Dialog
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SpeechEQ: Benchmarking Emotional Intelligence Quotient in Socially Aware Voice Conversational Models
2026-06-24 16:03:38Liang-Yuan Wu, Zih-Ching Chen, Tongshuang Wu, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Hua ShenAbstract
As multimodal conversational systems increasingly engage in spoken interaction, their ability to navigate paralinguistic social cues has become a critical bottleneck for natural human-AI communication. However, existing evaluations of machine emotional intelligence assess reasoning exclusively through isolated text or passive acoustic perception, overlooking the complex cross-modal reasoning required for active, multi-turn dialogue. We introduce \textsc{SpeechEQ}, a comprehensive framework designed to evaluate the sociolinguistic reasoning of Speech-Language Models (SLMs). The framework includes a validated dataset of 2,265 dialogues across 15 Emotional Quotient (EQ) subscales grounded in EQ-i 2.0 theory, along with a multi-turn evaluation protocol measured by our proposed Spoken EQ (SEQ) score inspired by human EQ assessments. Experiments show limitations in how both existing Speech Emotion Recognition and end-to-end Speech-Language Models understand and apply paralinguistic cues through speech. While end-to-end architectures outperform cascaded systems, \textsc{SpeechEQ} reveals that current multimodal models remain bottlenecked by a text-reliant ``modality shortcut,'' an alignment-induced ``safety trap,'' and ``contextual amnesia,'' highlighting the barriers to truly emotionally aware AI. Our benchmark can be accessed at this https URL and demo page at this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25990
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STEB: A Speech-to-Speech Translation Expressiveness Benchmark for Evaluating Beyond Translation Fidelity
2026-06-24 08:06:41Sitong Cheng, Weizhen Bian, Songjun Cao, Jin Li, Bei Liu, Chunyang Jiang, Yike Zhang, Weihao Wu, Yiming Li, Chi-Min Chan, Long Ma, Wei XueAbstract
Speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) should preserve not only lexical meaning, but also expressive attributes: emotion, scenario style (e.g., news reporting vs. dramatic dialogue), and nonverbal vocalizations (NVs). Moreover, collecting cross-lingual target speech that is both translation-faithful and expressively aligned with the source is difficult at scale, making reference-based evaluation impractical. We introduce STEB (Speech-to-Speech Translation Expressiveness Benchmark), a 32.6-hour Chinese--English benchmark that evaluates both standard dimensions (translation fidelity, speaker similarity, duration alignment) and expressiveness dimensions (emotion, scenario style, NV preservation). For expressiveness evaluation, STEB uses a caption-then-summarize framework that converts speech into structured expressive attributes and compares source and hypothesis attributes with an LLM judge. Human validation shows statistically significant correlations with listener judgments across all expressive dimensions. We evaluate six S2ST systems covering cascaded systems, end-to-end models, and speech large language models. Many systems, especially cascaded ones, achieve strong translation fidelity, but they still struggle with emotion preservation (best: 3.82/5) and NV preservation (best: 2.31/5). These results reveal a gap between semantic transfer and expressive transfer, identifying expressiveness preservation as an open challenge for S2ST. Audio samples are available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25529
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Reclaim Evaluation: A Lossy Memory Is Worse Than an Empty One
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A language model's memory can be worse than having no memory at all. Give a model a memory that kept a wrong conclusion but dropped the work behind it, and it emits that stale value as a confident answer; give the same model an empty memory and it abstains. Across seven models this direction never reverses, a clean kill condition that none breaks. We call this brittle memory: behavioral, not the near-immediate information bound beneath it; only its magnitude is disposition- and task-dependent, not its direction. We measure it with reclaim evaluation: compress a drifted interaction at a fixed budget, then test whether a correction recovers the known answer, scored against ground truth with no judge. Correctability is bottlenecked by whether the answer-determining source survives, not by capability. A one-line source-first policy (keep the recomputable source, drop the re-derivable conclusion) restores correctability at equal budget where that source is compact and identifiable; a length-matched control rules out added text as the cause. The hand-built oracle reaches 1.00; a one-prompt deployable version reclaims 0.49-0.88. The stake compounds: chained through a memory loop, a single dropped-source error corrupts a growing span of downstream steps and stays uncorrectable, while source-first holds to a bounded budget horizon. The wall and fix replicate across three deployed memory systems and on real dialogue (MultiWOZ), and past the budget where the source no longer fits, the fix fails silently unless the note records completeness. This is a controlled study of a mechanism, not a benchmark: judge-free exact scoring, matched-budget controls, and validators built to come out false. We release the harness, conditions, and validators.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25449
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Evaluating Japanese Dialect Robustness Across Speech and Text-based Large Language Models
2026-06-24 05:57:45Tomoya Mizumoto, Yusuke Fujita, Hao Shi, Lianbo Liu, Atsushi Kojima, Yui SudoAbstract
Dialogue systems based on large language models (LLMs) have advanced significantly in recent years. However, dialectal variation remains a major challenge, particularly for systems that process spoken input. LLM-based speech language models (SLMs), which integrate LLMs with speech processing components, show promise for spoken language tasks, yet their ability to comprehend dialects has not been sufficiently studied. Moreover, it remains unclear how the dialectal understanding of the base LLM affects SLM performance. This study investigates the dialectal robustness of both LLMs and SLMs using Japanese dialects as a test case. We define robustness as the ratio of performance on dialectal versus standard inputs, enabling fair comparisons. Our experiments show that SLM robustness correlates with that of their text-based counterparts. Furthermore, training with dialectal data and fine-tuning the speech encoder each improves robustness in SLMs.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25436
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Evaluating Language Models in Realistic Conversational Contexts
2026-06-24 01:33:01Ilija Subasic, Andrew Rabinovich, Zhao ChenAbstract
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed to serve open-ended, multi-turn interactions, evaluating conversational quality at human scale has become a central challenge. Existing evaluation frameworks built for summarization, translation, or short-form QA tasks fall short of adequately measuring the consistency of human-scale dialogue, especially when derivation and validation of these metrics themselves often rely on synthetic rather than human sources. We fill the gap by introducing UPHELD (UPwork Human-Scale Evaluated Long Dialogues), a large, reference-full benchmark for evaluating human-scale conversational ability beyond factual correctness. UPHELD consists of hundreds of complete human-to-human dialogues authored by professional script writers, with realistic turn densities and 36,000+ per-turn human annotations across 30,000+ expert-generated dialogue turns. Using UPHELD, we systematically evaluate classical automatic metrics and reference-free LLM-as-a-judge approaches, and find them unreliable when correlated with expert human judgment. Building off this analysis, we use UPHELD to develop a Mixture-of-Judges framework that combines multiple evaluative signals and improves correlation with human assessments by approximately 30%. Overall, UPHELD provides a robust, human-grounded foundation for evaluating human-scale conversational intelligence that fills a crucial gap in the pre-existing LLM dataset landscape.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26131
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Are We There Yet? Exploring the Capabilities of MLLMs in Assistive AI Applications
2026-06-23 18:44:59Shayon Dasgupta, Avijit Dasgupta, C. V. JawaharAbstract
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have redefined visual understanding by combining vision encoders with large-scale language models. This unified architecture enables strong performance on tasks like image captioning, visual question answering, and multimodal dialogue, often in zero- and few-shot settings. Their general-purpose capabilities and flexible interfaces make MLLMs a promising foundation for real-world vision-language applications. Assistive AI aims to help users interact with their environments through natural language. These scenarios demand robust visual recognition, contextual reasoning, and multilingual comprehension-capabilities that MLLMs are believed to offer. However, their effectiveness in assistive settings remains to be fully understood. In this work, we explore whether MLLMs can support Assistive AI by evaluating state-of-the-art models on real-world tasks: recognizing everyday objects like currency, answering questions based on scene text, and reading visually presented content across multiple languages. To this end, we developed a system, NetraLink, using a head-mounted GoPro to capture real-world egocentric data, and collected a benchmark covering these assistive scenarios. Our findings provide a comprehensive diagnostic of current MLLMs, highlighting their strengths and limitations in enabling assistive technologies grounded in visual perception and language interaction.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25084
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Accuracy and Satisfaction in Multi-Turn LLM Dialogues for NFR Assessment
2026-06-23 17:15:40Ali Pourghasemi Fatideh, Wilder Baldwin, Maria Dhakal, Collin McMillan, Sepideh GhanavatiAbstract
LLM-based dialogue assistants have become mainstream tools for software developers, yet current evaluation benchmarks focus exclusively on functional correctness. This leaves a critical gap in assessing the quality and accuracy of these conversations when handling Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), which are inherently vague, context-dependent, and involve many parts of a program. Evaluating how well these systems support collaborative reasoning about NFRs requires methods that go beyond single-turn accuracy to capture both the correctness of the system's outputs and the quality of the multi-turn interaction. In this paper, we investigate the accuracy and quality of multi-turn conversations between developers and an LLM-based agent in the domain of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulatory compliance. We hired 49 programmers to interact with GitHub Copilot to assess 148 HIPAA-derived NFRs against the iTrust codebase, a system designed to comply with HIPAA regulations, across three dimensions: requirement satisfaction level, reasoning, and code localization. We find that developers tend to agree with LLM assessments, but accuracy against expert ground truth is low. We model user satisfaction and find that longer system responses and more information-providing turns negatively affect user satisfaction, whereas proactive interactions positively affect it. Our findings provide insights for designing LLM-based dialogue systems that support NFR assessment.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24834
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Agentic Collaborative Cognition for Zero-Shot 3D Understanding
2026-06-23 14:44:04Wenxin Wang, Bo Zhang, Feng Chen, Zixuan Wang, Wen Li, Changsheng Li, Yinjie LeiAbstract
Recent advancements have explored agentic zero-shot 3D understanding by reformulating it as video keyframe understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing methods face an intrinsic bottleneck due to the finite observation perspectives inherent in videos and the implicit perception of 3D scenes. In this paper, we propose a collaborative multi-agent framework that assigns a Planning Agent to handle high-level viewpoint planning and supplement novel perspectives, and a Perception Agent to explicitly summarize the 3D scene into a structured holistic cognitive map. Specifically, Planning Agent first analyzes this cognitive map to determine query-relevant viewpoints and supplements missing critical perspectives to ensure comprehensive observation. Subsequently, Perception Agent documents object-level attributes from these views by assigning consistent instance identifiers across viewpoints, thereby integrating fragmented observations into the holistic cognitive map. In parallel, it provides feedback to filter out mismatched candidate objects and guide subsequent viewpoint planning. Through this closed-loop iterative process, two agents collaboratively figure out candidates until Perception Agent determines that sufficient information has been captured to complete the task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on 6 benchmarks, with improvements of 11.1\% Acc@0.5 on ScanRefer, 14.6 BLEU-1 on 3D-assisted dialog, and 2.1 EM on SQA3D.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24649
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Visualizing 'We the People': Bridging the Perception Gap through Pluralistic Data Storytelling
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Traditional visual data storytelling relies on binary graphics that depict two simplified groups in conflict. This can increase political polarization by oversimplifying intra-group disagreements and erasing ambiguity and shared ideas or values. This can inadvertently foster "us versus them" thinking. Intentional, pluralistic design choices for AI-enabled digital platforms can produce visualizations that emphasize nuance, opinion distribution, and intergroup commonalities. To demonstrate this potential, we examine deliberative technologies that map high-dimensional opinion spaces and highlight areas of both consensus and dissensus. The paper highlights the We the People deliberation conducted by Jigsaw and the Napolitan Institute in September 2025, which engaged over 2,400 Americans across all 435 congressional districts in an AI-supported, asynchronous dialogue regarding freedom and equality. By utilizing AI to synthesize long-form, text-based participant inputs into interactive "opinion landscapes," the initiative provided an alternative format for pluralistic data storytelling that humanized diverse viewpoints and revealed hidden areas of substantial broad consensus. The paper concludes that shifting from divisive, contrast-heavy visual frameworks to distribution-focused, interactive models represents a highly scalable, low-cost intervention capable of bridging perceptual gaps and cultivating a more resilient, collaborative democratic culture.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24635
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Dialogue to Discovery: Attribute-Aware Preference Elicitation for Conversational Product Search Assistants
2026-06-23 06:30:31Sarthak Harne, Natwar Modani, Debabrata Mahapatra, Shubham AgarwalAbstract
Conversational product search assistants offer a more expressive, natural, and interactive alternative to traditional keyword-based product search. With limited screen space, showing only a few items increases the need for precise preference elicitation, which can prolong conversations, leading to user frustration and session abandonment. Conversely, rushing to recommend items without a clear understanding of preferences risks poor matches and a degraded user experience. We present Dialogue to Discovery (D2D), an attribute-oriented preference elicitation framework that dynamically exploits the structure of product attributes to efficiently steer conversations toward the user's desired item. D2D adaptively prioritizes the most informative queries and strategically times product recommendations, reducing premature or off-target suggestions that harm engagement. To evaluate D2D, we curate three datasets from the Amazon Reviews corpus. In simulated conversations modelled using a multi-factor utilitarian patience framework, D2D achieves a 22.2-29.9% improvement in target-finding accuracy, 6.6-16.1% reduction in abandonment, and 27.5% shorter average conversations over the state-of-the-art baselines. A complementary user study further confirms significant gains in both user satisfaction and perceived efficiency.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24194
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DramaDirector: Geometry-Guided Short Drama Generation
2026-06-23 03:50:28Hengji Zhou, Sijie Liu, Jianrun Chen, Xingchen Zou, Lianghao Xia, Liqiang NieAbstract
Short dramas, with their rapid shot rhythms, dialogue-driven focus shifts, and demanding cinematographic grounding, pose challenges that prompt-level or text-only video generation pipelines struggle to meet. We study plot-to-short-drama generation, where a global plot and local context are transformed into visually grounded multi-shot videos. We propose DramaDirector, a geometry-grounded framework that lets the planner borrow cinematographic geometry from a gallery of real short-drama shots indexed by depth and pose. DramaDirector decouples each shot into static visual and dynamic narrative conditions, trains the planner with schema-constrained SFT and GRPO under a learned text-visual alignment reward, and retrieves depth-pose references to guide first-frame generation and image-to-video synthesis. We also introduce DramaBoard, a benchmark built from 35 live-action dramas, 2.8K episodes, and 81K shots, with structured storyboards and multi-dimensional evaluation protocols. Experiments show that DramaDirector improves over representative multi-agent and video generation baselines on faithfulness, consistency, and controllability. Our code is released at: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24107
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FIRSTPASS: A Multi-Domain, Multi-Round Peer Review Dataset Grounded in Real Editorial Outcomes
2026-06-23 02:44:28Prabhjot Singh, Somnath Luitel, Manmeet Singh, Josh DurkeeAbstract
Scientific peer review datasets have trained AI systems exclusively on Computer Science and Machine Learning venues, producing models that critique ablation studies yet have never seen a biology reviewer demand contamination controls or a chemist question Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectral assignments. We introduce FIRSTPASS, the first large-scale peer review dataset built on complete multi-round editorial dialogues from a multidisciplinary high-impact journal. Curated from Nature Communications mandatory transparent peer review (instituted November 2022), FIRSTPASS comprises 3,668 records spanning five scientific domains (biology, chemistry, neuroscience, physics, and earth science), capturing the full iterative structure of scientific validation: initial referee reports, author point-by-point responses, and updated reviewer assessments. Each record carries an outcome label derived directly from editorial decisions (STANDARD for two-round review; EXTENDED for three or more rounds), providing ground truth absent in all prior corpora. An automated audit confirms 100% content integrity. Expert reviews average 2,155 words, substantially denser than conference venue reviews. All data, parsing pipelines, and evaluation scripts are released to enable reproducible benchmarking of AI scientific judgment across disciplines.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26129
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From Task-Guided Conversational Graphs to Goal-Oriented Dialogue Runtimes
2026-06-22 18:00:03Mariano Garralda-BarrioAbstract
Graph and multi-agent orchestration frameworks make production large language model (LLM) workflows practical, but they do not by themselves solve conversational continuity when users maintain several interdependent objectives. This conceptual systems paper focuses on the high-complexity end of that design space, where goals can be suspended, resumed, revised, and invalidated by actions in other goals. We introduce the Goal-Oriented Dialogue Runtime (GODR), a framework-neutral design pattern that treats goals, task frames, lifecycle state, invalidation rules, and resumption contracts as first-class runtime objects while delegating bounded execution to graph runtimes, agents, tools, or application programming interfaces (APIs). GODR is not proposed as a replacement for workflow graphs in simple guided processes; it is intended for complex, multi-domain, interruptible conversations where objective continuity cannot be recovered reliably from agent identity, chat history, or execution-graph position alone. The paper formalizes the problem, proposes runtime objects and architecture-selection criteria, and frames evaluation as an agenda for future empirical validation rather than as a measured performance claim.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23797
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CallBench: A Benchmark for Dual-Goal Coordination in Phone Call Assistants
2026-06-22 09:02:49Xuzhao Geng, Haozhao Wang, Xuelian Li, Zhenyu Yang, Haonan Lu, Rui Zhang, Ruixuan LiAbstract
Target-oriented dialogue systems have demonstrated strong capabilities in completing user goals through interactive conversations. However, existing studies are primarily designed for single, explicit goal completion, while phone call assistants face a proxy setting that requires coordinating the device owner's explicit preset goal with the caller's implicit and dynamic goal. We introduce \textsc{CallBench}, a Chinese benchmark for evaluating dual-goal coordination in phone call assistants. \textsc{CallBench} contains 50,000 complete multi-turn phone call dialogues across six scenarios: takeout, delivery, taxi, work, life, and harassment. It covers regular presets, emergent presets, and no-preset cases, and includes diverse relations between owner-side and caller-side goals, such as alignment, complementarity, irrelevance, and conflict. We further design a preset-aware turn-level evaluation protocol covering semantic understanding, context use, active guidance, response quality, preset compliance, dialogue rhythm, and safety. Experiments on representative dialogue methods show that existing approaches still struggle with this task, highlighting the need for phone call assistants that can make reliable turn-level decisions between two independent goals under proxy constraints.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22635
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Operationalizing Narrative Entropy : A Two-Scene Registered Pilot Report and Pre-Validation Protocol
2026-06-20 06:50:04Levent BulutAbstract
Narrative Entropy ($S_n$) is a proposed quantitative descriptor within the Bulut Doctrine, intended to capture the rate at which a narrative text imposes processing load on a reader. To date the construct has been defined theoretically but not operationalized against real texts. This report documents the first such operationalization (the v2.0 pilot): two narrative scenes -- the opening restaurant scene of Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and the opening interior-monologue block of Carver's Cathedral -- were coded manually by a single rater and scored with the candidate formula $S_n = I_f \times C_b \times t$. The result was a divergence from the author's naive intuition: the single-voice monologue ($S_n = 30.0$) scored higher than the nine-character dialogue scene ($S_n = 18.8$). We treat this not as a result to be explained away but as the central finding, and we refuse post-hoc adjustment of the formula. Three competing interpretations are presented -- formula incompleteness, genuine high-load prose, and measurement error -- and the design that would discriminate among them is pre-registered. This v2.1 revision adds: (i) explicit acknowledgement that the divergence is consistent with the pre-existing architectural framework which privileges inferential reconstruction over surface declaration, and that what was called "contrary to expectation" in v2.0 reflected the author's anticipatory intuition rather than the methodology's own predictions; (ii) a pre-registered construct validity test for $I_f$, motivated by the observation that $I_f$ values were nearly equal across the two scenes (1.71 vs 1.58) despite the headline $S_n$ divergence. The document functions simultaneously as a pilot report ($n=2$) and as a pre-registration of the next-stage protocol. It does not claim that $S_n$ has been validated.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18109
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CATCH-ME if you RAG: a dataset of Contextually Annotated multi-Turn Counterspeech against Hate and Misinformation Exchanges
2026-06-18 15:32:14Helena Bonaldi, Genoveffa Martone, Marco GueriniAbstract
Online hate speech and misinformation frequently overlap, yet NLP research has mainly treated them in isolation. While LLMs represent a scalable solution for assisting humans in the generation of counterspeech for both threats, zero-shot models frequently generate repetitive and vague responses, underscoring the need for high-quality examples to steer model generation. However, existing counterspeech datasets against the overlap of hate and misinformation are scarce and limited to single-turn English dialogues, while real-life interactions span across multiple turns and languages. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first large-scale, expert-curated, multilingual dataset of dialogues tackling the intersection of hate and misinformation. To ensure factual grounding, the dialogues are also anchored in verified external knowledge (i.e., fact-checking articles and NGO reports) and include document- and chunk-level span annotations, making it directly applicable for RAG systems. Covering five languages and targeting hate directed at seven marginalized groups, this novel resource enables the training and evaluation of more persuasive, factually grounded counterspeech models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20369
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EvalConvoLearn: An Open-Source Framework for Evaluating Grounded Learner Simulations in Tutoring Conversations
2026-06-18 12:22:01Baptiste Moreau-PernetAbstract
Conversational learner simulations are valuable tools for testing learning theories, evaluating instructional materials and automated tutors, or powering teachable agents. Recently, large language models (LLM) have enabled richer, more naturalistic interactions with simulated learners; however, no open framework exists for evaluating whether such simulations faithfully reproduce real learner behavior. We introduce EvalConvoLearn, an open-source framework that assesses learner simulations along two axes: learning behavior (skill-conditioned mastery outcomes) and conversational quality (talk moves, error type distributions, question rate, turn length). EvalConvoLearn measures how closely a simulated learner approximates answer distributions observed in data by grounding metrics in authentic tutoring conversation datasets, and anchoring generated tutor responses in existing tutor utterances. The framework is demonstrated on a dataset of tutoring dialogues, including results for two LLM-based learner simulations, and the published GitHub code.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07497
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Advancing DialNav through Automatic Embodied Dialog Augmentation
2026-06-18 08:45:25Leekyeung Han, Sangwon Jung, Hyunji Min, Jinseong Jeong, Minyoung Kim, Paul Hongsuck SeoAbstract
For embodied agents capable of physical interaction, the capability to create and understand dialog is crucial to ensure both safety and effectiveness. While DialNav~\cite{han2025dialnav} provides a framework for holistic evaluation of the dialog--execution loop in photorealistic indoor navigation, its performance remains limited by a critical scarcity of training data (2K episodes). To address this, we propose an automatic generation pipeline, and construct the \textbf{RAINbow} dataset, a large-scale training dataset with 238K episodes for DialNav. Our pipeline converts existing VLN datasets into multi-turn dialog and creates cost-efficient and high-quality dataset. Then, we introduce two additional complementary advances to unlock the data's full potential: (1) Dual-Strategy Training, a navigation training scheme to align the navigation training with the dynamic dialog-navigation loop, and (2) a localization model that leverages VLN knowledge. By combining these complementary solutions, our model substantially outperforms the baseline in success rate on both \textbf{Val Seen} (58.24, \textbf{+89\%}) and \textbf{Val Unseen} (29.05, \textbf{+100\%}) splits, establishing a new state of the art.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19948
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NEST: Narrative Event Structures in Time for Long Video Understanding
2026-06-18 02:05:14Ali Asgarov, Kaushik Narasimhan, Najibul Haque Sarker, Hani Alomari, Chia-Wei Tang, Anushka Sivakumar, Zaber Ibn Abdul Hakim, Shaurya Mallampati, Chris ThomasAbstract
Recent progress in vision-language models has enabled the processing of increasingly long video sequences, but the ability to handle extended token streams does not translate to understanding of narrative structure in long videos. Existing long video benchmarks focus on needle-in-a-haystack retrieval rather than evaluating how low-level actions form events, how events interact across time, and how narratives progress, for example, whether a model can connect an early setback, such as a job loss to a later relationship breakup, despite long gaps, intervening scenes, or flashbacks that reframe what occurred. We introduce NEST (Narrative Event Structures in Time for Long Video Understanding), a dataset of 1005 full-length movies (avg. 98 minutes), each annotated with 102 multimodal narrative events grounded in visual content, dialogue, and audio. NEST captures multimodal narrative events with structured annotations grounded in visual content, dialogue, and audio, and links them through relations that reflect narrative structure, including temporal ordering, hierarchical composition, and long-range dependencies. We introduce baselines for event trigger detection (ETD), event localization (EL), event argument extraction (EAE), and event relation extraction (ERE). The benchmark is highly challenging for grounded event discovery, with ETD below 8%, EL under 6%, and EAE below 11%. In contrast, ERE is more tractable once events are given, reaching 35.45% F1 zero-shot and 44.42% F1 after fine-tuning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19706
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Creating Multilingual Mental Health Dialogue Datasets: Limits of Persona-Based Localization via Nationality and Language
Abstract
AI and large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising tools to address global mental health challenges. Despite the global nature of these challenges, there remains a critical shortage of high-quality datasets for training and evaluating such systems. To mitigate this gap, researchers increasingly generate synthetic clinical personas to simulate user data and test digital mental health support systems. However, most validated personas rely on English-centric contexts. This paper investigates whether similar persona-based methods can be used to generate multilingual mental health datasets. We modified nationality and language parameters in personas to generate clinical dialogues in Mandarin, Bengali, and Hindi. We then examined how different LLMs perform when evaluating the depression severity of these generated multilingual datasets against the baseline in English. Our findings indicate that just adding nationality and language parameters in personas might not be adequate, as it can introduce clinical inconsistency across languages. LLM judge models often exhibit inaccuracies in assessing depression severity in non-English texts, with performance varying across different models. This exposes the systemic limitations of applying English-centric personas to multilingual contexts. Ultimately, our work highlights the urgent need for culturally responsive data generation to ensure equitable mental health systems globally.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19640
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