# COOPER: Coordinating Specialized Agents towards a Complex Dialogue Goal

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.11792 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11792/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [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)
- [A Network-based End-to-End Trainable Task-oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04562/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Improving Language Model Negotiation with Self-Play and In-Context Learning from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10142/) (2023)
- [Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13626/) (2023)
- [MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13560/) (2022)
- [AugESC: Dialogue Augmentation with Large Language Models for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13047/) (2022)
- [Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04242/) (2022)
- [Is ChatGPT Equipped with Emotional Dialogue Capabilities?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09582/) (2023)
- [Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10172/) (2023)
- [Improving Dialog Systems for Negotiation with Personality Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09954/) (2020)
- [Controllable Mixed-Initiative Dialogue Generation through Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04147/) (2023)
- [TransESC: Smoothing Emotional Support Conversation via Turn-Level State Transition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03296/) (2023)
- [A Dynamic Strategy Coach for Effective Negotiation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13426/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Refine and Imitate: Reducing Repetition and Inconsistency in Persuasion Dialogues via Reinforcement Learning and Human Demonstration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15375/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Trainable Non-Collaborative Dialog System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10742/) (2019)
- ["My nose is running.""Are you also coughing?": Building A Medical Diagnosis Agent with Interpretable Inquiry Logics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13953/) (2022)
- [Towards a Progression-Aware Autonomous Dialogue Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03692/) (2022)
- [PoKE: Prior Knowledge Enhanced Emotional Support Conversation with Latent Variable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12640/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Simulating Classroom Education with LLM-Empowered Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19226/) (2024)
- [Affective Computing in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey from the NLP Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04638/) (2024)
- [OptimAI: Optimization from Natural Language Using LLM-Powered AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16918/) (2025)
- [MedAide: Information Fusion and Anatomy of Medical Intents via LLM-based Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12532/) (2024)
- [Simulation-Free Hierarchical Latent Policy Planning for Proactive Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14584/) (2024)
- [Modelling Political Coalition Negotiations Using LLM-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11712/) (2024)
- [Instruct Once, Chat Consistently in Multiple Rounds: An Efficient Tuning Framework for Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06967/) (2024)
- [IntentionESC: An Intention-Centered Framework for Enhancing Emotional Support in Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05947/) (2025)
- [Integrative Decoding: Improve Factuality via Implicit Self-consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01556/) (2024)
- [Beyond Pipelines: A Survey of the Paradigm Shift toward Model-Native Agentic AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16720/) (2025)
- [AutoPal: Autonomous Adaptation to Users for Personal AI Companionship](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13960/) (2024)
- [Stephanie: Step-by-Step Dialogues for Mimicking Human Interactions in Social Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04093/) (2024)
- [360^circREA: Towards A Reusable Experience Accumulation with 360deg Assessment for Multi-Agent System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05569/) (2024)
- [When LLMs Team Up: The Emergence of Collaborative Affective Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01698/) (2025)
- [MADS: Multi-Agent Dialogue Simulation for Diverse Persuasion Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05124/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Persuasive Dialogue Agents by Synthesizing Cross-Disciplinary Communication Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22696/) (2026)
- [CoSToM:Causal-oriented Steering for Intrinsic Theory-of-Mind Alignment in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10031/) (2026)
- [Proactive Dialogue Policy Optimization via Cognitive-State Transition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34948/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in exploring dialogues with more complex goals, such as negotiation, persuasion, and emotional support, which go beyond traditional service-focused dialogue systems. Apart from the requirement for much more sophisticated strategic reasoning and communication skills, a significant challenge of these tasks lies in the difficulty of objectively measuring the achievement of their goals in a quantifiable way, making it difficult for existing research to directly optimize the dialogue procedure towards them. In our work, we emphasize the multifaceted nature of complex dialogue goals and argue that it is more feasible to accomplish them by comprehensively considering and jointly promoting their different aspects. To this end, we propose a novel dialogue framework, Cooper, which coordinates multiple specialized agents, each dedicated to a specific dialogue goal aspect separately, to approach the complex objective. Through this divide-and-conquer manner, we make complex dialogue goals more approachable and elicit greater intelligence via the collaboration of individual agents. Experiments on persuasion and emotional support dialogues demonstrate the superiority of our method over a set of competitive baselines.