mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

A Survey on Proactive Dialogue Systems: Problems, Methods, and Prospects

arXiv 2305.02750 ↗First posted 4 May 2023cs.CL cs.AIcited by 66

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Abstract (arXiv)

Proactive dialogue systems, related to a wide range of real-world conversational applications, equip the conversational agent with the capability of leading the conversation direction towards achieving pre-defined targets or fulfilling certain goals from the system side. It is empowered by advanced techniques to progress to more complicated tasks that require strategical and motivational interactions. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the prominent problems and advanced designs for conversational agent's proactivity in different types of dialogues. Furthermore, we discuss challenges that meet the real-world application needs but require a greater research focus in the future. We hope that this first survey of proactive dialogue systems can provide the community with a quick access and an overall picture to this practical problem, and stimulate more progresses on conversational AI to the next level.

Key facts. Cited by 66 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 44 of its 58 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 May 2023.

Builds on

44 of 58 references.

References · 44

  1. 2018Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?cited by 820
  2. 2020A Simple Language Model for Task-Oriented Dialoguecited by 331
  3. 2020Social Chemistry 101: Learning to Reason about Social and Moral Normscited by 253
  4. 2019Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Goodcited by 207
  5. 2019Build it Break it Fix it for Dialogue Safety: Robustness from Adversarial Human Attackcited by 176
  6. 2018Towards Deep Conversational Recommendationscited by 174
  7. 2018Decoupling Strategy and Generation in Negotiation Dialoguescited by 156
  8. 2019Challenges in Building Intelligent Open-domain Dialog Systemscited by 147
  9. 2019Asking Clarifying Questions in Open-Domain Information-Seeking Conversationscited by 136
  10. 2022ProsocialDialog: A Prosocial Backbone for Conversational Agentscited by 109
  11. 2020Towards Conversational Recommendation over Multi-Type Dialogscited by 107
  12. 2022The Moral Integrity Corpus: A Benchmark for Ethical Dialogue Systemscited by 92
32 more
  1. 2019Proactive Human-Machine Conversation with Explicit Conversation Goalscited by 87
  2. 2019Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversationcited by 66
  3. 2021Building and Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogue Corpora with Clarifying Questionscited by 63
  4. 2021Just Say No: Analyzing the Stance of Neural Dialogue Generation in Offensive Contextscited by 56
  5. 2021Unified Conversational Recommendation Policy Learning via Graph-based Reinforcement Learningcited by 51
  6. 2020Adding Chit-Chat to Enhance Task-Oriented Dialoguescited by 48
  7. 2022PACIFIC: Towards Proactive Conversational Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data in Financecited by 45
  8. 2020Improving Dialog Systems for Negotiation with Personality Modelingcited by 37
  9. 2022A Unified Multi-task Learning Framework for Multi-goal Conversational Recommender Systemscited by 32
  10. 2021Fusing task-oriented and open-domain dialogues in conversational agentscited by 28
  11. 2019Alternating Recurrent Dialog Model with Large-scale Pre-trained Language Modelscited by 25
  12. 2021DialoGraph: Incorporating Interpretable Strategy-Graph Networks into Negotiation Dialoguescited by 25
  13. 2022Evaluating Mixed-initiative Conversational Search Systems via User Simulationcited by 24
  14. 2021TIAGE: A Benchmark for Topic-Shift Aware Dialog Modelingcited by 22
  15. 2020Keyword-Guided Neural Conversational Modelcited by 21
  16. 2019Augmenting Non-Collaborative Dialog Systems with Explicit Semantic and Strategic Dialog Historycited by 20
  17. 2020Refine and Imitate: Reducing Repetition and Inconsistency in Persuasion Dialogues via Reinforcement Learning and Human Demonstrationcited by 20
  18. 2021Multiple Choice Questions based Multi-Interest Policy Learning for Conversational Recommendationcited by 20
  19. 2019End-to-End Trainable Non-Collaborative Dialog Systemcited by 19
  20. 2021RESPER: Computationally Modelling Resisting Strategies in Persuasive Conversationscited by 18
  21. 2022Interacting with Non-Cooperative User: A New Paradigm for Proactive Dialogue Policycited by 17
  22. 2022SalesBot: Transitioning from Chit-Chat to Task-Oriented Dialoguescited by 16
  23. 2020Dynamic Knowledge Routing Network For Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversationcited by 15
  24. 2021UniDS: A Unified Dialogue System for Chit-Chat and Task-oriented Dialoguescited by 12
  25. 2022Where to Go for the Holidays: Towards Mixed-Type Dialogs for Clarification of User Goalscited by 12
  26. 2022Seamlessly Integrating Factual Information and Social Content with Persuasive Dialoguecited by 11
  27. 2022KETOD: Knowledge-Enriched Task-Oriented Dialoguecited by 11
  28. 2022You Don't Know My Favorite Color: Preventing Dialogue Representations from Revealing Speakers' Private Personascited by 11
  29. 2022Target-Guided Dialogue Response Generation Using Commonsense and Data Augmentationcited by 8
  30. 2022Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation Planningcited by 8
  31. 2022OPERA: Harmonizing Task-Oriented Dialogs and Information Seeking Experiencecited by 5
  32. 2016StalemateBreaker: A Proactive Content-Introducing Approach to Automatic Human-Computer Conversationcited by 2

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 7; 2024: 12; 2025: 22; 2026: 25.

66 papers.

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  1. 2023Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaborationcited by 115
  2. 2023Plug-and-Play Policy Planner for Large Language Model Powered Dialogue Agentscited by 76
  3. 2024Ask-before-Plan: Proactive Language Agents for Real-World Planningcited by 59
  4. 2024Towards Human-centered Proactive Conversational Agentscited by 48
  5. 2023Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversationscited by 41
  6. 2024Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 36
  7. 2024Proactive Conversational Agents with Inner Thoughtscited by 35
  8. 2024Don't Just Say "I don't know"! Self-aligning Large Language Models for Responding to Unknown Questions with Explanationscited by 30
  9. 2023Target-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems with Personalization: Problem Formulation and Dataset Curationcited by 23
  10. 2024Strength Lies in Differences! Improving Strategy Planning for Non-collaborative Dialogues via Diversified User Simulationcited by 21
  11. 2025PRINCIPLES: Synthetic Strategy Memory for Proactive Dialogue Agentscited by 15
  12. 2025ProactiveVA: Proactive Visual Analytics with LLM-Based UI Agentcited by 14
38 more
  1. 2025Interpersonal Memory Matters: A New Task for Proactive Dialogue Utilizing Conversational Historycited by 10
  2. 2023Evaluating Task-oriented Dialogue Systems: A Systematic Review of Measures, Constructs and their Operationalisationscited by 9
  3. 2024Injecting Salesperson's Dialogue Strategies in Large Language Models with Chain-of-Thought Reasoningcited by 9
  4. 2025ProactiveEval: A Unified Evaluation Framework for Proactive Dialogue Agentscited by 9
  5. 2025LLAMAPIE: Proactive In-Ear Conversation Assistantscited by 8
  6. 2024Unveiling the Secrets of Engaging Conversations: Factors that Keep Users Hooked on Role-Playing Dialog Agentscited by 7
  7. 2024Script-Based Dialog Policy Planning for LLM-Powered Conversational Agents: A Basic Architecture for an "AI Therapist"cited by 7
  8. 2023One Pass Streaming Algorithm for Super Long Token Attention Approximation in Sublinear Spacecited by 6
  9. 2024Target-constrained Bidirectional Planning for Generation of Target-oriented Proactive Dialoguecited by 6
  10. 2025Towards Personalized Conversational Sales Agents: Contextual User Profiling for Strategic Actioncited by 6
  11. 2025Towards Evaluating Proactive Risk Awareness of Multimodal Language Modelscited by 6
  12. 2025Building Egocentric Procedural AI Assistant: Methods, Benchmarks, and Challengescited by 5
  13. 2026ProactiveMobile: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Boosting Proactive Intelligence on Mobile Devicescited by 5
  14. 2024The Future of Cognitive Strategy-enhanced Persuasive Dialogue Agents: New Perspectives and Trendscited by 4
  15. 2024Navigating the Unknown: A Chat-Based Collaborative Interface for Personalized Exploratory Taskscited by 4
  16. 2025How to Enable Effective Cooperation Between Humans and NLP Models: A Survey of Principles, Formalizations, and Beyondcited by 4
  17. 2025FishBargain: An LLM-Empowered Bargaining Agent for Online Fleamarket Platform Sellerscited by 4
  18. 2025Overhearing LLM Agents: A Survey, Taxonomy, and Roadmapcited by 3
  19. 2025Grounded in Reality: Learning and Deploying Proactive LLM from Offline Logscited by 3
  20. 2026Anticipate and Learn: Unleashing Idle-Time Compute in Proactive Agentscited by 3
  21. 2025PaRT: Enhancing Proactive Social Chatbots with Personalized Real-Time Retrievalcited by 2
  22. 2025Enhancing User-Oriented Proactivity in Open-Domain Dialogues with Critic Guidancecited by 2
  23. 2026PROPER Agents: Proactivity Driven Personalized Agents for Advancing Knowledge Gap Navigationcited by 2
  24. 2026METRO: Towards Strategy Induction from Expert Dialogue Transcripts for Non-collaborative Dialoguescited by 2
  25. 2026Vinci2: Providing Proactive Assistance in Continuous Egocentric Videoscited by 2
  26. 2026Proactive Service Agents: A Unified Decision Framework, Methods, and Evaluationcited by 2
  27. 2023Salespeople vs SalesBot: Exploring the Role of Educational Value in Conversational Recommender Systemscited by 1
  28. 2025A Data Synthesis Method Driven by Large Language Models for Proactive Mining of Implicit User Intentions in Tourismcited by 1
  29. 2025Mixed-Initiative Dialog for Human-Robot Collaborative Manipulationcited by 1
  30. 2025DiscussLLM: Teaching Large Language Models When to Speakcited by 1
  31. 2025How2: How to learn from procedural How-to questionscited by 1
  32. 2026Enhancing Conversational Agents via Task-Oriented Adversarial Memory Adaptationcited by 1
  33. 2026Towards Proactive Information Probing: Customer Service Chatbots Harvesting Value from Conversationcited by 1
  34. 2026Beyond "I Don't Know": Evaluating LLM Self-Awareness in Discriminating Data and Model Uncertaintycited by 1
  35. 2026An Empirical Study of Proactive Coding Assistants in Real-World Software Developmentcited by 1
  36. 2026Pseudo-Siamese Network for Planning in Target-Oriented Proactive Dialoguescited by 1
  37. 2026OnePred: Next-Query Prediction via Recursive Intent Memory in Multi-Turn Conversationscited by 1
  38. 2026MemCog: From Memory-as-Tool to Memory-as-Cognition in Conversational Agentscited by 1

50 most cited of 66 All 66 (JSON)