Mitigating Conversational Inertia in Multi-Turn Agents

Large language models excel as few-shot learners when provided with appropriate demonstrations, yet this strength becomes problematic in multiturn agent scenarios, where LLMs erroneously mimic their own previous responses as few-shot examples. Through attention analysis, we identify conversational inertia, a phenomenon where models exhibit strong diagonal attention to previous responses, which is associated with imitation bias that constrains exploration. This reveals a tension when transforming few-shot LLMs into agents: longer context enriches environmental feedback for exploitation, yet also amplifies conversational inertia that undermines exploration. Our key insight is that for identical states, actions generated with longer contexts exhibit stronger inertia than those with shorter contexts, enabling construction of preference pairs without environment rewards. Based on this, we propose Context Preference Learning to calibrate model preferences to favor low-inertia responses over highinertia ones. We further provide context management strategies at inference time to balance exploration and exploitation. Experimental results across eight agentic environments and one deep research scenario validate that our framework reduces conversational inertia and achieves performance improvements.

The Art of Socratic Inquiry: A Framework for Proactive Template-Guided Therapeutic Conversation Generation

Proactive questioning, where therapists deliberately initiate structured, cognition-guiding inquiries, is a cornerstone of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Yet, current psychological large language models (LLMs) remain overwhelmingly reactive, defaulting to empathetic but superficial responses that fail to surface latent beliefs or guide behavioral change. To bridge this gap, we propose the \textbf{Socratic Inquiry Framework (SIF)}, a lightweight, plug-and-play therapeutic intent planner that transforms LLMs from passive listeners into active cognitive guides. SIF decouples \textbf{when to ask} (via Strategy Anchoring) from \textbf{what to ask} (via Template Retrieval), enabling context-aware, theory-grounded questioning without end-to-end retraining. Complementing SIF, we introduce \textbf{Socratic-QA}, a high-quality dataset of strategy-aligned Socratic sequences that provides explicit supervision for proactive reasoning. Experiments show that SIF significantly enhances proactive questioning frequency, conversational depth, and therapeutic alignment, marking a clear shift from reactive comfort to proactive exploration. Our work establishes a new paradigm for psychologically informed LLMs: not just to respond, but to guide.

dziribot: rag based intelligent conversational agent for algerian arabic dialect

The rapid digitalization of customer service has intensified the demand for conversational agents capable of providing accurate and natural interactions. In the Algerian context, this is complicated by the linguistic complexity of Darja, a dialect characterized by non-standardized orthography, extensive code-switching with French, and the simultaneous use of Arabic and Latin (Arabizi) scripts. This paper introduces DziriBOT, a hybrid intelligent conversational agent specifically engineered to overcome these challenges. We propose a multi-layered architecture that integrates specialized Natural Language Understanding (NLU) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), allowing for both structured service flows and dynamic, knowledge-intensive responses grounded in curated enterprise documentation. To address the low-resource nature of Darja, we systematically evaluate three distinct approaches: a sparse-feature Rasa pipeline, classical machine learning baselines, and transformer-based fine-tuning. Our experimental results demonstrate that the fine-tuned DziriBERT model achieves state-of-the-art performance. These results significantly outperform traditional baselines, particularly in handling orthographic noise and rare intents. Ultimately, DziriBOT provides a robust, scalable solution that bridges the gap between formal language models and the linguistic realities of Algerian users, offering a blueprint for dialect-aware automation in the regional market.

PedagoSense: A Pedology Grounded LLM System for Pedagogical Strategy Detection and Contextual Response Generation in Learning Dialogues

This paper addresses the challenge of improving interaction quality in dialogue based learning by detecting and recommending effective pedagogical strategies in tutor student conversations. We introduce PedagoSense, a pedology grounded system that combines a two stage strategy classifier with large language model generation. The system first detects whether a pedagogical strategy is present using a binary classifier, then performs fine grained classification to identify the specific strategy. In parallel, it recommends an appropriate strategy from the dialogue context and uses an LLM to generate a response aligned with that strategy. We evaluate on human annotated tutor student dialogues, augmented with additional non pedagogical conversations for the binary task. Results show high performance for pedagogical strategy detection and consistent gains when using data augmentation, while analysis highlights where fine grained classes remain challenging. Overall, PedagoSense bridges pedagogical theory and practical LLM based response generation for more adaptive educational technologies.

Should LLMs, $\textit{like}$, Generate How Users Talk? Building Dialect-Accurate Dialog[ue]s Beyond the American Default with MDial

More than 80% of the 1.6 billion English speakers do not use Standard American English (SAE) and experience higher failure rates and stereotyped responses when interacting with LLMs as a result. Yet multi-dialectal performance remains underexplored. We introduce $\textbf{MDial}$, the first large-scale framework for generating multi-dialectal conversational data encompassing the three pillars of written dialect -- lexical (vocabulary), orthographic (spelling), and morphosyntactic (grammar) features -- for nine English dialects. Partnering with native linguists, we design an annotated and scalable rule-based LLM transformation to ensure precision. Our approach challenges the assumption that models should mirror users' morphosyntactic features, showing that up to 90% of the grammatical features of a dialect should not be reproduced by models. Independent evaluations confirm data quality, with annotators preferring MDial outputs over prior methods in 98% of pairwise comparisons for dialect naturalness. Using this pipeline, we construct the dialect-parallel $\textbf{MDialBench}$mark with 50k+ dialogs, resulting in 97k+ QA pairs, and evaluate 17 LLMs on dialect identification and response generation tasks. Even frontier models achieve under 70% accuracy, fail to reach 50% for Canadian English, and systematically misclassify non-SAE dialects as American or British. As dialect identification underpins natural language understanding, these errors risk cascading failures into downstream tasks.

Enhancing Conversational Agents via Task-Oriented Adversarial Memory Adaptation

Conversational agents struggle to handle long conversations due to context window limitations. Therefore, memory systems are developed to leverage essential historical information. Existing memory systems typically follow a pipeline of offline memory construction and update, and online retrieval. Despite the flexible online phase, the offline phase remains fixed and task-independent. In this phase, memory construction operates under a predefined workflow and fails to emphasize task relevant information. Meanwhile, memory updates are guided by generic metrics rather than task specific supervision. This leads to a misalignment between offline memory preparation and task requirements, which undermines downstream task performance. To this end, we propose an Adversarial Memory Adaptation mechanism (AMA) that aligns memory construction and update with task objectives by simulating task execution. Specifically, first, a challenger agent generates question answer pairs based on the original dialogues. The constructed memory is then used to answer these questions, simulating downstream inference. Subsequently, an evaluator agent assesses the responses and performs error analysis. Finally, an adapter agent analyzes the error cases and performs dual level updates on both the construction strategy and the content. Through this process, the memory system receives task aware supervision signals in advance during the offline phase, enhancing its adaptability to downstream tasks. AMA can be integrated into various existing memory systems, and extensive experiments on long dialogue benchmark LoCoMo demonstrate its effectiveness.

HARMONI: Multimodal Personalization of Multi-User Human-Robot Interactions with LLMs

Existing human-robot interaction systems often lack mechanisms for sustained personalization and dynamic adaptation in multi-user environments, limiting their effectiveness in real-world deployments. We present HARMONI, a multimodal personalization framework that leverages large language models to enable socially assistive robots to manage long-term multi-user interactions. The framework integrates four key modules: (i) a perception module that identifies active speakers and extracts multimodal input; (ii) a world modeling module that maintains representations of the environment and short-term conversational context; (iii) a user modeling module that updates long-term speaker-specific profiles; and (iv) a generation module that produces contextually grounded and ethically informed responses. Through extensive evaluation and ablation studies on four datasets, as well as a real-world scenario-driven user-study in a nursing home environment, we demonstrate that HARMONI supports robust speaker identification, online memory updating, and ethically aligned personalization, outperforming baseline LLM-driven approaches in user modeling accuracy, personalization quality, and user satisfaction.

Ad Insertion in LLM-Generated Responses

Sustainable monetization of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a critical open challenge. Traditional search advertising, which relies on static keywords, fails to capture the fleeting, context-dependent user intents--the specific information, goods, or services a user seeks--embedded in conversational flows. Beyond the standard goal of social welfare maximization, effective LLM advertising imposes additional requirements on contextual coherence (ensuring ads align semantically with transient user intents) and computational efficiency (avoiding user interaction latency), as well as adherence to ethical and regulatory standards, including preserving privacy and ensuring explicit ad disclosure. Although various recent solutions have explored bidding on token-level and query-level, both categories of approaches generally fail to holistically satisfy this multifaceted set of constraints. We propose a practical framework that resolves these tensions through two decoupling strategies. First, we decouple ad insertion from response generation to ensure safety and explicit disclosure. Second, we decouple bidding from specific user queries by using ``genres'' (high-level semantic clusters) as a proxy. This allows advertisers to bid on stable categories rather than sensitive real-time response, reducing computational burden and privacy risks. We demonstrate that applying the VCG auction mechanism to this genre-based framework yields approximately dominant strategy incentive compatibility (DSIC) and individual rationality (IR), as well as approximately optimal social welfare, while maintaining high computational efficiency. Finally, we introduce an "LLM-as-a-Judge" metric to estimate contextual coherence. Our experiments show that this metric correlates strongly with human ratings (Spearman's $ρ\approx 0.66$), outperforming 80% of individual human evaluators.

Assessing the Quality of Mental Health Support in LLM Responses through Multi-Attribute Human Evaluation

The escalating global mental health crisis, marked by persistent treatment gaps, availability, and a shortage of qualified therapists, positions Large Language Models (LLMs) as a promising avenue for scalable support. While LLMs offer potential for accessible emotional assistance, their reliability, therapeutic relevance, and alignment with human standards remain challenging to address. This paper introduces a human-grounded evaluation methodology designed to assess LLM generated responses in therapeutic dialogue. Our approach involved curating a dataset of 500 mental health conversations from datasets with real-world scenario questions and evaluating the responses generated by nine diverse LLMs, including closed source and open source models. More specifically, these responses were evaluated by two psychiatric trained experts, who independently rated each on a 5 point Likert scale across a comprehensive 6 attribute rubric. This rubric captures Cognitive Support and Affective Resonance, providing a multidimensional perspective on therapeutic quality. Our analysis reveals that LLMs provide strong cognitive reliability by producing safe, coherent, and clinically appropriate information, but they demonstrate unstable affective alignment. Although closed source models (e.g., GPT-4o) offer balanced therapeutic responses, open source models show greater variability and emotional flatness. We reveal a persistent cognitive-affective gap and highlight the need for failure aware, clinically grounded evaluation frameworks that prioritize relational sensitivity alongside informational accuracy in mental health oriented LLMs. We advocate for balanced evaluation protocols with human in the loop that center on therapeutic sensitivity and provide a framework to guide the responsible design and clinical oversight of mental health oriented conversational AI.

Optimizing Conversational Quality in Spoken Dialogue Systems with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback

Reinforcement learning from human or AI feedback (RLHF/RLAIF) for speech-in/speech-out dialogue systems (SDS) remains underexplored, with prior work largely limited to single semantic rewards applied at the utterance level. Such setups overlook the multi-dimensional and multi-modal nature of conversational quality, which encompasses semantic coherence, audio naturalness, speaker consistency, emotion alignment, and turn-taking behavior. Moreover, they are fundamentally mismatched with duplex spoken dialogue systems that generate responses incrementally, where agents must make decisions based on partial utterances. We address these limitations with the first multi-reward RLAIF framework for SDS, combining semantic, audio-quality, and emotion-consistency rewards. To align utterance-level preferences with incremental, blockwise decoding in duplex models, we apply turn-level preference sampling and aggregate per-block log-probabilities within a single DPO objective. We present the first systematic study of preference learning for improving SDS quality in both multi-turn Chain-of-Thought and blockwise duplex models, and release a multi-reward DPO dataset to support reproducible research. Experiments show that single-reward RLAIF selectively improves its targeted metric, while joint multi-reward training yields consistent gains across semantic quality and audio naturalness. These results highlight the importance of holistic, multi-reward alignment for practical conversational SDS.