Synthetic dialogue generation can support research in privacy-restricted service settings, but generated conversations must preserve communicative intent, affective meaning, and natural dialogue flow. We introduce PragAlign, a feedback-guided framework for controlled synthetic dialogue generation conditioned on service context, target intent, and target emotion, with auxiliary trait-style controls. PragAlign uses a generate--evaluate--revise loop in which an LLM-based evaluator scores intent alignment, emotion alignment, coherence, fluency, and aggregate quality, then provides criterion-specific feedback for up to three refinement rounds. On 800 matched dialogue specifications, PragAlign achieves 99.50\% evaluator-defined acceptance, compared with 72.25\% for one-shot generation and 95.88\% for repeated generation without structured feedback. This indicates that repeated attempts account for much of the gain over one-shot generation, while structured feedback primarily improves last-mile multi-constraint satisfaction rather than broad average quality. Refinement gains are concentrated in emotion alignment, which is also the dominant failure mode in ablations. A separate human evaluation of 1,200 generated dialogues shows that intent expression and dialogue flow are highly recognizable to annotators, while emotion appropriateness is less stable and more subjective. These results support PragAlign as a quality-control framework for improving evaluator-defined communicative constraint satisfaction, while showing that affective realization and independent human-perceived quality remain open challenges.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02480
Multi-turn jailbreak attacks demonstrate that harmful intent can be distributed across dialogue, yet existing methods obscure what conversational mechanisms drive vulnerability. We introduce BLUEPRINT, a safety-evaluation framework separating a factorized social-influence strategy space from WORLDVIEWSIM, a cross-turn situational context module. Monte Carlo Tree Search optimizes turn-level combinations of 18 theory-grounded influence factors across a four-turn trajectory. Across six frontier models, BLUEPRINT achieves near-ceiling ASR on major open-weight and proprietary models, while requiring the fewest average queries (2.46). The resulting trajectories further reveal model-specific vulnerability among resistant targets: each responds to distinct influence factors and strategy transitions, yet all share a common recovery pathway-shifting toward concrete, executable task framing consistently escapes hard-refusal states. Ablations confirm operational cues matter most: making requests actionable has the largest impact, gain framing is unusually potent, and some legitimacy appeals can backfire. These findings suggest robust multi-turn safety requires monitoring not only harmful content, but also how dialogue state makes unsafe requests appear concrete and locally executable.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02414
Joint audio-video generation models have made substantial progress in visual quality and audio-visual synchronization. However, they still provide limited control over when shot transitions occur and dialogue is spoken. This limitation constrains their application in script-driven content creation, where timing errors can undermine narrative coherence and the viewing experience. Current joint generators align video and audio representations on a shared temporal axis, yet the precise timing of shots and dialogue specified in a structured prompt is encoded only in the prompt's text representation and remains unaligned with the temporal coordinates of either modality. Consequently, video and audio may remain synchronized with each other while both fail to follow the script timeline. This mismatch motivates us to extend temporal alignment beyond video and audio to include the structured script. We therefore introduce Temporal Context Routing (TCR), which maps the script timing onto the shared temporal axis of video and audio generation and routes each prompt's guidance to the corresponding positions in both modalities. Compared with the baseline on 200 test scripts, TCR reduces Shot Boundary MAE by 96%, from 1.11 s to 0.042 s, and raises Dialogue Acc@0.5 s from 28.3% to 84.1%. TCR achieves these improvements while maintaining visual quality and audio-visual synchronization comparable to those of the baselines. A user study further shows that participants prefer TCR on all five evaluated dimensions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02367
Existing Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) literature has focused on identifying and structuring errors, failures, conflicts, and knowledge issues (called in this work as contradictions) in domain-specific dialogue-based interactions. However, there is still lack of a formal computational framework to represent and define these contradictions, interoperable and usable across HRI and human-agent interaction (HAI) domains. Thus, this research project aims to capture, represent, and evaluate the notion of (1) dialogue-based collaborative interaction and (2) related contradictions in a foundational ontology. METHONTOLOGY, a systematic approach to build domain-independent ontologies was applied. In the conceptualisation stage of the presented ontology, concepts and models from Activity Theory were used. Preliminary results presented in this short article are: (i) Natural language definitions of dialogues and related contradictions in HRI, (ii) Set Theoretic definitions of dialogues and contradictions, and (iii) First Order Logic (FoL) formulation of the contradiction concepts and three novel principles guiding dialogue-based interactions between humans and robots. In summary, we report on ongoing work to develop a foundational ontology based on Activity Theory called Activity Theory-based foundational ontology (ATFOt) to capture and represent the notion of contradictions in HRI.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02364
The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and the growing diversity of their applications presents a unique optimization opportunity: selecting the right model for the task, while optimizing for speed, cost, and quality at a per-task level. However, inference endpoints can vary widely in quality, price, latency, context support, tool use, domain expertise, and reasoning behavior. This heterogeneity makes manual heuristics difficult to maintain and unlikely to achieve consistently favorable speed--cost--quality trade-offs on their own. We introduce \router{}, a lightweight GLiClass-based router that assigns a suitability score to each inference-time model label without autoregressive generation. The released 0.6B-parameter checkpoint combines a Qwen3 decoder with a shallow bidirectional scorer. Its decoder-KV execution path preserves a text-only key--value cache across a session, encodes only new dialogue turns, and evaluates transient candidate-label tokens without adding them to the persistent cache. The same checkpoint also predicts task type, difficulty, reasoning mode, and expected output length, and supports custom zero-shot labels. For task generation, we construct a task ontology with 23 families, 115 task types, 345 routable subtypes, 1,173 synthetic examples, and an orthogonal axis of 30 domains. Using this structure, we generate 150,000 verifier-scored tasks and 15,000 open-ended tasks. We then train the Qwen3 decoder on these tasks, while explicitly separating learned request prediction from per-task policies for attributes such as eligibility, cost, cache reuse, safety, and sovereignty. Across six LiveBench subsets, the router outperforms the mean candidate; on the selected 1,000-task subset, it achieves an aggregate top-1 score of 0.707 versus 0.696 for the strongest fixed model, with benchmark-dependent gains.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02292
Multimodal emotion recognition is a key research area in affective computing, with applications in sentiment analysis, intelligent customer service, and human-computer interaction. However, existing methods often rely on single-modal features or simple multimodal fusion, failing to capture the synergy between global and local contexts, which limits model performance and emotion understanding. To address this challenge, we propose Transformer-GAT, a hybrid framework that combines Transformer and the Graph Attention Network to enable cross-modal emotion understanding. The Transformer is used to capture global semantic information, while the Graph Attention Network is employed to model fine-grained relationships between modalities, thereby enhancing the representation of emotional features. Experiments on the IEMOCAP and MELD datasets show that our model achieves weighted F1 scores of 72.45% and 77.37%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate that Transformer-GAT effectively integrates multimodal features, balances global and local contexts, and provides deeper emotional insights, offering new directions for multimodal emotion computing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29556
Memory enables Large Language Model (LLM) agents to perceive, store, and use information from past dialogues, which is essential for personalization. However, existing methods fail to properly model the temporal dimension of memory in two aspects: 1) Temporal inaccuracy: memories are organized by dialogue time rather than their actual occurrence time; 2) Temporal fragmentation: existing methods focus on point-wise memory, losing durative information that captures persistent states and evolving patterns. To address these limitations, we propose Temporal Semantic Memory (TSM), a memory framework that models semantic time for point-wise memory and supports the construction and utilization of durative memory. During memory construction, it first builds a semantic timeline rather than a dialogue one. Then, it consolidates temporally continuous and semantically related information into a durative memory. During memory utilization, it incorporates the query's temporal intent on the semantic timeline, enabling the retrieval of temporally appropriate durative memories and providing time-valid, duration-consistent context to support response generation. Experiments on LongMemEval and LoCoMo show that TSM consistently outperforms existing methods and achieves up to 12.2% absolute improvement in accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07468
Empathetic response generation requires models to decide not only what to say, but also how to respond to the previous speaker's affective situation. We formulate this as response-side affective-orientation control and use multi-annotator emoji distributions as weak affective--attitudinal evidence, rather than as output symbols or gold labels, to induce a latent control space that operationally approximates listener stance. We construct EmojiDialogue, an utterance-level extension of EmpatheticDialogues with emoji votes and confidence scores, and propose EmoStance, which models source-side affective expression, predicts a soft response-side orientation from dialogue context and speaker roles, and steers a frozen instruction-tuned LLM through continuous prefix embeddings. In blind pairwise evaluation with 20 annotators and 800 judgments, EmoStance achieves a 62.2% decisive win rate, with the clearest gains in contextual specificity and perceived responsiveness, while remaining complementary to external-knowledge methods. Code, annotation metadata, and reconstruction scripts are available in our GitHub repository: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02133
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in interactive systems where understanding user intent precisely is paramount. A key capability for such systems is effective question clarification, especially when user queries are ambiguous or underspecified. This paper introduces a novel tri-agent framework for the robust evaluation of an LLM's ability to engage in clarifying dialogue. Our framework comprises three distinct LLM-based agents: (1) a Question Clarifying Agent (QCA), the system under evaluation, tasked with identifying ambiguities and posing clarifying questions; (2) a Respondent Agent (RA), designed to simulate human user responses, potentially including irrelevant or challenging replies; and (3) an Evaluator Agent (EA), an LLM-as-a-judge, which assesses the quality of the dialogue based on a comprehensive set of metrics. We detail a methodology for synthetic data generation in the supply chain domain as an example. We propose metrics evaluating ambiguity handling, question quality, dialogue efficiency, language appropriateness, and final intent alignment. We also briefly discuss the validation of the EA against human judgments. This work provides a structured approach to benchmark, validate, and improve the clarification capabilities of conversational LLM applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02054
Spoken dialogue state tracking recovers slot-value pairs from speech, where ASR errors concentrate in entity values and persist across turns, making it both a generation and an editing problem. A strong per-turn text editor corrects much of this but, operating on the transcript alone, leaves three recoverable errors: a value predicted inconsistently across turns, an omitted slot, and a value the audio does not support. We present AVERT, which scores each candidate value by combining cross-turn agreement with a trained audio-conditioned verifier and resolves the three error types with three operators, vote, add, and swap, each restricted to the slots where its error is common. On SpokenWOZ, a base speech-LLM reaches 33.04 JGA, a text editor 38.34, and AVERT 40.13, without retraining either. This is in the range of a 1B end-to-end system that consumes the full spoken history (39.32), though AVERT uses two 1B decoders rather than one. The audio verifier contributes a statistically significant gain, and restricting each operator to a selected slot subset matters: removing it lets unrestricted voting overwrite correct categorical values and fall below the editor.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01828
Audio LLM benchmarks measure understanding and dialogue quality, not whether speech-enabled models respond with relational warmth when a vulnerable user discloses a mental-health concern. We introduce a 7-turn scripted-disclosure probe grounded in WHO mental-health clinical guidelines, with each script run on the same model (Azure OpenAI gpt-realtime) in both audio and text-only conditions, and acoustic-prosody analysis of the generated speech. Across 532 responses we identify two audio-specific patterns transcript-only evaluation would miss: at the elicitation turn the model's voice gets shorter, faster, lower-pitched, and quieter rather than warmer (p < .001 for five of seven acoustic features), and the modality gap on relational acceptance, small in aggregate, concentrates in the highest-stakes self-harm/suicide scripts. A two-rater listener study corroborates that perceived warmth is concentrated at specific turns and on bereavement disclosures. Together these patterns indicate that auditing speech-enabled models in mental-health contexts requires evaluating the combined audio-and-text experience the user encounters, not the transcript in isolation. We release the protocol, scoring pipeline, and scripts as a starting point for evaluating speech-enabled models in mental-health contexts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04256
Farsi, spoken by more than 120 million people, lacks a comprehensive benchmark for dialogue generation and understanding. We introduce TALKFA, a unified benchmark comprising three complementary datasets: (1) WIKI-FADIAL, 4.2K Wikipedia-grounded dialogues for knowledge-grounded generation; (2) DAILYDIALOG-FA, 6.6K dialogues annotated for dialogue acts and emotions; and (3) PLAYDIAL-FA, 2.1K theatrical dialogues with sentiment labels. While LLMs assist data construction, every dialogue undergoes multi-stage review and revision by native Farsi speakers, and only the final human-approved dialogues are released. Experiments with six LLAMA and MISTRAL models show that LoRA substantially improves dialogue generation while requiring only 25-50% of the training data to recover over 90% of the final performance gains. Across classification tasks, FABERT achieves the best dialogue-act performance, LORA-MISTRAL-7B performs best on emotion recognition, and MISTRAL-24B achieves the highest sentiment score. Human evaluation and independent external validation demonstrate the reliability of the benchmark, while comparisons with GPT-4.1 as an LLM judge reveal that automatic metrics substantially overestimate dialogue quality. Zero-shot evaluation with frontier LLMs further shows that TalkFa remains a challenging benchmark. We will release all datasets, annotation guidelines, code, and checkpoints.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01810
Empirical legal research often relies on turning research questions into structured data extracted from large collections of rulings and judgments. Designing the extraction schema and then extracting the data remain a manual, expertise-heavy bottleneck. We present schematize, an open-source multi-agent system that interactively turns a researcher's problem statement into a validated extraction schema that can later be used for autonomous extraction. Schematize couples (i) a clarification dialogue that elicits implicit expert intent, (ii) iterative schema generation, (iii) data-grounded refinement that tests the schema against documents, and (iv) chat-based post-editing. We evaluated the system with human legal professional, introducing our novel methodology, and schematize achieves top performance in most of tested configurations. While the system is designed to be domain-agnostic and applicable to any document collection, we tailor and evaluate it on legal research problems. We release schematize as a pip-installable Python package with full documentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22209
Audio Description (AD) provides spoken narration of visual events during dialogue gaps, making movies accessible to visually impaired audiences. The problem requires determining both what (which visual event) and when (position for inserting the AD) to narrate, to achieve the best user experience. Prior work has largely reduced the problem to video captioning of pre-segmented video clips, i.e., what is largely predefined and when is ignored entirely. We propose Cue2Narrate, a two-stage pipeline that jointly predicts what and when to narrate in longer untrimmed movie clips. A dual-head audio-visual localizer predicts two temporally distinct windows per AD utterance: a visual cue window and a spoken narration window. A LoRA-adapted VLM then generates concise ADs from the predicted visual evidence, trained with a Description Ranking Loss that ranks captions (negative samples) of the same frames lower than the GT AD. To benchmark this new problem statement, we introduce the LongLSMDC benchmark with up to 8-min movie clips (~6.5min on average). On LongLSMDC, Cue2Narrate outperforms video-only and audio-only localization baselines by 5--12 points in avg. mAP. Under both predicted- and GT-window evaluation, Cue2Narrate improves AD generation over the corresponding fine-tuned base VLM. These results establish the first benchmark for multi-segment AD generation on long-form clips. Data & Code: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01725
Data-residency constraints force enterprises to self-host LLMs, but continuous adoption of newer models without decommissioning their predecessors expands the serving fleet, fragmenting a finite GPU pool. We consolidate traffic from over 200 internal applications onto a single model by closing quality gaps identified through production error analysis along three axes: instruction following, function-calling, and internal task distribution. Quality is tracked by offline benchmarks stratified to production traffic and scored by deterministic verifiers or calibrated LLM judges. Rather than optimising all objectives jointly, which introduces cross-domain reward interference, we train a separate GRPO expert per axis and merge them via two-stage SLERP. Each expert's reward exposes a distinct failure mode, namely semantic collapse, over-calling, and verbosity hacking, each requiring a domain-specific fix. In non-reasoning mode the recipe surpasses a ${\sim}7\times$ larger by total parameters baseline on the in-house Arena with 69.6 to 65.8, instruction following with 0.85 to 0.83, and function-calling with 0.79 to 0.77, while lifting general dialogue benchmarks. The model absorbs 50% of platform traffic, 116M requests per month, at a fraction of the serving cost.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01572
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in advice seeking and decision making that may affect social judgements. Despite stigma's profound effects on people and communities, benchmarks remain scarce. Existing general-domain evaluations typically rely on static prompts and fixed-format tasks, overlooking conversational contexts and audience effects in everyday communication. To address these gaps, we introduce SDARE-Bench, the first scenario-based benchmark evaluating both stigma detection and open-ended response generation in LLMs, comprising 1,138 dyadic queries and 1,388 group dialogue. Empirical results across 8 LLMs consistently demonstrate poor identification of stigma components, especially in group dialogues. In open-ended response generation, stigma expression was substantially higher in group settings than in dyadic, with weaker resistance to stigma and more unrealistic advice. Responses were evaluated using a classifier trained on 1,392 human annotated responses. In constructed group pressure settings, stigma expression rates further increased to a striking average of 97.5%. Our findings identify stigma response as a recurring LLM safety vulnerability, especially in socially complex conversational contexts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01548
As LLM-based human simulators are increasingly used for policy, evaluation, and training, they must faithfully reproduce real behavioral patterns. While prior work has examined behavioral fidelity in survey responses and dialogue, longer-horizon real-world activity remains largely unexplored. We introduce a framework for evaluating behavioral fidelity in long-horizon activity simulations across temporal granularities and levels of analysis. As a case study, we collect a 43-hour multi-camera dataset of in-the-wild office activity and compare trace-derived conditioning mechanisms: persona descriptors, few-shot exemplars, and statistical transition and time-of-day priors. We find that behavioral fidelity is not uniform across metrics: statistical priors bring activity and sequence distributions closest to real behavior, yet over-fragment routines and suppress within-person variability. These findings motivate a more holistic evaluation that spans multiple metrics, temporal granularities, and levels of analysis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01257
Repeated banking interactions require assistants to maintain complete, current, and traceable customer records as life changes emerge incidentally in routine requests. Existing benchmarks emphasize question answering, bounded episodes, or targeted recall rather than exhaustive longitudinal reconstruction. We introduce FinLifeBench, which evaluates two tasks over the same cumulative dialogue: reconstructing every life-event instance with its first-establishing session and reconstructing a complete 34-path financial state at consecutive checkpoints. The benchmark contains 6,000 eight-turn Korean banking sessions from 20 independent synthetic trajectories, with deterministic, exhaustive gold for 24 event types and 34 state paths and consensus quality assurance. Across eleven LLMs under a full-context condition, event-anchor recall falls from 0.591 at 15 sessions to 0.445 at 300. Errors are driven primarily by omitted events rather than poor anchor localization, while financial-state reconstruction frequently treats superseded or potentially outdated information as current; the best GCA@15 reaches 0.470. Performance on the two reconstruction tasks is only weakly associated. These results show that models can localize evidence for recovered events while still failing to maintain complete and temporally valid longitudinal records.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01198
Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing digital communication by powering conversational agents deployed across domains such as customer service, digital sales, and insurance. These agents, built on LLMs, can understand user input, retrieve relevant information, and generate coherent responses. However, while they excel at factual communication, they often lack the ability to engage in truly persuasive, context-sensitive dialogue, especially in domains like insurance, where trust and clarity are critical. Building on this need within the insurance domain, our work focuses on improving the persuasiveness of digital agents, aka LLMs. To support this, we introduce InsureDial, a Persuasive Insurance Dialogue dataset, designed to capture the nuances of persuasive communication specific to motor insurance interactions. We introduce PersuaRL, a reinforcement learning-based framework that equips LLM-driven dialogue agents with the ability to adaptively explore, select, and coordinate strategies across multiple expert modules, guided by the evolving dialogue context, to achieve more effective persuasion. We conduct extensive automatic human and qualitative evaluations on two benchmark persuasion dialogue datasets, including our InsureDial. Our evaluations consistently demonstrate that PersuaRL outperforms baseline, generating contextually appropriate and highly persuasive responses.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01188
Clinical LLM assistants must reason over multi-visit patient trajectories, yet whether the compact history representations used to scale them---retrieval, structured timelines, LLM summaries, agentic memory---preserve the longitudinal signal clinical reasoning needs has not been measured. We introduce ClinTraceBench: 385 MIMIC-IV-derived verified dialogues with event-ID provenance, a nine-task taxonomy (T1--T9), and L0--L4 deterministic + L5 human-audit validation (98.92\% agreement). We evaluate eight history representation strategies---a no-context floor, \textit{last-visit-only}, \textit{full-context}, BGE-M3 \textit{dense-retrieval}, two compression schemes, and two agentic-memory systems (\textit{Mem0}, \textit{A-Mem})---across four backbones (DeepSeek-V3, GPT-4o-mini, Haiku~4.5, Sonnet~4.6) on 6{,}271 questions: 32 cells, 200{,}672 predictions. Four findings: (SP4) a controlled T3 injection probe isolates compression-induced \textit{relation} loss---with the attribution sentence present \textit{before} construction, \textit{Mem0}, \textit{A-Mem} and \textit{llm-summary} still recover only 0--5.3\% of the injected positives; (SP1) compressed strategies pay an aggregation tax on multi-visit trends and cross-patient comparisons; (SP2) the blind-to-full gap spans $+29.8$~pp (GPT-4o-mini) to $+62.7$~pp (Haiku); (SP3) abstention scales non-monotonically with context length. On the Pareto frontier Haiku dominates Sonnet under \textit{full-context} (\$25.76 vs.\ \$106.21), inverting the ``biggest backbone wins'' heuristic.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01111