Demand for personalized financial advising is growing, but consistent advisor expertise is difficult to obtain, scale, and encode in LLM systems. Simple persona prompts rarely specify how a financial advisor should reason and often drift toward generic recommendations. We propose Fund2Persona, a framework that grounds financial-advisor personas in fund disclosures, holdings transitions, market context, and manager commentary, then refines them through an agentic actor--scorer--patcher loop. We evaluate the resulting personas on held-out holdings-transition reconstruction and manager-commentary alignment, where they better recover portfolio decisions and grounded manager interpretation than generic baselines. We further study two downstream diagnostics: market-scenario generation, where persona retrieval broadens plausible investment views beyond repeated generic rollouts, and advisory dialogues grounded in investor profiles, where matched personas give more specific and useful advice than a generic advisor. These results suggest that fund-data-grounded financial-advisor personas can make manager-specific investment expertise portable rather than merely changing an LLM's surface style.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29793
Social influence dialogue changes user behavior by altering internal cognitive states. The central evaluation question is whether the user's beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions measurably change over the course of conversation, a process-oriented criterion that neither surface-level text metrics (BLEU/ROUGE) nor single-score LLM judgments can capture. We propose the \textbf{Cog}nitive \textbf{W}orld \textbf{M}odel \textbf{(CogWM)}, an LLM-based user model that reframes multi-turn dialogue evaluation from ``what did the user say'' to ``how did the user's internal cognitive state evolves.'' CogWM jointly predicts BDI/E cognitive states and user utterances and serves as both a user simulator and an evaluation platform, using a three-tier evaluation framework that covers turn-level fidelity, trajectory-level state dynamics, and task-level composite scoring. Trained via our \textbf{S}ummarize-\textbf{a}nd-\textbf{A}llocate \textbf{(SaA)} annotation pipeline on 150,454 user-turn samples across four social influence scenarios, CogWM achieves 77.6\% emotion accuracy (2.1$\times$ over GPT-5.5). In 3600 multi-agent discrimination trials, it distinguishes six commercial agents by their cognitive influence, with Llama-4-Scout ranking first (CTS +0.233). CogWM moves social influence dialogue evaluation from terminal judgment to process tracking. We have released our code\footnote{\scriptsize Code: this https URL} and models\footnote{Model: this https URL}.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29495
Explainable AI (XAI) is now a major theme in NLP; however, Arabic NLP remains under-explained in three connected senses. First, there is a method gap: Arabic XAI relies heavily on a small set of post-hoc techniques such as LIME, SHAP, attention visualization, and saliency, while broader NLP XAI offers richer diagnostic, counterfactual, probing, rationale-based, and human-centered methods. Second, there is a task gap: existing Arabic XAI work is concentrated in classification tasks, especially sentiment analysis, hate/offensive language detection, fake news, and spam, with weaker coverage of generation, retrieval, translation, summarization, structured prediction, and dialogue. Third, there is a linguistic gap: many explanations identify influential tokens, but rarely explain Arabic-specific phenomena such as morphology, clitics, dialectal variation, diglossia, orthographic ambiguity, diacritics, code-switching, named entities, cultural references, or Classical and religious registers. This critical structured survey synthesizes the reviewed literature on Arabic XAI across text, speech, and multimodal settings. We argue that Arabic NLP does not only need explanations of model decisions; it needs explanations that are faithful to Arabic as a linguistic, cultural, and sociotechnical object. We introduce a taxonomy of tasks, methods, linguistic units, varieties, goals, and evaluation practices, and propose a research agenda for linguistically grounded Arabic XAI.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26144
LLM agents handle user requests on behalf of organizations through tool calls and must follow the company policies stated in their system prompts. Prior work approaches this as a safeguarding problem -- external checks that block non-compliant agent actions. We argue that policy adherence is a broader problem: real workflows unfold across many turns, require explicit user confirmation and prerequisite reads, and hinge on the content of the dialogue rather than on any single argument value. Meeting this bar requires (i) full conversation context, (ii) self-reasoning over the policy and the current dialogue, and (iii) conversation-specific remediation that guides the agent's next turn -- three capabilities that prior safeguard work has often underestimated. We introduce POLICYGUARD, a sub-agent verifier that shares the agent's view of the dialogue, reasons over the policy in context, and provides actionable feedback for the agent's next turn. On tau^2-BENCH airline across three vendors (GPT-5.4, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro) with four trials per setting, POLICYGUARD improves PASS4 by +12.0 / +6.0 / +12.0 pp. Per-call analyses show POLICYGUARD achieves higher policy-violation recall while blocking roughly half as often as argument-level guards.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29225
Model Context Protocol (MCP)-style ecosystems give language-model applications a practical connection layer for tools, resources, prompts, and transports. As agents move from connection to execution, security decisions often remain split across clients, servers, prompts, approval dialogs, OAuth deployments, and logs. This paper asks whether a runtime can make execution-layer invariants explicit and testable while preserving MCP-like workflows. We define eight invariants: metadata non-authority, grant-backed approval, canonical resources, principal binding, scoped capability invocation, source-and-target data-flow authorization, deny-path audit, and explicit protocol state. We implement these invariants in HCP, a Handle-Capability Protocol reference runtime for MCP-style agent execution that represents calls through principals, resources, grants, capabilities, handles, policy decisions, data-pipe checks, and audit entries. We evaluate HCP against two MCP-like baselines: a naive connection-layer runtime and a practice-informed connection-layer mitigation baseline with metadata linting, session checks, and per-call approvals. Across 10 benchmark cases, the naive baseline permits all modeled attacks, the mitigation baseline permits 6 of 10, and HCP blocks all 10 while preserving audit evidence. Ablations identify which runtime components block attacks and preserve forensic evidence. A local in-memory microbenchmark reports sub-millisecond mean latencies for measured policy, invocation, peek, and pipe operations. A bounded GitHub README-screening sample provides ecosystem signals, not vulnerability findings. The results support a narrow claim: MCP-style agent systems need an execution-control layer in addition to connection-layer conventions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29073
Speech-to-speech dialogue models increasingly depend on prosody and interactional nuance to convey social intent, yet benchmarks for these cues remain limited. We introduce StanceBench, a benchmark for measuring interpersonal stance in conversational speech and evaluating audio-capable LLMs as automated judges. Using the Seamless Interaction corpus, StanceBench (1) specifies 9 stance dimensions via role-prompt poles, (2) standardizes single-speaker and interaction-based evaluations, and (3) reports LLM-as-a-judge robustness, bias, and stance inference. Across evaluated stances, empathy and politeness are the easiest. Warmth and assertiveness are moderately separable with positivity skew/asymmetry. Honesty is the hardest and shows high prompt order bias, consistent with needing cross-turn evidence. Attentiveness is separable but aligns weakly with humans. Interaction stances are more context-sensitive, with threshold gaps and high variance, especially conflict regulation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22658
Although most undergraduates now use large language models (LLMs), a form of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) for academic writing, no validated method distinguishes the qualitatively different ways students rely on them. Existing instruments assess reliance solely by frequency of use, a measure that, as this study shows, inadvertently rewards dependence on AI rather than recognizing students' own intellectual contribution. Conducted at a public minority-serving university and grounded in the AI Literacy Framework, Expectancy-Value Theory, and Biggs's Presage-Process-Product model, the study drew on 382 undergraduates, 14 interviews, and 396 open-ended survey responses. Four distinct reliance types were identified and confirmed: Strategic (34.3%), Instrumental (30.9%), Dialogic (30.4%), and Dependent (4.5%). Students' value and cost beliefs predicted the intensity of their reliance on LLMs, whereas their AI literacy predicted the type of reliance they adopted, indicating that differentiated support is needed. Notably, Strategic users, those who engaged AI most deliberately, scored lowest on standard outcome measures. This pattern reflects a limitation of current instruments, which index AI's contribution rather than writing quality, thereby penalizing students who show the greatest independent thinking. Analysis also revealed an additional group, roughly 13%, who declined to use AI for ethical rather than practical reasons, and who existing frameworks overlook. These findings carry implications for AI literacy programs, the measurement of student learning outcomes, and equitable AI policy at minority-serving institutions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28749
Speech-driven 3D facial animation methods face significant challenges in simultaneously achieving high-fidelity motion and precise artistic control at production quality. Existing controllable models typically learn global style control by relying on large-scale, low-quality \emph{in-the-wild} datasets that compromise overall animation realism. Furthermore, these frameworks often lack the fine-grained temporal precision required for demanding tasks such as dialogue localization (e.g., dubbing), where matching specific facial expressions is as critical as lip synchronization. We present KM-Speaker (Keypoint-Matching Speaker), a novel keypoint-conditioned flow-based generative framework that provides both global style guidance and frame-level temporal control from reference performances. We propose a disentanglement strategy that separates audio-driven lip motion from keypoint-driven upper-face dynamics, together with a global style context preservation mechanism to ensure coherent full-face expressiveness. KM-Speaker advances example-based 3D facial animation by achieving high-fidelity motion and flexible controllability in a data-constrained setting, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods in lip-sync accuracy, style adherence, and expressive temporal control.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28568
Recent advances in large language models and vision-language models have enabled reasoning over multimodal data, offering opportunities for clinical applications such as decision support and triaging. However, existing medical AI benchmarks are fragmented: some support multi-turn dialogues but lack images, while others provide multimodal inputs but focus on single-turn QA tasks. To address this gap, we introduce IMCBench, an image-grounded, multi-turn medical conversation benchmark that pairs real, publicly available clinical images with synthetic patient profiles to simulate realistic patient-clinician interactions. Each conversation is evaluated across three clinical dimensions: safety, accuracy, and appropriate use of uncertainty in diagnosis. We benchmark eight multimodal frontier models across four model families (Claude, GPT, Nova, and Llama), scoring each on a 1-5 scale using LLM-as-Jury scoring calibrated against expert clinician annotations. Our results show that Claude Opus 4.6 achieves the highest overall score (3.61), followed by Claude Sonnet 4.6 (3.30) and GPT-5.2 (3.29), though no model dominates all dimensions and safety degrades for both malignant and rare conditions ($\Delta$ = -0.27 each). Ablation studies further reveal that both visual input and EHR context contribute to safe guidance (safety drops of 0.18 and 0.23 on average when each is removed), with stronger models leveraging visual features more effectively. Together, these findings demonstrate that accurate clinical description does not guarantee safe patient guidance, motivating the need for multi-dimensional evaluation frameworks in medical AI.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28556
The clinical and communication skills of medical students are commonly assessed through Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs), which consist of brief scenario-driven simulations of doctor-patient interactions. However, training is often limited by the low availability of human standardized patients, motivating the development of realistic virtual patients (VPs). To address this gap, we introduce a French OSCE dialogue dataset comprising 240 student-patient training interactions. We build upon it a controllable LLM-based pipeline to generate synthetic OSCE dialogues. The pipeline integrates modular components, such as retrieval-based grounding and a reflection loop, to ensure patient fidelity, coherence, and realism. Additionally, we propose a multi-level evaluation framework assessing patient simulation quality, student performance, and linguistic quality, using an LLM-as-a-Judge approach. Experiments suggest that controllability modules generally improve patient fidelity and student evaluation consistency. Finally, we implement an interactive prototype in which students can practice with a VP and receive automatic feedback.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28526
Objective: This paper investigates the gendered structure of speaker addressee relationships in film dialogue, asking not merely who speaks, but who is spoken to and how conversational dynamics unfold across gender lines. Methods: Using a manually annotated dataset of 4,600 directed dialogue events from 38 film screenplays, we apply network analysis, chi squared tests, paired statistical comparisons, and participation shift analysis across three studies. Key Findings: Male characters dominate as both speakers and addressees corpus wide, even in scenes with more women; cross gender dialogue is directionally symmetric on average but clustered at the film level; and same gender turns diffuse conversational attention while cross gender turns produce tighter dyadic reciprocation. Conclusion: Gender bias in film dialogue operates through the architecture of conversation itself, through exclusion from interaction and structural positioning as addressees, rather than through speaking time or within conversation directional imbalance alone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22656
Embodied agents operating in decentralized and partially observable environments have attracted growing attention in recent years. However, existing large language model (LLM)-based agents often exhibit behaviors that are misaligned with their partners or inconsistent with the environment state, leading to inefficient cooperation and poor task success. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework, Learning Laws of Cooperation (LLawCo), that enables embodied agents to autonomously align with both their partners and task objectives. Our framework allows agents to reflect on past failures to extract misaligned behavioral patterns, which are used to derive high-level behavioral laws, such as "Talk when necessary" and "Wait for partner." These laws are explicitly incorporated into the agents' chains of thought via supervised fine-tuning, aligning their reasoning with task requirements and the behavior of other agents. To evaluate our approach, we introduce PARTNR-Dialog, a large-scale multi-agent communicative and cooperative planning benchmark built on the PARTNR environment. Experiments on existing tasks and our new benchmark demonstrate significant improvements in cooperative efficiency and task success rates. Across four backbone LLMs, our method achieves average success rate improvements of 4.5% on the PARTNR-Dialog benchmark and 6.8% on the TDW-MAT benchmark over state-of-the-art open-source communicative agent frameworks. See the LLawCo project page for details: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28182
Insurance fraud imposes substantial financial losses and operational inefficiencies, raising premiums and impacting trust among legitimate policyholders. Early detection at FNOL remains a persistent challenge. Existing approaches rely largely on private, text-only datasets, limiting progress on multimodal methods that integrate linguistic, behavioural, and speaker-based indicators. We introduce a synthetic multimodal framework that replicates FNOL conditions. It generates agent-customer dialogue transcripts and two-speaker audios, performs ASR and diarisation. Downstream modules combine NER, regex-based feature extraction, LLM-RAG retrieval, and speaker embeddings in a rule-based risk score to flag narrative reuse, structural inconsistencies, and cross-case voice repetition while balancing sensitivity and false positives. Dataset validation and component-level evaluations show stability and transfer potential, offering a reproducible baseline beyond text-only fraud detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28002
Generating lifelike facial animation for dyadic conversations requires reconciling high-level cognitive intent with precise low-level motor reflexes, yet existing methods fall short in the semantic understanding of dialogue context and in precise dynamic control. In this paper, we propose MindFlow, a dual-pathway generative framework inspired by the Ventral-Dorsal pathway model in neuroscience, which decouples generation into two collaborative streams, thereby harmonizing deep semantic reasoning with fine-grained control. In the Ventral module, we transform the conventional Sentence-Action approach into a novel Chunk-State approach that models raw acoustic streams as a context-aware, evolving emotional state chain, capturing subtle paralinguistic nuances and mid-utterance emotional shifts missed by sentence-level modeling. The Dorsal module features a conditional autoregressive flow matching network for high-fidelity facial motion, driven by high-frequency acoustic cues and modulated by emotion states, plus a Selective Acoustic Injector for adaptive audio gating to ensure robustness in talking-and-listening dynamics without interference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MindFlow achieves superior semantic appropriateness and motion naturalness compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27779
Second-language (L2) English learners can rarely rehearse speaking with a partner. Speaking is also the most anxiety-laden skill. These gaps drive a fast-growing market for automated speaking practice and scoring. But an automated score is trustworthy only if it is accurate, interpretable, fair, and benchmarked against the right human bar. We build an interpretable feature-plus-LLM hybrid for spontaneous L2 dialogue. We evaluate it without ever fitting to the human labels, against the ICNALE Global Rating Archive: 140 speeches rated by ~80 trained raters on 10 analytic criteria. We score the 130 L2 speeches with usable audio. A deterministic De-Jong speech-timing composite reaches rho=0.764. Blended with a single text-LLM fluency judgment, it reaches Spearman rho=0.818 against the consensus gold. This agrees with the consensus better than 81% of the 80 individual trained raters: above the median rater (rho=0.73) and near the best, and at ~83% of the reliability-corrected maximum (kappa_max=0.99). The blend improves on the composite alone by +0.054 (paired-bootstrap 95% CI [0.017, 0.108], excludes 0); the LLM adds a coarse fluency ranking that the continuous composite refines. We also report a controlled null on pause encoding, bounded to effects below about +/-0.1 rho at this sample size. Holding the LLM and learner words fixed and varying only how pauses are written into the prompt, inline pause locations do not beat aggregate pause statistics (-0.069, CI [-0.15, +0.08]), and a grounded mid-clause criterion gives no reliable gain. The fluency signal comes from the measured speech-timing features, not from how pauses are written for the LLM. We back every claim with two agreeing learner-isolation methods, paired-bootstrap CIs, a monologue negative control, per-feature reproduction of classical measurements, and a per-L1 fairness audit.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26137
We present a conceptual framework for analyzing dialogue in collaborative problem-solving contexts, with an emphasis on the emerging dynamics of human-AI and multi-agent collaboration. As intelligent systems become active agents capable of autonomous reasoning and strategic cooperation, understanding the dialogic interaction during collaborative problem solving is increasingly important for optimizing and evaluating such partnerships. Our framework addresses key limitations in current analytical approaches through a hierarchical two-layer coding scheme that integrates cognitive and non-cognitive problem solving with metacognitive regulatory mechanisms. We demonstrate its effectiveness and generalizability across nine datasets spanning multiple domains, and provide insights into how humans and agents coordinate their knowledge, skills, and efforts to solve complex problems, showing in particular that metacognitive regulation can be an essential discriminator of deeper collaboration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27233
Online reinforcement learning is widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with reward signals, yet training can be unstable under noisy or misspecified rewards. We identify a failure mode we call directional inconsistency: within a batch, a small set of high-reward rollouts induces representation-space preference directions that sharply disagree with the batch majority, resulting in high-variance and destabilizing updates. We propose geoalign, a lightweight plug-in for rollout curation in iterative policy optimization. Geoalign (i) forms within-prompt preference pairs, (ii) learns an online projector on per-rollout hidden states to concentrate reward-ordered displacement directions, and (iii) detects directionally inconsistent rollouts via their angular deviation from a batch consensus prototype and rectifies them with within-prompt stable alternatives. Geoalign is forward-pass only and adds negligible overhead. Across dialogue alignment with a learned reward model and mathematical reasoning with binary verified rewards, Geoalign improves final performance and reduces training oscillation, outperforming PF-PPO, PAR, PODS, and Seed-GRPO. These results suggest latent directional consensus as an effective reliability signal for online LLM RL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26917
Personalized language-model assistants are often evaluated through a memory lens: can a model recall preferences users have explicitly stated in dialogue? More comprehensive personalization demands a harder capability -- inferring what users care about from the multimodal traces they naturally leave behind. We introduce SocialPersona, a benchmark for evaluating whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can recover revealed preferences from longitudinal social-media timelines and use them in dialogue. Built from longitudinal timelines of 171 everyday, non-promotional social-media users, SocialPersona contains text, images, timestamps, and 2,597 human-verified preference tags across seven interest domains, separating stable interests from recent interests. It supports two tasks: constructing structured user profiles from multimodal context and generating responses aligned with inferred profiles. Experiments with proprietary and open-weight MLLMs show that models can identify broad interest domains, yet their performance drops on fine-grained and recent interests and degrades further when inferred profiles must be used to personalize dialogue. Together with evidence that text and images provide complementary preference signals, these results indicate that robust cross-modal, long-horizon user modeling remains a key challenge, and that SocialPersona can help measure and advance progress toward assistants that infer and act on revealed preferences.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26654
Evaluating AI agents that use external tools requires realistic test scenarios that capture how practitioners compose tools and iterate across conversation turns. Constructing such scenarios by hand demands deep domain expertise, does not scale across tool ecosystems, and produces static benchmarks that cannot track evolving APIs. We observe that tool specifications -- function names, natural-language descriptions, and typed parameter schemas -- already encode sufficient semantic information to synthesize realistic evaluation scenarios without manual curation or live tool execution. Agent Seer builds off this latent information: from a single Model Context Protocol (MCP) specification, with no examples, no live tool access, and no domain-specific tuning. This pipeline enriches raw schemas, generates graded scenarios with synthetic tool outputs, and expands them into mock-data-grounded multi-turn dialogues that exhibit strong tool-calling correctness and conversational coherence. Evaluation quality is measured by applying this pipeline on seven MCP specifications spanning diverse domains and tool-suite sizes and measuring the tool-calling correctness and conversational coherence. The pipeline achieves strong quality across all domains, with complete tool coverage on small and medium specifications. Two findings emerge within this analysis: parameter schema complexity is the strongest correlate of quality variation -- tool-suite size plays a smaller, orthogonal role -- and argument value accuracy is the dominant failure mode among imperfect scenarios, a sub-dimension invisible to coarse-grained name-match metrics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26133
Automatic speech and language technologies are still heavily biased toward high-resource languages, limiting their applicability to dialectal and low-resource settings such as Algerian Dialect. This language presents additional challenges including lack of standardized orthography, frequent codeswitching with French, and scarcity of annotated speech resources. This paper addresses the problem of building a complete speech-to-speech conversational system for Algerian Dialect. We propose a modular pipeline integrating automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding, retrieval-augmented generation, and text-to-speech synthesis within a unified architecture. This work is the continuation of our previous work on Algerian dialectal conversational systems Bechiri and Lanasri [2026], extending it from text-based dialogue modeling to full speech-based interaction. We constructed dedicated datasets for ASR, NLU, and TTS in the telecom domain and fine-tune pretrained models for each component. The ASR system is built on Whisper-based adaptation, while the NLU module combines transformer-based embeddings with a task-oriented dialogue framework. A neural TTS system is trained on a newly collected dialectal corpus to enable spoken response generation. Experimental results show strong performance across all components, including low word error rate for ASR, high intent classification and entity recognition scores for NLU, and stable speech synthesis quality. The proposed system provides a reproducible baseline for end-to-end conversational modeling in Algerian Dialect.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26003