arXiv AI

State-Grounded Conditioning: Wrapping User-Facing LLM Agents Where Direction Depends on Live State

arXiv AI
Sep 17

When to Call an LLM: A Confidence-Gated Hybrid for Cost-Effective Emotion Recognition in Conversational AI

The paper evaluates three approaches for emotion recognition in conversation— a low‑cost stacked ensemble, an off‑the‑shelf LLM prompt, and a confidence‑gated hybrid that escalates only uncertain ensemble predictions to the LLM. Across three datasets (IEMOCAP, MELD, CMU‑MOSI), the hybrid consistently outperforms each pure system, achieving higher weighted F1 scores while routing most traffic through the inexpensive ensemble. This results in significant cost savings (≈$10‑85 per million utterances) and provides an interpretable escalation signal tied to emotion or sentiment shifts.

By Sai Babu Udayagiri, Arjun Chouhan, Ravisekhar Kanagala, Trishala Pavagada
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

GAUGE: When Not to Trust LLM-as-a-Judge in User-Simulated Evaluation of Task-Oriented Agents

GAUGE is a new offline protocol that evaluates whether the common practice of using an LLM-as-a-judge to rank task‑oriented agents actually aligns with a verifiable reward. Across 25 agents from six providers on two benchmarks, GAUGE finds that user satisfaction scores are largely uncorrelated with task success, and that the judge’s ranking loses precision when agents are closely matched in performance. The study highlights a gap between ranking validity and construct validity in current evaluation practices.

By Umesh Bodhwani, Thanh Tran, Kai Wei
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

S3Gym: Can LLMs Turn Self-Testing and Self-Judging into Self-Improvement?

S3Gym is an interactive benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on their ability to self-improve through self-testing, self-judging, and self-improvement. It separates permissive exploration from strict held-out evaluation across seven text-based games with executable environment verifiers. Experiments show that self-improvement varies by task, with different experience incorporation pathways (direct history, summary memory, or parameter training) yielding mixed results and highlighting the need for agents to transform feedback into executable, transferable policies.

By Jiajun Shi, Siyuan Tao, Yuhao Wu, Zexuan Wang, Jingyuan Zhang, Jiaheng Liu, Xinping Lei, Xinrong Zhang, Siyuan Fang, Zhewen Tan, Tianle Cai, Junhao Fang, Jiameng Huang, Yueyang Wang, Jinkai Liu, Yuxuan Zhang, Jian Yang, Zhoujun Li, Shen Yan, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

From Offline Proxies to Online Decisions: A Layered Engagement Evaluation Framework for Conversational AI

The paper presents a layered framework for evaluating conversational AI by aligning offline proxy signals with online A/B experiment outcomes. It introduces a three‑step alignment chain—behavioral label to product outcome, classifier to candidate behavior, and offline signal to experiment effect—alongside an audit protocol that compares confidence intervals and rankings. In a real‑world deployment, the composite proxy achieved 81.1% F1 versus 34.3% for the raw classifier, correctly predicting direction on all 113 contrasts and enabling efficient prioritization of candidate models before costly online testing.

By Xuanyi Li, Vaskar Nath, Hossein Amirkhani, Jay Li, Alex Deng
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Observation-Calibrated Self-Distillation

arXiv:2608. 04788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model agents are commonly trained through reinforcement learning with sparse trajectory-level rewards, which offer limited guidance on how strongly individual tokens should be updated.

By Yi Yang, Cong Qin, Xiaodan Liu, Chishui Chen, Qing Dong, Yan Zhang, Cao Liu, Zhao Yang, Lu Pan, Jiaye Lin, Yi Feng
arXiv AI
Sep 2

SAGE: State-Grounded, Abstention-Aware Evaluation of Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents

SAGE (State‑Grounded, Abstention‑Aware Evaluation) is a new framework for assessing task‑oriented dialogue agents that focuses on whether each turn correctly advances the workflow state rather than just the quality of the reply. It compiles workflow specifications and per‑turn state differences into schema‑grounded criteria, then evaluates them through a cascade of symbolic rules and encoder/NLI verifiers that abstain instead of guessing, producing a turn‑level decision with an evidence trace. In experiments across MultiWOZ, Schema‑Guided Dialogue, and ABCD datasets, SAGE‑Core—using only symbolic rules and on‑device encoders—outperforms all evaluated LLM‑based judges, including GPT‑4.1 variants, while incurring zero paid LLM cost.

By Rayan Khoury, Shih-Yao Lin, Pratyush Mishra
arXiv AI
Jul 15

Critic Experience Bank: Self-Evolving Step-Level Confidence Estimation for LLM Agents

arXiv:2607. 12397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents act in external environments where each action changes the state that later decisions condition on, and where a single wrong step can waste interaction budget or trigger irreversible side effects long before the final failure is observed.

By Yaopei Zeng, Congchao Wang, JianHang Chen, Nan Wang, Yurui Chang, Lu Lin