mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Decoupling Strategy and Generation in Negotiation Dialogues

arXiv 1808.09637 ↗First posted 29 Aug 2018cs.CLcited by 156

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Cited by 37 in LLM agents and tool use, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

We consider negotiation settings in which two agents use natural language to bargain on goods. Agents need to decide on both high-level strategy (e.g., proposing 50) and the execution of that strategy (e.g., generating "The bike is brand new. Selling for just 50."). Recent work on negotiation trains neural models, but their end-to-end nature makes it hard to control their strategy, and reinforcement learning tends to lead to degenerate solutions. In this paper, we propose a modular approach based on coarse di- alogue acts (e.g., propose(price=50)) that decouples strategy and generation. We show that we can flexibly set the strategy using supervised learning, reinforcement learning, or domain-specific knowledge without degeneracy, while our retrieval-based generation can maintain context-awareness and produce diverse utterances. We test our approach on the recently proposed DEALORNODEAL game, and we also collect a richer dataset based on real items on Craigslist. Human evaluation shows that our systems achieve higher task success rate and more human-like negotiation behavior than previous approaches.

Key facts. Cited by 156 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2018.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 13; 2022: 13; 2023: 28; 2024: 34; 2025: 33; 2026: 35.

156 papers.

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  1. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
  2. 2025τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environmentcited by 558
  3. 2023SOTOPIA: Interactive Evaluation for Social Intelligence in Language Agentscited by 350
  4. 2023Reward Design with Language Modelscited by 257
  5. 2024MediQ: Question-Asking LLMs and a Benchmark for Reliable Interactive Clinical Reasoningcited by 145
  6. 2023Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaborationcited by 115
  7. 2024How Well Can LLMs Negotiate? NegotiationArena Platform and Analysiscited by 93
  8. 2023LMRL Gym: Benchmarks for Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning with Language Modelscited by 84
  9. 2023Plug-and-Play Policy Planner for Large Language Model Powered Dialogue Agentscited by 76
  10. 2021Action-Based Conversations Dataset: A Corpus for Building More In-Depth Task-Oriented Dialogue Systemscited by 73
  11. 2023A Survey on Proactive Dialogue Systems: Problems, Methods, and Prospectscited by 66
  12. 2023Goal Driven Discovery of Distributional Differences via Language Descriptionscited by 61
38 more
  1. 2021CaSiNo: A Corpus of Campsite Negotiation Dialogues for Automatic Negotiation Systemscited by 60
  2. 2023Prompt-Based Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Policy Planningcited by 60
  3. 2024Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? The Misleading Success of Simulating Social Interactions With LLMscited by 59
  4. 2024NegotiationToM: A Benchmark for Stress-testing Machine Theory of Mind on Negotiation Surroundingcited by 49
  5. 2024Towards Human-centered Proactive Conversational Agentscited by 48
  6. 2024Measuring Bargaining Abilities of LLMs: A Benchmark and A Buyer-Enhancement Methodcited by 44
  7. 2023Welfare Diplomacy: Benchmarking Language Model Cooperationcited by 43
  8. 2024Evaluating Language Model Agency through Negotiationscited by 43
  9. 2025SiriuS: Self-improving Multi-agent Systems via Bootstrapped Reasoningcited by 41
  10. 2023Zero-Shot Goal-Directed Dialogue via RL on Imagined Conversationscited by 38
  11. 2022CHAI: A CHatbot AI for Task-Oriented Dialogue with Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 33
  12. 2024Planning Like Human: A Dual-process Framework for Dialogue Planningcited by 32
  13. 2022Let's Negotiate! A Survey of Negotiation Dialogue Systemscited by 31
  14. 2023Decision-Oriented Dialogue for Human-AI Collaborationcited by 29
  15. 2024Are LLMs Effective Negotiators? Systematic Evaluation of the Multifaceted Capabilities of LLMs in Negotiation Dialoguescited by 29
  16. 2021DeliData: A dataset for deliberation in multi-party problem solvingcited by 26
  17. 2021DialoGraph: Incorporating Interpretable Strategy-Graph Networks into Negotiation Dialoguescited by 25
  18. 2024A Survey on Recent Advances in Conversational Data Generationcited by 23
  19. 2022Context-Aware Language Modeling for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systemscited by 22
  20. 2023DialogStudio: Towards Richest and Most Diverse Unified Dataset Collection for Conversational AIcited by 21
  21. 2024Strength Lies in Differences! Improving Strategy Planning for Non-collaborative Dialogues via Diversified User Simulationcited by 21
  22. 2023ReadMe++: Benchmarking Multilingual Language Models for Multi-Domain Readability Assessmentcited by 19
  23. 2021RESPER: Computationally Modelling Resisting Strategies in Persuasive Conversationscited by 18
  24. 2022Interacting with Non-Cooperative User: A New Paradigm for Proactive Dialogue Policycited by 17
  25. 2025SOTOPIA-Omega: Dynamic Strategy Injection Learning and Social Instruction Following Evaluation for Social Agentscited by 16
  26. 2021Reference-Centric Models for Grounded Collaborative Dialoguecited by 15
  27. 2023Investigating Agency of LLMs in Human-AI Collaboration Taskscited by 15
  28. 2023Be Selfish, But Wisely: Investigating the Impact of Agent Personality in Mixed-Motive Human-Agent Interactionscited by 15
  29. 2025PRINCIPLES: Synthetic Strategy Memory for Proactive Dialogue Agentscited by 15
  30. 2025Magentic Marketplace: An Open-Source Environment for Studying Agentic Marketscited by 15
  31. 2022Social Influence Dialogue Systems: A Survey of Datasets and Models For Social Influence Taskscited by 14
  32. 2024Efficacy of Language Model Self-Play in Non-Zero-Sum Gamescited by 14
  33. 2024Zero-shot Persuasive Chatbots with LLM-Generated Strategies and Information Retrievalcited by 14
  34. 2024Simulation-Free Hierarchical Latent Policy Planning for Proactive Dialoguescited by 14
  35. 2026A Survey on LLM-based Conversational User Simulationcited by 14
  36. 2022Opponent Modeling in Negotiation Dialogues by Related Data Adaptationcited by 13
  37. 2024ACE: A LLM-based Negotiation Coaching Systemcited by 13
  38. 2023Towards the Scalable Evaluation of Cooperativeness in Language Modelscited by 12

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