# Towards a Progression-Aware Autonomous Dialogue Agent

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.03692 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03692/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 23 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 May 2022.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09977/) (2020)
- [Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05855/) (2019)
- [TweetEval: Unified Benchmark and Comparative Evaluation for Tweet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12421/) (2020)
- [Beyond Goldfish Memory: Long-Term Open-Domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07567/) (2021)
- [Deal or No Deal? End-to-End Learning for Negotiation Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05125/) (2017)
- [Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Good](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06725/) (2019)
- [MultiWOZ 2.2 : A Dialogue Dataset with Additional Annotation Corrections and State Tracking Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12720/) (2020)
- [Decoupling Strategy and Generation in Negotiation Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09637/) (2018)
- [Accelerated Hierarchical Density Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07321/) (2017)
- [GL-GIN: Fast and Accurate Non-Autoregressive Model for Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01925/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text Generation and Planning for Strategic Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05846/) (2017)
- [The Gutenberg Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12752/) (2020)
- [Towards End-to-End Learning for Efficient Dialogue Agent by Modeling Looking-ahead Ability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05408/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [COOPER: Coordinating Specialized Agents towards a Complex Dialogue Goal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11792/) (2023)
- [The Imperative of Conversation Analysis in the Era of LLMs: A Survey of Tasks, Techniques, and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14195/) (2024)
- [ORCHID: A Chinese Debate Corpus for Target-Independent Stance Detection and Argumentative Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13667/) (2024)
- [PARL-MT: Learning to Call Functions in Multi-Turn Conversation with Progress Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23206/) (2025)
- [Towards a Neural Era in Dialogue Management for Collaboration: A Literature Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09021/) (2023)
- [Human Label Variation in Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22723/) (2026)
- [Beyond Direct Answering: Aligning Educational LLMs as Socratic Guides via Heuristic Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22996/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in large-scale language modeling and generation have enabled the creation of dialogue agents that exhibit human-like responses in a wide range of conversational scenarios spanning a diverse set of tasks, from general chit-chat to focused goal-oriented discourse. While these agents excel at generating high-quality responses that are relevant to prior context, they suffer from a lack of awareness of the overall direction in which the conversation is headed, and the likelihood of task success inherent therein. Thus, we propose a framework in which dialogue agents can evaluate the progression of a conversation toward or away from desired outcomes, and use this signal to inform planning for subsequent responses. Our framework is composed of three key elements: (1) the notion of a "global" dialogue state (GDS) space, (2) a task-specific progression function (PF) computed in terms of a conversation's trajectory through this space, and (3) a planning mechanism based on dialogue rollouts by which an agent may use progression signals to select its next response.