Proactive LLM agents can turn idle compute into useful support before users ask. Yet even correct work can misread user context, impose review costs, or undermine trust. This work proposes foundations...
arXiv:2607. 02975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective agency in social environments depends on when an agent seeks knowledge, when it acts, and whether its actions are justified by acquired information.
By Dan C. Hsu, Luke Lu
The paper presents a unified framework for proactive service agents, defining proactivity as an agent’s ability to infer service opportunities from incomplete signals and decide whether to remain silent, ask, assist, or act. It models this as a partially observable sequential decision process constrained by authorization and risk, integrating timing, content, and delivery into a single structured action. The authors categorize existing methods along a decision pipeline—state and need estimation, intervention gating, action construction, and feedback adaptation—and propose standardized metrics for evaluating triggering, timing, calibration, user burden, safety, and policy value across diverse interaction modalities.
By Yan Tang, Tingyu Cao, Yuanbo Tang, Huaze Tang, Keer Hu
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
The paper argues that evaluating agents as fixed models is insufficient, proposing instead to treat them as configurable systems. Using a new benchmark of four scientific tasks, the authors analyze how five configuration aspects—task information, reasoning, self‑verification, time budget, and backbone model—affect performance, noting that about 54% of outcome variance arises from run‑to‑run differences even with the same settings. The study finds that providing more task information has the strongest impact, while interactions among settings (e.g., extra time only helps with adequate information or model capability) and the choice of verification tools significantly shape agent behavior.
By Luis Wiedmann, Leander Girrbach, Cordelia Schmid, Zeynep Akata
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