arXiv AI
6d ago

Evaluating LLM-based Agents for Multi-Turn Conversations: A Survey

The article surveys evaluation methods for large language model (LLM)-based agents in multi-turn conversations, reviewing nearly 250 scholarly sources through a PRISMA-inspired framework. It introduces two taxonomies: one outlining what to evaluate—task completion, response quality, user experience, memory and context retention, planning, and tool integration—and another detailing how to evaluate, covering annotation-based, automated, hybrid, and self-judging approaches. The framework incorporates both traditional metrics like BLEU and ROUGE and advanced techniques suited to dynamic, interactive dialogues.

By Shengyue Guan, Jindong Wang, Jiang Bian, Bin Zhu, Jian-guang Lou, Haoyi Xiong
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

ToSCA: Leveraging Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning on Temporal and Strategic Abstractions of Conversational Agents

arXiv:2608.21969v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans have multiple levels of temporal abstractions on daily interaction and thinking, such as concept perception and strategic planning. Inspired by...

By Xiaoyu Wang, Qingqing Gu, Yue Zhao, Teng Chen, Yuqi Cao, Xiaokai Chen, Hongyan Li, Luo Ji
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Affective Flow Language Model for Emotional Support Conversation

The paper introduces the Affective Flow Language Model (AFlow), which treats multi‑turn emotional support conversations as an evolving affective utility flow along dialogue trajectories. AFlow searches diverse support paths, estimates utilities of intermediate states, and employs Affective Flow Preference Optimization (AFPO) to propagate downstream preference signals to earlier states, enabling consistent strategy transitions. Experiments on ExTES and ESConv demonstrate improved strategy alignment, response diversity, and generation quality across various model settings.

By Chenghui Zou, Ning Wang, Tiesunlong Shen, Luwei Xiao, Chuan Ma, Xiangpeng Li, Rui Mao, Erik Cambria