arXiv AI
Aug 25

CallScreenBench: Benchmarking Small Language Models as Phone Secretaries

CallScreenBench is a benchmark for evaluating small, on-device language models that act as phone secretaries, focusing on their ability to handle unknown inbound calls without a cooperative task. The benchmark measures owner endorsement through five call-and-note metrics, each paired with counter-metrics and uncertainty estimates, and includes guardedness diagnostics to identify safe, tool‑free proxies. Results across 4‑bit checkpoints of 0.6‑4 B parameter models show varying performance on service, recall, plausibility, and triage discrimination, highlighting trade‑offs between quality and guardedness.

By Jiaqi Gan, Haoyuan Tang, Jamey Z. Liang, Siying Chen, Ankit Raj, Kidus Zewde, Yuchen Zhou, Yuxin Zhang, Simiao Ren
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Useless but Safe? Benchmarking Utility Recovery with User Intent Clarification in Multi-Turn Conversations

The paper introduces CarryOnBench, an interactive benchmark that tests whether large language models can revise their interpretation of user intent and recover utility while staying safe in multi‑turn conversations. Using 398 harmful‑looking queries with benign intents, the benchmark simulates 5,970 conversations across 14 models, evaluating both intent‑aligned utility and safety with a new metric called Ben‑Util. Results show that models often withhold information due to misinterpretation, but most can recover with clarifications, revealing failure modes such as unsafe and redundant recovery that single‑turn tests miss.

By Mingqian Zheng, Malia Morgan, Liwei Jiang, Carolyn Rose, Maarten Sap
arXiv AI
Sep 18

MTVA-Bench: Evaluating the Language Model Inside Cascaded Voice Agents

MTVA-Bench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate the language model component of cascaded voice agents under realistic conditions. It simulates callers with an LLM, mocks backend tool responses, and scores both tool‑call correctness and conversational quality using two LLM judges, covering 49 agents, 490 scenarios, and 7 languages. The benchmark reveals that while models perform similarly on tool selection, they differ widely in argument handling, rule compliance, and dialogue quality, highlighting the nuanced challenges of real‑world voice interactions.

By Pritish Mishra, Ishaan Kumar, Akshat Mandoli, Sudarshan Kamath
arXiv AI
Sep 17

When to Call an LLM: A Confidence-Gated Hybrid for Cost-Effective Emotion Recognition in Conversational AI

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