The article surveys multi‑turn conversational AI, highlighting its shift from isolated text prompts to sustained, multimodal interactions that involve clarifying goals, revising requests, and switching topics. It reviews literature across text‑only dialogue, AudioLLMs, multimodal and omni‑modal systems, and tool‑augmented agents, organizing findings around datasets, models, training, evaluation, and cross‑cutting challenges. The analysis reveals that while multimodal perception and action have progressed rapidly, systems still struggle with persistent memory, cross‑turn grounding, full‑duplex interaction, robust evaluation, and cultural alignment.
By Syeda Faiza Ahmed, Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar Chowdhury
VoiceLongMemEval (VLME) is a new benchmark that tests AI assistants on their ability to remember how users sounded by incorporating paralinguistic metadata—such as emotion labels, prosody descriptors, and voice events—into each conversational turn. The benchmark uses a three‑stage adversarial gate to ensure that models cannot succeed with transcript alone, revealing a significant affect gap: models gain 0.09 to 0.38 accuracy when provided with paralinguistic cues, and audio‑native models outperform standard ASR pipelines in extracting these signals. The dataset and code will be released upon acceptance.
By Ramit Pahwa, Parivesh Priye, Apoorva Beedu
UTILMEM is a new diagnostic benchmark that tests how conversational agents use long‑term memory, focusing on reasoning over dense histories, spotting implicitly relevant memories, synthesizing distributed evidence, and resisting interference from similar distractors. It contains 1,717 instances across five domains and evaluates a range of retrieval‑based and memory‑augmented systems. The study shows that strong performance on traditional factual recall does not guarantee effective memory utilization, highlighting a gap between retrieving information and integrating it into coherent, task‑oriented outputs.
By Peijun Qing, Fobo Shi, Soroush Vosoughi
arXiv:2607. 02020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models must continually adapt to evolving tasks and domains, yet standard continual learning metrics mainly measure whether old answers remain correct, leaving the stability of multimodal grounding largely unexamined.
By Qianyu Chen, Canran Xiao, Runxuan Tang
Large language model agents are increasingly deployed in human-human interaction settings, such as meeting assistants and clinical documentation systems, where they must observe conversations and retain information for downstream queries. Unlike traditional human-assistant settings, these environments are inherently multimodal, involve complex discourse phenomena such as anaphora and deixis, and contain asynchronous or conflicting information from multiple participants.
arXiv:2607. 14499v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made substantial advances on benchmarks, yet their real-world effectiveness remains uncertain.
By Yijiang Li, Huiqi Zou, Bingyang Wang, Ziang Xiao