A Diagnosis-Guided Post-Training Recipe for Small-Model Dialogue Game Agents

The paper presents a post‑training recipe for small dialogue‑game agents that involves three steps: acquiring broad game participation via supervised fine‑tuning, repairing specific local failures with turn‑local preference pairs, and preserving general capabilities. Applied to the LM Playschool Challenge, the method raises the public clemscore from 10.67 to 38.92 and the closed in‑domain score from 13.41 to 41.17 while keeping overall static performance nearly unchanged. The gains are mainly within the targeted game family, with limited improvement on out‑of‑domain clemscore.

By Nan Li