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:2606. 29495v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Social influence dialogue changes user behavior by altering internal cognitive states.
By Minghui Ma, Bin Guo, Han Wang, Mengqi Chen, Jingqi Liu, Yan Liu, Zhiwen Yu
Social influence dialogue changes user behavior by altering internal cognitive states. The central evaluation question is whether the user's beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions measurably change over the course of conversation, a process-oriented criterion that neither surface-level text metrics (BLEU/ROUGE) nor single-score LLM judgments can capture.
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:2609.17010v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Lifelong conversational agents rely on memory systems to maintain deep, context-aware interactions with users. However, existing explicit textual memor...
By Cai Ke, Xin Liu, Han Zhang, Jiangyue Yan, Zike Yuan, Ling Deng, Yue Yu, Hui Wang, Ruifeng Xu
arXiv:2606. 18258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a wide range of human-like behaviors, from expressing thoughts and emotions, to engaging in relationship-building with users, to refusing requests and maintaining boundaries.
By Sunnie S. Y. Kim, Margit Bowler, Leon A Gatys
arXiv:2608. 01366v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are integral to complex intellectual tasks, yet output quality remains constrained by user-provided prompts.
By B. Sankar, Pawni Yadav, Srinidhi Ranjini Girish, Amogh A. S
arXiv:2603. 25031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In psychological support and emotional companionship scenarios, the core limitation of large language models (LLMs) lies not merely in response quality, but in their reliance on local next-token prediction, which prevents them from maintaining the temporal continuity, stage awareness, and user consent boundaries required for multi-turn intervention.
By Boning Zhao, Yutong Hu, Xinnuo Li
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).
arXiv:2606. 16307v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training tool-augmented LLM agents requires large corpora of multi-turn, tool-grounded conversational data that is expensive to annotate, privacy-constrained in production settings, and largely absent from public datasets.
By Rahul Khedar, Eshita, Sneha Teja Sree Reddy Thondapu, Mayank Malhotra, Arup Das, Jitesh Chandra, Yun-Shiuan Chuang, Chaitanya Kulkarni, Arun Menon, Linsey Pang, Avinash Karn, Mouli V, Prakhar Mehrotra
arXiv:2608. 15755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: User-centric multi-turn agents must act on an evolving task situation shaped by changing user intents, accumulated tool-grounded facts, missing information, and execution constraints.
By Meiling Tao, Yiling Tao, Peng Wang
arXiv:2608. 00007v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with human-like personas is crucial for agentic applications, such as role-play and user simulation.
By Bohan Tang, Yiwen Guo