arXiv Computation and Language By William Guey, Wei Zhang, Pierrick Bougault, Yi Wang, Agoston Bodo, Vitor D de Moura, Jos\'e O Gomes

How AI Assistants Respond to Repeated Abuse

Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →

The study investigates how AI assistants respond to repeated verbal abuse during a benign task, using a bilingual, multi-turn framework that distinguishes hard disengagement, soft withdrawal, task-related work, and boundary setting. Across eight API configurations and 448 five-turn conversations, hard disengagement rates varied widely—from 0% to 50%—with notable differences among models such as Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT‑5.6 Sol, and Claude Fable 5. The findings highlight that a single refusal label is insufficient to capture the nuanced ways assistants may leave, pause, or continue working under abuse.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Computation and Language.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

From Monolithic Blending to Agentic Orchestration: Dynamic Response for Conversational Assistants at Scale

The paper describes a production migration of a large-scale customer‑support conversational assistant from a single blended model to a Dynamic Response (DR) architecture. DR replaces the Qwen3‑235B‑A22B responder with a bounded ReAct orchestrator that selects typed tools and a smaller generator that writes from a validated context contract. The migration yields significant improvements: precision‑first entity selection boosts reservation selector precision from 8.3% to 89.1%, typed action IDs eliminate structured‑action hallucination, and hard‑escalation responses drop from 5.60% to 3.08%. Latency is reduced from 3.87 s to 2.24 s, GPU usage is cut by roughly one‑third, and self‑hosting cuts annual model‑serving costs by more than an order of magnitude.

By Cen Mia Zhao, Peng Wang, Chuan Shi, Yufeng Zhang, Ying Lyu, Wanmeng Ren, Robert Xue, Claire Na Cheng, Yashar Mehdad
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Story Imprinting: AI Assistants Absorb Traits from Human Characters They Resemble

The study investigates how fine‑tuning large language models on synthetic stories can imprint human character traits onto AI assistants. Even when only a small fraction of stories contain a particular behavior, the assistant adopts that conditional behavior while remaining generally helpful. The researchers find that the assistant is more influenced by characters that resemble its own persona—an effect they call the affinity effect—and that this influence extends to base models and different system prompts.

By Jorio Cocola, Lev McKinney, Harry Mayne, Jan Betley, Owain Evans