mlsanityData to 13 Oct 2026

Towards Human-centered Proactive Conversational Agents

arXiv 2404.12670 ↗First posted 19 Apr 2024cs.IR cs.CL cs.HCcited by 48

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Abstract (arXiv)

Recent research on proactive conversational agents (PCAs) mainly focuses on improving the system's capabilities in anticipating and planning action sequences to accomplish tasks and achieve goals before users articulate their requests. This perspectives paper highlights the importance of moving towards building human-centered PCAs that emphasize human needs and expectations, and that considers ethical and social implications of these agents, rather than solely focusing on technological capabilities. The distinction between a proactive and a reactive system lies in the proactive system's initiative-taking nature. Without thoughtful design, proactive systems risk being perceived as intrusive by human users. We address the issue by establishing a new taxonomy concerning three key dimensions of human-centered PCAs, namely Intelligence, Adaptivity, and Civility. We discuss potential research opportunities and challenges based on this new taxonomy upon the five stages of PCA system construction. This perspectives paper lays a foundation for the emerging area of conversational information retrieval research and paves the way towards advancing human-centered proactive conversational systems.

Key facts. Cited by 48 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Builds on 51 of its 90 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 19 Apr 2024.

Builds on

51 of 90 references.

References · 51

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  2. 2023Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedbackcited by 800
  3. 2021Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systemscited by 296
  4. 2020Reducing conversational agents' overconfidence through linguistic calibrationcited by 209
  5. 2019Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Goodcited by 208
  6. 2023Improving Language Model Negotiation with Self-Play and In-Context Learning from AI Feedbackcited by 205
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  10. 2019Queens are Powerful too: Mitigating Gender Bias in Dialogue Generationcited by 152
  11. 2019Asking Clarifying Questions in Open-Domain Information-Seeking Conversationscited by 139
  12. 2023MathDial: A Dialogue Tutoring Dataset with Rich Pedagogical Properties Grounded in Math Reasoning Problemscited by 129
38 more
  1. 2023Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaborationcited by 115
  2. 2022ProsocialDialog: A Prosocial Backbone for Conversational Agentscited by 109
  3. 2020Towards Conversational Recommendation over Multi-Type Dialogscited by 107
  4. 2020Estimation-Action-Reflection: Towards Deep Interaction Between Conversational and Recommender Systemscited by 98
  5. 2023Plug-and-Play Policy Planner for Large Language Model Powered Dialogue Agentscited by 76
  6. 2023Understanding the Role of Human Intuition on Reliance in Human-AI Decision-Making with Explanationscited by 73
  7. 2019Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversationcited by 66
  8. 2023A Survey on Proactive Dialogue Systems: Problems, Methods, and Prospectscited by 66
  9. 2021Building and Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogue Corpora with Clarifying Questionscited by 63
  10. 2023Cue-CoT: Chain-of-thought Prompting for Responding to In-depth Dialogue Questions with LLMscited by 62
  11. 2023Building Emotional Support Chatbots in the Era of LLMscited by 62
  12. 2023Prompt-Based Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Policy Planningcited by 61
  13. 2019How should my chatbot interact? A survey on human-chatbot interaction designcited by 56
  14. 2021Unified Conversational Recommendation Policy Learning via Graph-based Reinforcement Learningcited by 51
  15. 2022PACIFIC: Towards Proactive Conversational Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data in Financecited by 45
  16. 2023From Instructions to Intrinsic Human Values -- A Survey of Alignment Goals for Big Modelscited by 45
  17. 2022Conversational Information Seekingcited by 37
  18. 2022A Unified Multi-task Learning Framework for Multi-goal Conversational Recommender Systemscited by 32
  19. 2023Controllable Mixed-Initiative Dialogue Generation through Promptingcited by 32
  20. 2023Unlocking the Potential of User Feedback: Leveraging Large Language Model as User Simulator to Enhance Dialogue Systemcited by 32
  21. 2021Speaker and Time-aware Joint Contextual Learning for Dialogue-act Classification in Counselling Conversationscited by 31
  22. 2022Let's Negotiate! A Survey of Negotiation Dialogue Systemscited by 31
  23. 2022INSCIT: Information-Seeking Conversations with Mixed-Initiative Interactionscited by 27
  24. 2023Aligning Language Models with Human Preferences via a Bayesian Approachcited by 27
  25. 2021DialoGraph: Incorporating Interpretable Strategy-Graph Networks into Negotiation Dialoguescited by 25
  26. 2022Evaluating Mixed-initiative Conversational Search Systems via User Simulationcited by 25
  27. 2023Align on the Fly: Adapting Chatbot Behavior to Established Normscited by 23
  28. 2024Strength Lies in Differences! Improving Strategy Planning for Non-collaborative Dialogues via Diversified User Simulationcited by 21
  29. 2021Multiple Choice Questions based Multi-Interest Policy Learning for Conversational Recommendationcited by 20
  30. 2022User Satisfaction Estimation with Sequential Dialogue Act Modeling in Goal-oriented Conversational Systemscited by 20
  31. 2019End-to-End Trainable Non-Collaborative Dialog Systemcited by 19
  32. 2021RESPER: Computationally Modelling Resisting Strategies in Persuasive Conversationscited by 18
  33. 2022Interacting with Non-Cooperative User: A New Paradigm for Proactive Dialogue Policycited by 17
  34. 2022KETOD: Knowledge-Enriched Task-Oriented Dialoguecited by 12
  35. 2022Comparison-based Conversational Recommender System with Relative Bandit Feedbackcited by 12
  36. 2020Machine Learning Explanations to Prevent Overtrust in Fake News Detectioncited by 11
  37. 2022Impacts of Personal Characteristics on User Trust in Conversational Recommender Systemscited by 8
  38. 2020Building Proactive Voice Assistants: When and How (not) to Interactcited by 7

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Cited by year (2026 to 13 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 6; 2025: 18; 2026: 24.

48 papers.

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  1. 2024SocialMind: LLM-based Proactive AR Social Assistive System with Human-like Perception for In-situ Live Interactionscited by 25
  2. 2025From Personas to Talks: Revisiting the Impact of Personas on LLM-Synthesized Emotional Support Conversationscited by 23
  3. 2024A Survey of Conversational Searchcited by 22
  4. 2024Depression Diagnosis Dialogue Simulation: Self-improving Psychiatrist with Tertiary Memorycited by 14
  5. 2025The Measurement Imbalance in Agentic AI Evaluation Undermines Industry Productivity Claimscited by 14
  6. 2025ProactiveVA: Proactive Visual Analytics with LLM-Based UI Agentcited by 14
  7. 2025Agent.xpu: Efficient Scheduling of Agentic LLM Workloads on Heterogeneous SoCcited by 11
  8. 2025Teaching Vision-Language Models to Ask: Resolving Ambiguity in Visual Questionscited by 11
  9. 2025LLAMAPIE: Proactive In-Ear Conversation Assistantscited by 8
  10. 2025Conversational Search: From Fundamentals to Frontiers in the LLM Eracited by 8
  11. 2024Beyond Persuasion: Towards Conversational Recommender System with Credible Explanationscited by 7
  12. 2024Script-Based Dialog Policy Planning for LLM-Powered Conversational Agents: A Basic Architecture for an "AI Therapist"cited by 7
36 more
  1. 2025Substance over Style: Evaluating Proactive Conversational Coaching Agentscited by 6
  2. 2025Towards Evaluating Proactive Risk Awareness of Multimodal Language Modelscited by 6
  3. 2025Agentic Services Computingcited by 6
  4. 2026SEAD: Self-Evolving Agent for Multi-Turn Service Dialoguecited by 6
  5. 2024Knowledge-Enhanced Conversational Recommendation via Transformer-based Sequential Modellingcited by 5
  6. 2025YETI (YET to Intervene) Proactive Interventions by Multimodal AI Agents in Augmented Reality Taskscited by 4
  7. 2025Self-Adaptive Cognitive Debiasing for Large Language Models in Decision-Makingcited by 4
  8. 2025Reinforced Strategy Optimization for Conversational Recommender Systems via Network-of-Expertscited by 4
  9. 2026Does My Chatbot Have an Agenda? Understanding Human and AI Agency in Human-Human-like Chatbot Interactioncited by 3
  10. 2026MHSafeEval: Role-Aware Interaction-Level Evaluation of Mental Health Safety in Large Language Modelscited by 3
  11. 2026ProActor: Timing-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Proactive Task Scheduling Agentscited by 3
  12. 2025PaRT: Enhancing Proactive Social Chatbots with Personalized Real-Time Retrievalcited by 2
  13. 2026PROPER Agents: Proactivity Driven Personalized Agents for Advancing Knowledge Gap Navigationcited by 2
  14. 2026Knowing Isn't Understanding: Re-grounding Generative Proactivity with Epistemic and Behavioral Insightcited by 2
  15. 2026Beyond Static Personas: Situational Personality Steering for Large Language Modelscited by 2
  16. 2026Do Proactive Agents Really Need an LLM to Decide When to Wake and What to Anchor?cited by 2
  17. 2026Proactive Service Agents: A Unified Decision Framework, Methods, and Evaluationcited by 2
  18. 2025CANDY: Benchmarking LLMs' Limitations and Assistive Potential in Chinese Misinformation Fact-Checkingcited by 1
  19. 2025A General Highly Accurate Online Planning Method Integrating Large Language Models into Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation for Dialogue Taskscited by 1
  20. 2026Steering LLMs via Scalable Interactive Oversightcited by 1
  21. 2026Enhancing Persuasive Dialogue Agents by Synthesizing Cross-Disciplinary Communication Strategiescited by 1
  22. 2026Reinforcing Real-world Service Agents: Balancing Utility and Cost in Task-oriented Dialoguecited by 1
  23. 2026Help Without Being Asked: A Deployed Proactive Agent System for On-Call Support with Continuous Self-Improvementcited by 1
  24. 2026Towards Proactive Information Probing: Customer Service Chatbots Harvesting Value from Conversationcited by 1
  25. 2026Position: Life-Logging Video Streams Make the Privacy-Utility Trade-off Inevitablecited by 1
  26. 2026Agents in the Large: Perception-Centered Architecture for Persistent Agentscited by 1
  27. 2025Planning with Diffusion Models for Target-Oriented Dialogue Systemscited by 0
  28. 2025Image-Seeking Intent Prediction for Cross-Device Product Searchcited by 0
  29. 2026YIELD: A Large-Scale Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Information Elicitation Agentscited by 0
  30. 2026UP-NRPA: User Portrait based Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation for Planning with Large Language Models in Goal-oriented Dialogue Systemscited by 0
  31. 2026Curiosity as Linguistic Intervention: Using LLM Tutoring Dialogues to Influence Exploratory Learning Behaviorcited by 0
  32. 2026From Sports to Safety: Benchmarking Proactive Risk Inference in MLLMscited by 0
  33. 2026Act2Intention: A Benchmark For Developing Active Mobile Agents Through Inferring User Intention from GUI Actionscited by 0
  34. 2026Clarify User Expertise: Towards Proactive Conversational Agents Tailoring Responses to User Proficiencycited by 0
  35. 2026ProMediConv: Benchmarking Proactive Conversational Agents in Legal Dispute Mediationcited by 0
  36. 2026Foundations of Proactive Agents: Principles, Technical Layers, and Proactivity-Gymcited by 0