ATOD: An Evaluation Framework and Benchmark for Agentic Task-Oriented Dialogue System

Recent advances in task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, driven by large language models (LLMs) with extensive API and tool integration, have enabled conversational agents to coordinate interleaved goals, maintain long-horizon context, and act proactively through asynchronous execution. These capabilities extend beyond traditional TOD systems, yet existing benchmarks lack systematic support for evaluating such agentic behaviors. To address this gap, we introduce ATOD, a benchmark and synthetic dialogue generation pipeline that produces richly annotated conversations requiring long-term reasoning. ATOD captures key characteristics of advanced TOD, including multi-goal coordination, dependency management, memory, adaptability, and proactivity. Building on ATOD, we propose ATOD-Eval, a holistic evaluation framework that translates these dimensions into fine-grained metrics and supports reproducible offline and online evaluation. We further present a strong agentic memory-based evaluator for benchmarking on ATOD. Experiments show that ATOD-Eval enables comprehensive assessment across task completion, agentic capability, and response quality, and that the proposed evaluator offers a better accuracy-efficiency tradeoff compared to existing memory- and LLM-based approaches under this evaluation setting.

RealMem: Benchmarking LLMs in Real-World Memory-Driven Interaction

As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve from static dialogue interfaces to autonomous general agents, effective memory is paramount to ensuring long-term consistency. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on casual conversation or task-oriented dialogue, failing to capture **"long-term project-oriented"** interactions where agents must track evolving goals. To bridge this gap, we introduce **RealMem**, the first benchmark grounded in realistic project scenarios. RealMem comprises over 2,000 cross-session dialogues across eleven scenarios, utilizing natural user queries for evaluation. We propose a synthesis pipeline that integrates Project Foundation Construction, Multi-Agent Dialogue Generation, and Memory and Schedule Management to simulate the dynamic evolution of memory. Experiments reveal that current memory systems face significant challenges in managing the long-term project states and dynamic context dependencies inherent in real-world projects. Our code and datasets are available at [https://github.com/AvatarMemory/RealMemBench](https://github.com/AvatarMemory/RealMemBench).

MMWOZ: Building Multimodal Agent for Task-oriented Dialogue

Task-oriented dialogue systems have garnered significant attention due to their conversational ability to accomplish goals, such as booking airline tickets for users. Traditionally, task-oriented dialogue systems are conceptualized as intelligent agents that interact with users using natural language and have access to customized back-end APIs. However, in real-world scenarios, the widespread presence of front-end Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and the absence of customized back-end APIs create a significant gap for traditional task-oriented dialogue systems in practical applications. In this paper, to bridge the gap, we collect MMWOZ, a new multimodal dialogue dataset that is extended from MultiWOZ 2.3 dataset. Specifically, we begin by developing a web-style GUI to serve as the front-end. Next, we devise an automated script to convert the dialogue states and system actions from the original dataset into operation instructions for the GUI. Lastly, we collect snapshots of the web pages along with their corresponding operation instructions. In addition, we propose a novel multimodal model called MATE (Multimodal Agent for Task-oriEnted dialogue) as the baseline model for the MMWOZ dataset. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive experimental analysis using MATE to investigate the construction of a practical multimodal agent for task-oriented dialogue.

Enhancing Goal-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems via Consistency Reflection and Correction

This paper proposes a consistency reflection and correction method for goal-oriented dialogue systems.

Emotionally Intelligent Task-oriented Dialogue Systems: Architecture, Representation, and Optimisation

Task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems are designed to help users achieve specific goals through natural language interaction. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved linguistic fluency and contextual understanding, building effective and emotionally intelligent ToD systems remains a complex challenge. Effective ToD systems must optimise for task success, emotional understanding and responsiveness, and precise information conveyance, all within inherently noisy and ambiguous conversational environments. In this work, we investigate architectural, representational, optimisational as well as emotional considerations of ToD systems. We set up systems covering these design considerations with a challenging evaluation environment composed of a natural-language user simulator coupled with an imperfect natural language understanding module. We propose \textbf{LUSTER}, an \textbf{L}LM-based \textbf{U}nified \textbf{S}ystem for \textbf{T}ask-oriented dialogue with \textbf{E}nd-to-end \textbf{R}einforcement learning with both short-term (user sentiment) and long-term (task success) rewards. Our findings demonstrate that combining LLM capability with structured reward modelling leads to more resilient and emotionally responsive ToD systems, offering a practical path forward for next-generation conversational agents.

Conversational Intent-Driven GraphRAG: Enhancing Multi-Turn Dialogue Systems through Adaptive Dual-Retrieval of Flow Patterns and Context Semantics

We present CID-GraphRAG (Conversational Intent-Driven Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation), a novel framework that addresses the limitations of existing dialogue systems in maintaining both contextual coherence and goal-oriented progression in multi-turn customer service conversations. Unlike traditional RAG systems that rely solely on semantic similarity (Conversation RAG) or standard knowledge graphs (GraphRAG), CID-GraphRAG constructs dynamic intent transition graphs from goal achieved historical dialogues and implements a dual-retrieval mechanism that adaptively balances intent-based graph traversal with semantic search. This approach enables the system to simultaneously leverage both conversional intent flow patterns and contextual semantics, significantly improving retrieval quality and response quality. In extensive experiments on real-world customer service dialogues, we employ both automatic metrics and LLM-as-judge assessments, demonstrating that CID-GraphRAG significantly outperforms both semantic-based Conversation RAG and intent-based GraphRAG baselines across all evaluation criteria. Quantitatively, CID-GraphRAG demonstrates substantial improvements over Conversation RAG across automatic metrics, with relative gains of 11% in BLEU, 5% in ROUGE-L, 6% in METEOR, and most notably, a 58% improvement in response quality according to LLM-as-judge evaluations. These results demonstrate that the integration of intent transition structures with semantic retrieval creates a synergistic effect that neither approach achieves independently, establishing CID-GraphRAG as an effective framework for addressing the challenges of maintaining contextual coherence and goal-oriented progression in knowledge-intensive multi-turn dialogues.

Simulating User Diversity in Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems using Large Language Models

In this study, we explore the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating synthetic users and simulating user conversations with a task-oriented dialogue system and present detailed results and their analysis. We propose a comprehensive novel approach to user simulation technique that uses LLMs to create diverse user profiles, set goals, engage in multi-turn dialogues, and evaluate the conversation success. We employ two proprietary LLMs, namely GPT-4o and GPT-o1 (Achiam et al., 2023), to generate a heterogeneous base of user profiles, characterized by varied demographics, multiple user goals, different conversational styles, initial knowledge levels, interests, and conversational objectives. We perform a detailed analysis of the user profiles generated by LLMs to assess the diversity, consistency, and potential biases inherent in these LLM-generated user simulations. We find that GPT-o1 generates more heterogeneous user distribution across most user attributes, while GPT-4o generates more skewed user attributes. The generated set of user profiles are then utilized to simulate dialogue sessions by interacting with a task-oriented dialogue system.

Interpretable and Robust Dialogue State Tracking via Natural Language Summarization with LLMs

This paper introduces a novel approach to Dialogue State Tracking (DST) that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate natural language descriptions of dialogue states, moving beyond traditional slot-value representations. Conventional DST methods struggle with open-domain dialogues and noisy inputs. Motivated by the generative capabilities of LLMs, our Natural Language DST (NL-DST) framework trains an LLM to directly synthesize human-readable state descriptions. We demonstrate through extensive experiments on MultiWOZ 2.1 and Taskmaster-1 datasets that NL-DST significantly outperforms rule-based and discriminative BERT-based DST baselines, as well as generative slot-filling GPT-2 DST models, in both Joint Goal Accuracy and Slot Accuracy. Ablation studies and human evaluations further validate the effectiveness of natural language state generation, highlighting its robustness to noise and enhanced interpretability. Our findings suggest that NL-DST offers a more flexible, accurate, and human-understandable approach to dialogue state tracking, paving the way for more robust and adaptable task-oriented dialogue systems.

HierTOD: A Task-Oriented Dialogue System Driven by Hierarchical Goals

Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems assist users in completing tasks through natural language interactions, often relying on a single-layered workflow structure for slot-filling in public tasks, such as hotel bookings. However, in enterprise environments, which involve rich domain-specific knowledge, TOD systems face challenges due to task complexity and the lack of standardized documentation. In this work, we introduce HierTOD, an enterprise TOD system driven by hierarchical goals and can support composite workflows. By focusing on goal-driven interactions, our system serves a more proactive role, facilitating mixed-initiative dialogue and improving task completion. Equipped with components for natural language understanding, composite goal retriever, dialogue management, and response generation, backed by a well-organized data service with domain knowledge base and retrieval engine, HierTOD delivers efficient task assistance. Furthermore, our system implementation unifies two TOD paradigms: slot-filling for information collection and step-by-step guidance for task execution. Our human study demonstrates the effectiveness and helpfulness of HierTOD in performing both paradigms.

Contextual ASR Error Handling with LLMs Augmentation for Goal-Oriented Conversational AI

General-purpose automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems do not always perform well in goal-oriented dialogue. Existing ASR correction methods rely on prior user data or named entities. We extend correction to tasks that have no prior user data and exhibit linguistic flexibility such as lexical and syntactic variations. We propose a novel context augmentation with a large language model and a ranking strategy that incorporates contextual information from the dialogue states of a goal-oriented conversational AI and its tasks. Our method ranks (1) n-best ASR hypotheses by their lexical and semantic similarity with context and (2) context by phonetic correspondence with ASR hypotheses. Evaluated in home improvement and cooking domains with real-world users, our method improves recall and F1 of correction by 34% and 16%, respectively, while maintaining precision and false positive rate. Users rated .8-1 point (out of 5) higher when our correction method worked properly, with no decrease due to false positives.