# Stephanie: Step-by-Step Dialogues for Mimicking Human Interactions in Social Conversations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04093 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04093/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09977/) (2020)
- [MetaICL: Learning to Learn In Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15943/) (2021)
- [Challenges in Building Intelligent Open-domain Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05709/) (2019)
- [Emotion Recognition in Conversation: Research Challenges, Datasets, and Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02947/) (2019)
- [MIME: MIMicking Emotions for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01454/) (2020)
- [PsyQA: A Chinese Dataset for Generating Long Counseling Text for Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01702/) (2021)
- [MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13560/) (2022)
- [PLACES: Prompting Language Models for Social Conversation Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03269/) (2023)
- [MojiTalk: Generating Emotional Responses at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04090/) (2017)
- [Cue-CoT: Chain-of-thought Prompting for Responding to In-depth Dialogue Questions with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11792/) (2023)
- [Building Emotional Support Chatbots in the Era of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11584/) (2023)
- [Prompted LLMs as Chatbot Modules for Long Open-domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04533/) (2023)
- [Control Globally, Understand Locally: A Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12749/) (2022)
- [Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models for Empathetic Response Generation: Empirical Investigations and Improvements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05140/) (2023)
- [Bootstrapping LLM-based Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents via Self-Talk](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05033/) (2024)
- [LLM as A Robotic Brain: Unifying Egocentric Memory and Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09349/) (2023)
- [CINS: Comprehensive Instruction for Few-shot Learning in Task-oriented Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04645/) (2021)
- [COOPER: Coordinating Specialized Agents towards a Complex Dialogue Goal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11792/) (2023)
- [Unraveling ChatGPT: A Critical Analysis of AI-Generated Goal-Oriented Dialogues and Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14556/) (2023)
- [Contextual Dynamic Prompting for Response Generation in Task-oriented Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13268/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Privacy-Preserving Video Anomaly Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14565/) (2024)
- [Dictionary Insertion Prompting for Multilingual Reasoning on Multilingual Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01141/) (2024)
- [Toxic Subword Pruning for Dialogue Response Generation on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04155/) (2024)
- [Cross-channel Perception Learning for H&E-to-IHC Virtual Staining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07559/) (2025)
- [Stephanie2: Thinking, Waiting, and Making Decisions Like Humans in Step-by-Step AI Social Chat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05657/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the rapidly evolving field of natural language processing, dialogue systems primarily employ a single-step dialogue paradigm. Although this paradigm is efficient, it lacks the depth and fluidity of human interactions and does not appear natural. We introduce a novel Step-by-Step Dialogue Paradigm (Stephanie), designed to mimic the ongoing dynamic nature of human conversations. By employing a dual learning strategy and a further-split post-editing method, we generated and utilized a high-quality step-by-step dialogue dataset to fine-tune existing large language models, enabling them to perform step-by-step dialogues. We thoroughly present Stephanie. Tailored automatic and human evaluations are conducted to assess its effectiveness compared to the traditional single-step dialogue paradigm. We will release code, Stephanie datasets, and Stephanie LLMs to facilitate the future of chatbot eras.