mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

DialogXpert: Driving Intelligent and Emotion-Aware Conversations through Online Value-Based Reinforcement Learning with LLM Priors

arXiv 2505.17795 ↗First posted 23 May 2025cs.CL cs.AIcited by 4

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Abstract (arXiv)

Large-language-model (LLM) agents excel at reactive dialogue but struggle with proactive, goal-driven interactions due to myopic decoding and costly planning. We introduce DialogXpert, which leverages a frozen LLM to propose a small, high-quality set of candidate actions per turn and employs a compact Q-network over fixed BERT embeddings trained via temporal-difference learning to select optimal moves within this reduced space. By tracking the user's emotions, DialogXpert tailors each decision to advance the task while nurturing a genuine, empathetic connection. Across negotiation, emotional support, and tutoring benchmarks, DialogXpert drives conversations to under 3 turns with success rates exceeding 94% and, with a larger LLM prior, pushes success above 97% while markedly improving negotiation outcomes. This framework delivers real-time, strategic, and emotionally intelligent dialogue planning at scale. Code available at https://github.com/declare-lab/dialogxpert/

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 44 of its 66 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 May 2025.

Builds on

44 of 66 references.

References · 44

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
  2. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
  3. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 14,132
  4. 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,372
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  6. 2013Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 3,274
  7. 2023ChatGPT Outperforms Crowd-Workers for Text-Annotation Taskscited by 870
  8. 2023Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Modelcited by 861
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  11. 2021Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systemscited by 299
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32 more
  1. 2019Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Goodcited by 209
  2. 2023Improving Language Model Negotiation with Self-Play and In-Context Learning from AI Feedbackcited by 207
  3. 2023AnnoLLM: Making Large Language Models to Be Better Crowdsourced Annotatorscited by 172
  4. 2018Decoupling Strategy and Generation in Negotiation Dialoguescited by 162
  5. 2022RL with KL penalties is better viewed as Bayesian inferencecited by 135
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  7. 2023Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaborationcited by 116
  8. 2017The Consciousness Priorcited by 107
  9. 2023ProAgent: Building Proactive Cooperative Agents with Large Language Modelscited by 98
  10. 2024Probabilistic Inference in Language Models via Twisted Sequential Monte Carlocited by 90
  11. 2023Plug-and-Play Policy Planner for Large Language Model Powered Dialogue Agentscited by 77
  12. 2022NusaX: Multilingual Parallel Sentiment Dataset for 10 Indonesian Local Languagescited by 68
  13. 2023Building Emotional Support Chatbots in the Era of LLMscited by 62
  14. 2023Prompt-Based Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Policy Planningcited by 61
  15. 2022Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planningcited by 60
  16. 2022PACIFIC: Towards Proactive Conversational Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data in Financecited by 45
  17. 2023Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversationscited by 41
  18. 2024Planning Like Human: A Dual-process Framework for Dialogue Planningcited by 32
  19. 2023Ask an Expert: Leveraging Language Models to Improve Strategic Reasoning in Goal-Oriented Dialogue Modelscited by 31
  20. 2022A Survey on Recent Advances and Challenges in Reinforcement Learning Methods for Task-Oriented Dialogue Policy Learningcited by 30
  21. 2024Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Large Language Model Priorscited by 30
  22. 2019A Dynamic Strategy Coach for Effective Negotiationcited by 26
  23. 2021DialoGraph: Incorporating Interpretable Strategy-Graph Networks into Negotiation Dialoguescited by 25
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  26. 2020Learning Goal-oriented Dialogue Policy with Opposite Agent Awarenesscited by 16
  27. 2024Simulation-Free Hierarchical Latent Policy Planning for Proactive Dialoguescited by 14
  28. 2023Strategize Before Teaching: A Conversational Tutoring System with Pedagogy Self-Distillationcited by 11
  29. 2023Enhancing Large Language Model Induced Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems Through Look-Forward Motivated Goalscited by 8
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  32. 2020Generating Emotionally Aligned Responses in Dialogues using Affect Control Theorycited by 4

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 3.

4 papers.

  1. 2025Towards Open-Ended Emotional Support Conversations in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Future-Oriented Rewardscited by 5
  2. 2026EmoLLM: Appraisal-Grounded Cognitive-Emotional Co-Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 0
  3. 2026UP-NRPA: User Portrait based Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation for Planning with Large Language Models in Goal-oriented Dialogue Systemscited by 0
  4. 2026Proactive Dialogue Policy Optimization via Cognitive-State Transitioncited by 0

Similar, not cited

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  1. 2025SAGE: Steering Dialog Generation with Future-Aware State-Action Augmentation
  2. 2024Towards Zero-Shot, Controllable Dialog Planning with LLMs
  3. 2025SpeakRL: Synergizing Reasoning, Speaking, and Acting in Language Models with Reinforcement Learning
  4. 2024Improving Dialogue Agents by Decomposing One Global Explicit Annotation with Local Implicit Multimodal Feedback
  5. 2025Dream to Chat: Model-based Reinforcement Learning on Dialogues with User Belief Modeling
  6. 2020Human-centric Dialog Training via Offline Reinforcement Learning
  7. 2026User-Aware Active Knowledge Acquisition for Emotional Support Dialogue
  8. 2026Dual-Loop Self-Evolution via Verifiable Emotion Feedback for Multi-Turn Empathetic Dialogue