mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaboration

arXiv 2305.13626 ↗First posted 23 May 2023cs.CLcited by 115

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 23 in LLM agents and tool use, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Conversational systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, show exceptional proficiency in context understanding and response generation. However, despite their impressive capabilities, they still possess limitations, such as providing randomly-guessed answers to ambiguous queries or failing to refuse users' requests, both of which are considered aspects of a conversational agent's proactivity. This raises the question of whether LLM-based conversational systems are equipped to handle proactive dialogue problems. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of LLM-based conversational systems, specifically focusing on three aspects of proactive dialogue systems: clarification, target-guided, and non-collaborative dialogues. To trigger the proactivity of LLMs, we propose the Proactive Chain-of-Thought prompting scheme, which augments LLMs with the goal planning capability over descriptive reasoning chains. Empirical findings are discussed to promote future studies on LLM-based proactive dialogue systems.

Key facts. Cited by 115 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 57 of its 76 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 May 2023.

Builds on

57 of 76 references.

References · 57

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
  2. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 13,958
  3. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
  4. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
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  10. 2022LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applicationscited by 1,218
  11. 2022Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agentscited by 1,029
  12. 2023A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivitycited by 888
38 more
  1. 2019DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generationcited by 842
  2. 2018CoQA: A Conversational Question Answering Challengecited by 674
  3. 2020Recipes for building an open-domain chatbotcited by 593
  4. 2020Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbotcited by 467
  5. 2021TAT-QA: A Question Answering Benchmark on a Hybrid of Tabular and Textual Content in Financecited by 402
  6. 2023ChatIE: Zero-Shot Information Extraction via Chatting with ChatGPTcited by 250
  7. 2019Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Goodcited by 207
  8. 2023Improving Language Model Negotiation with Self-Play and In-Context Learning from AI Feedbackcited by 202
  9. 2021How Many Data Points is a Prompt Worth?cited by 197
  10. 2020TOD-BERT: Pre-trained Natural Language Understanding for Task-Oriented Dialoguecited by 185
  11. 2019The Second Conversational Intelligence Challenge (ConvAI2)cited by 178
  12. 2018Decoupling Strategy and Generation in Negotiation Dialoguescited by 156
  13. 2022Language Models that Seek for Knowledge: Modular Search & Generation for Dialogue and Prompt Completioncited by 102
  14. 2020Towards Topic-Guided Conversational Recommender Systemcited by 94
  15. 2021Dialogue State Tracking with a Language Model using Schema-Driven Promptingcited by 94
  16. 2019Proactive Human-Machine Conversation with Explicit Conversation Goalscited by 87
  17. 2020Recent Advances and Challenges in Task-oriented Dialog Systemcited by 78
  18. 2023PLACES: Prompting Language Models for Social Conversation Synthesiscited by 72
  19. 2019Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversationcited by 66
  20. 2023A Survey on Proactive Dialogue Systems: Problems, Methods, and Prospectscited by 66
  21. 2021Building and Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogue Corpora with Clarifying Questionscited by 63
  22. 2023Prompted LLMs as Chatbot Modules for Long Open-domain Conversationcited by 61
  23. 2020Language Generation with Multi-Hop Reasoning on Commonsense Knowledge Graphcited by 57
  24. 2023Is ChatGPT Equipped with Emotional Dialogue Capabilities?cited by 54
  25. 2021Unified Conversational Recommendation Policy Learning via Graph-based Reinforcement Learningcited by 51
  26. 2022PACIFIC: Towards Proactive Conversational Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data in Financecited by 45
  27. 2023SGP-TOD: Building Task Bots Effortlessly via Schema-Guided LLM Promptingcited by 39
  28. 2022Conversational Information Seekingcited by 36
  29. 2022A Unified Multi-task Learning Framework for Multi-goal Conversational Recommender Systemscited by 32
  30. 2023Controllable Mixed-Initiative Dialogue Generation through Promptingcited by 32
  31. 2022Let's Negotiate! A Survey of Negotiation Dialogue Systemscited by 31
  32. 2021CINS: Comprehensive Instruction for Few-shot Learning in Task-oriented Dialog Systemscited by 30
  33. 2021OTTers: One-turn Topic Transitions for Open-Domain Dialoguecited by 29
  34. 2021DialoGraph: Incorporating Interpretable Strategy-Graph Networks into Negotiation Dialoguescited by 25
  35. 2022Multi-Stage Prompting for Knowledgeable Dialogue Generationcited by 22
  36. 2020Keyword-Guided Neural Conversational Modelcited by 21
  37. 2019Augmenting Non-Collaborative Dialog Systems with Explicit Semantic and Strategic Dialog Historycited by 20
  38. 2022User Satisfaction Estimation with Sequential Dialogue Act Modeling in Goal-oriented Conversational Systemscited by 20

50 most cited of 57 All 57 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 6; 2024: 28; 2025: 40; 2026: 41.

115 papers.

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  1. 2025CollabLLM: From Passive Responders to Active Collaboratorscited by 117
  2. 2023Plug-and-Play Policy Planner for Large Language Model Powered Dialogue Agentscited by 76
  3. 2024Modeling Future Conversation Turns to Teach LLMs to Ask Clarifying Questionscited by 70
  4. 2023Building Emotional Support Chatbots in the Era of LLMscited by 62
  5. 2024Ask-before-Plan: Proactive Language Agents for Real-World Planningcited by 59
  6. 2024Learning to Clarify: Multi-turn Conversations with Action-Based Contrastive Self-Trainingcited by 53
  7. 2024Towards Human-centered Proactive Conversational Agentscited by 48
  8. 2024CLAMBER: A Benchmark of Identifying and Clarifying Ambiguous Information Needs in Large Language Modelscited by 48
  9. 2024Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 36
  10. 2025Structured Uncertainty guided Clarification for LLM Agentscited by 34
  11. 2024Asking the Right Question at the Right Time: Human and Model Uncertainty Guidance to Ask Clarification Questionscited by 32
  12. 2024Planning Like Human: A Dual-process Framework for Dialogue Planningcited by 32
38 more
  1. 2024Don't Just Say "I don't know"! Self-aligning Large Language Models for Responding to Unknown Questions with Explanationscited by 30
  2. 2024Affective Computing in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey from the NLP Perspectivecited by 24
  3. 2024A Survey on Recent Advances in Conversational Data Generationcited by 23
  4. 2023WatME: Towards Lossless Watermarking Through Lexical Redundancycited by 22
  5. 2024Strength Lies in Differences! Improving Strategy Planning for Non-collaborative Dialogues via Diversified User Simulationcited by 21
  6. 2023COOPER: Coordinating Specialized Agents towards a Complex Dialogue Goalcited by 18
  7. 2024STYLE: Improving Domain Transferability of Asking Clarification Questions in Large Language Model Powered Conversational Agentscited by 17
  8. 2024PRACTIQ: A Practical Conversational Text-to-SQL dataset with Ambiguous and Unanswerable Queriescited by 17
  9. 2025PRINCIPLES: Synthetic Strategy Memory for Proactive Dialogue Agentscited by 15
  10. 2024Simulation-Free Hierarchical Latent Policy Planning for Proactive Dialoguescited by 14
  11. 2025Consistent Client Simulation for Motivational Interviewing-based Counselingcited by 14
  12. 2024Depression Diagnosis Dialogue Simulation: Self-improving Psychiatrist with Tertiary Memorycited by 13
  13. 2025ClarifyMT-Bench: Benchmarking and Improving Multi-Turn Clarification for Conversational Large Language Modelscited by 12
  14. 2023Think Before You Speak: Cultivating Communication Skills of Large Language Models via Inner Monologuecited by 11
  15. 2024Instruct Once, Chat Consistently in Multiple Rounds: An Efficient Tuning Framework for Dialoguecited by 11
  16. 2024The Imperative of Conversation Analysis in the Era of LLMs: A Survey of Tasks, Techniques, and Trendscited by 11
  17. 2025Teaching Vision-Language Models to Ask: Resolving Ambiguity in Visual Questionscited by 11
  18. 2026Value of Information: A Framework for Human-Agent Communicationcited by 10
  19. 2024Examining the Influence of Political Bias on Large Language Model Performance in Stance Classificationcited by 9
  20. 2025ProactiveEval: A Unified Evaluation Framework for Proactive Dialogue Agentscited by 9
  21. 2024Dynamic Contexts for Generating Suggestion Questions in RAG Based Conversational Systemscited by 7
  22. 2024AGENT-CQ: Automatic Generation and Evaluation of Clarifying Questions for Conversational Search with LLMscited by 7
  23. 2025Simulating Before Planning: Constructing Intrinsic User World Model for User-Tailored Dialogue Policy Planningcited by 7
  24. 2023Large Language Models as Source Planner for Personalized Knowledge-grounded Dialoguecited by 6
  25. 2025Disambiguation in Conversational Question Answering in the Era of LLMs and Agents: A Surveycited by 6
  26. 2025Towards Evaluating Proactive Risk Awareness of Multimodal Language Modelscited by 6
  27. 2025What Makes a Good Natural Language Prompt?cited by 6
  28. 2026On Information Self-Locking in Reinforcement Learning for Active Reasoning of LLM agentscited by 6
  29. 2026PM-Bench: Evaluating Prospective Memory in LLM Agentscited by 6
  30. 2024Interactive Dialogue Agents via Reinforcement Learning on Hindsight Regenerationscited by 5
  31. 2025Referential ambiguity and clarification requests: comparing human and LLM behaviourcited by 5
  32. 2025CaRT: Teaching LLM Agents to Know When They Know Enoughcited by 5
  33. 2024Taking Action Towards Graceful Interaction: The Effects of Performing Actions on Modelling Policies for Instruction Clarification Requestscited by 4
  34. 2024Navigating the Unknown: A Chat-Based Collaborative Interface for Personalized Exploratory Taskscited by 4
  35. 2025How to Enable Effective Cooperation Between Humans and NLP Models: A Survey of Principles, Formalizations, and Beyondcited by 4
  36. 2025Zero-Shot and Efficient Clarification Need Prediction in Conversational Searchcited by 4
  37. 2025ASTRA: A Negotiation Agent with Adaptive and Strategic Reasoning via Tool-integrated Action for Dynamic Offer Optimizationcited by 4
  38. 2025Query Understanding in LLM-based Conversational Information Seekingcited by 4

50 most cited of 115 All 115 (JSON)

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  2. 2023A New Dialogue Response Generation Agent for Large Language Models by Asking Questions to Detect User's Intentions
  3. 2025A Desideratum for Conversational Agents: Capabilities, Challenges, and Future Directions
  4. 2025Dialogic Pedagogy for Large Language Models: Aligning Conversational AI with Proven Theories of Learning
  5. 2024Large Language Models as User-Agents for Evaluating Task-Oriented-Dialogue Systems
  6. 2024Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents
  7. 2025Detect, Explain, Escalate: Sustainable Dialogue Breakdown Management for LLM Agents
  8. 2025Evaluating LLM-based Agents for Multi-Turn Conversations: A Survey