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: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:2606. 29495v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As LLM-based conversational agents advance toward increasingly open-ended and interaction-intensive scenarios, task completion alone provides an incomplete assessment of their effectiveness.
By Minghui Ma, Bin Guo, Hao Wang, Han Wang, Mengqi Chen, Jingqi Liu, Yan Liu
arXiv:2606. 14199v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as human simulators for interactive evaluation and social simulation.
By Xuhui Zhou, Weiwei Sun, Weihua Du, Jiarui Liu, Haojia Sun, Qianou Ma, Tongshuang Wu, Yiming Yang, Maarten Sap
arXiv:2605. 23055v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Frontier language models sometimes recognize that they are being evaluated and adjust their behavior, undermining validity of benchmark results.
By Changling Li, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Jie Zhang, Zhijing Jin, Sahar Abdelnabi, Maksym Andriushchenko
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
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
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a production capability behind agent-assist prompts, escalation routing, and post-call analytics in contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) platforms, where co...
arXiv:2604. 19139v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve through alignment techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Constitutional AI, a growing and increasingly conspicuous phenomenon has emerged: the proliferation of verbal tics--repetitive, formulaic linguistic patterns that pervade model outputs.
By Shuai Wu, Xue Li, Yanna Feng, Yufang Li, Zhijun Wang, Ran Wang
ZenGen is a comprehensive framework designed to develop socially intelligent large language models (LLMs). It introduces SoMBench, a psychology‑grounded benchmark with 3 primary and 17 secondary dimensions, and shows that current LLMs perform poorly on social cognition tasks. ZenGen combines supervised fine‑tuning, on‑policy distillation, and rubric‑based reinforcement learning to improve internalization, while Actio provides deployment‑time grounding with typed supports such as PRISM, Starling, SAGE, and gated RAG, yielding significant performance gains across benchmarks.
By ZenGen Team, Ao Xiang, Bi Jingping, Chen Jiahui, Chen Lehan, Chen Yilin, Cheng Xueqi, Fan Yixing, Gan Kairong, Gao Haowen, Gao Jinhua, Gao Shuxuan, Gong Chang, Guo Jiafeng, Guo Ruijie, Han Zhouyu, He Guangfu, He Yichun, Jiang Shuo, Jing Shaoling, Jing Ya, Lei Chenhao, Lei Yan, Li Anqi, Li Chengao, Li Haoyu, Li Shitian, Liang Xinjian, Liu Zhaoge, Lyu Xingyu, Nie Zhuwei, Pang Liang, Quan Zeping, Shan Shiguang, Shen Huawei, Tang Xinran, Tian Feng, Wang Qian, Wang Ruiping, Wang Xiaohong, Xia Zaiyu, Xiao Yi, Xu Jiayuan, Xu Kehan, Xu Qianqian, Xu Tianyu, Xu Yongjun, Yang Haoming, Yang Jun, Yao Di, Yu Xiaoming, Zhang Futong, Zhang Jie, Zhang Shixuan, Zhang Yuxuan, Zhao Xinyu, Zhao Zhuoran, Zhong Yunfei, Zhu Shengyu
arXiv:2607. 28908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reflection, the ability to revisit and revise prior reasoning, is central to how humans improve their answers.
By Yefan Tao, Gerald Friedland, Madhusudhanan Chandrasekaran, Luyang Kong
The paper introduces a disclosure‑gated user simulator for companion‑agent evaluation, where information release is conditioned on the agent’s behavior through a five‑level gate system. The authors train the simulator on synthetic and real data, audit its performance, and demonstrate that it preserves ranking order and score stability across 12 tested systems. Their released simulator achieves a 0.993 correlation with the original benchmark’s simulator and outperforms prompting a frontier model, which only shifts scores upward without affecting rankings.
By Yao Liu, Yu He