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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02750 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02750/

## Key facts

- Cited by 66 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [A Simple Language Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00796/) (2020)
- [Social Chemistry 101: Learning to Reason about Social and Moral Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00620/) (2020)
- [Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Good](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06725/) (2019)
- [Towards Deep Conversational Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07617/) (2018)
- [Build it Break it Fix it for Dialogue Safety: Robustness from Adversarial Human Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06083/) (2019)
- [Decoupling Strategy and Generation in Negotiation Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09637/) (2018)
- [Challenges in Building Intelligent Open-domain Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05709/) (2019)
- [Asking Clarifying Questions in Open-Domain Information-Seeking Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06554/) (2019)
- [ProsocialDialog: A Prosocial Backbone for Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12688/) (2022)
- [Towards Conversational Recommendation over Multi-Type Dialogs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03954/) (2020)
- [The Moral Integrity Corpus: A Benchmark for Ethical Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03021/) (2022)
- [Proactive Human-Machine Conversation with Explicit Conversation Goals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05572/) (2019)
- [Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11553/) (2019)
- [Building and Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogue Corpora with Clarifying Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05794/) (2021)
- [Just Say No: Analyzing the Stance of Neural Dialogue Generation in Offensive Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11830/) (2021)
- [Unified Conversational Recommendation Policy Learning via Graph-based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09710/) (2021)
- [Adding Chit-Chat to Enhance Task-Oriented Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12757/) (2020)
- [PACIFIC: Towards Proactive Conversational Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data in Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08817/) (2022)
- [Improving Dialog Systems for Negotiation with Personality Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09954/) (2020)
- [A Unified Multi-task Learning Framework for Multi-goal Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06923/) (2022)
- [Fusing task-oriented and open-domain dialogues in conversational agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04137/) (2021)
- [Alternating Recurrent Dialog Model with Large-scale Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03756/) (2019)
- [DialoGraph: Incorporating Interpretable Strategy-Graph Networks into Negotiation Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00920/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Mixed-initiative Conversational Search Systems via User Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08046/) (2022)
- [TIAGE: A Benchmark for Topic-Shift Aware Dialog Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04562/) (2021)
- [Keyword-Guided Neural Conversational Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08383/) (2020)
- [Augmenting Non-Collaborative Dialog Systems with Explicit Semantic and Strategic Dialog History](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13425/) (2019)
- [Refine and Imitate: Reducing Repetition and Inconsistency in Persuasion Dialogues via Reinforcement Learning and Human Demonstration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15375/) (2020)
- [Multiple Choice Questions based Multi-Interest Policy Learning for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11775/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13626/) (2023)
- [Plug-and-Play Policy Planner for Large Language Model Powered Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00262/) (2023)
- [Ask-before-Plan: Proactive Language Agents for Real-World Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12639/) (2024)
- [Towards Human-centered Proactive Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12670/) (2024)
- [Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10172/) (2023)
- [Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12472/) (2024)
- [Proactive Conversational Agents with Inner Thoughts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00383/) (2024)
- [Don't Just Say "I don't know"! Self-aligning Large Language Models for Responding to Unknown Questions with Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15062/) (2024)
- [Target-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems with Personalization: Problem Formulation and Dataset Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07397/) (2023)
- [Strength Lies in Differences! Improving Strategy Planning for Non-collaborative Dialogues via Diversified User Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06769/) (2024)
- [PRINCIPLES: Synthetic Strategy Memory for Proactive Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17459/) (2025)
- [ProactiveVA: Proactive Visual Analytics with LLM-Based UI Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18165/) (2025)
- [Interpersonal Memory Matters: A New Task for Proactive Dialogue Utilizing Conversational History](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05150/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Task-oriented Dialogue Systems: A Systematic Review of Measures, Constructs and their Operationalisations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13871/) (2023)
- [Injecting Salesperson's Dialogue Strategies in Large Language Models with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18564/) (2024)
- [ProactiveEval: A Unified Evaluation Framework for Proactive Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20973/) (2025)
- [LLAMAPIE: Proactive In-Ear Conversation Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04066/) (2025)
- [Unveiling the Secrets of Engaging Conversations: Factors that Keep Users Hooked on Role-Playing Dialog Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11522/) (2024)
- [Script-Based Dialog Policy Planning for LLM-Powered Conversational Agents: A Basic Architecture for an "AI Therapist"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15242/) (2024)
- [One Pass Streaming Algorithm for Super Long Token Attention Approximation in Sublinear Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14652/) (2023)
- [Target-constrained Bidirectional Planning for Generation of Target-oriented Proactive Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06063/) (2024)
- [Towards Personalized Conversational Sales Agents: Contextual User Profiling for Strategic Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08754/) (2025)
- [Towards Evaluating Proactive Risk Awareness of Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17455/) (2025)
- [ProactiveMobile: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Boosting Proactive Intelligence on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21858/) (2026)
- [FishBargain: An LLM-Empowered Bargaining Agent for Online Fleamarket Platform Sellers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10406/) (2025)
- [Building Egocentric Procedural AI Assistant: Methods, Benchmarks, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13261/) (2025)
- [Vinci2: Providing Proactive Assistance in Continuous Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11523/) (2026)
- [The Future of Cognitive Strategy-enhanced Persuasive Dialogue Agents: New Perspectives and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04631/) (2024)
- [Navigating the Unknown: A Chat-Based Collaborative Interface for Personalized Exploratory Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24032/) (2024)
- [How to Enable Effective Cooperation Between Humans and NLP Models: A Survey of Principles, Formalizations, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05714/) (2025)

## 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.