# From What to Respond to When to Respond: Timely Response Generation for Open-domain Dialogue Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14285 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14285/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 30 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Mixed Precision Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03740/) (2017)
- [Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17753/) (2024)
- [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)
- [SOTOPIA: Interactive Evaluation for Social Intelligence in Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11667/) (2023)
- [Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10158/) (2023)
- [Social Simulacra: Creating Populated Prototypes for Social Computing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04024/) (2022)
- [Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01144/) (2021)
- [Beyond Goldfish Memory: Long-Term Open-Domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07567/) (2021)
- [COMET-ATOMIC 2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05953/) (2020)
- [SODA: Million-scale Dialogue Distillation with Social Commonsense Contextualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10465/) (2022)
- ["Going on a vacation" takes longer than "Going for a walk": A Study of Temporal Commonsense Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03065/) (2019)
- [Long Time No See! Open-Domain Conversation with Long-Term Persona Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05797/) (2022)
- [ACUTE-EVAL: Improved Dialogue Evaluation with Optimized Questions and Multi-turn Comparisons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03087/) (2019)
- [TIMEDIAL: Temporal Commonsense Reasoning in Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04571/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models as Generative User Simulators for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09738/) (2024)
- [Conversation Chronicles: Towards Diverse Temporal and Relational Dynamics in Multi-Session Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13420/) (2023)
- [ESCoT: Towards Interpretable Emotional Support Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10960/) (2024)
- [Dialogue Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Commonsense-aware Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09343/) (2023)
- [Commonsense-Focused Dialogues for Response Generation: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06427/) (2021)
- [MPCHAT: Towards Multimodal Persona-Grounded Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17388/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Dialogue State Tracking Models through LLM-backed User-Agents Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13037/) (2024)
- [Chatbots as social companions: How people perceive consciousness, human likeness, and social health benefits in machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10599/) (2023)
- [Mind the Gap Between Conversations for Improved Long-Term Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15415/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While research on dialogue response generation has primarily focused on generating coherent responses conditioning on textual context, the critical question of when to respond grounded on the temporal context remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel task called timely dialogue response generation and introduce the TimelyChat benchmark, which evaluates the capabilities of language models to predict appropriate time intervals and generate time-conditioned responses. Additionally, we construct a large-scale training dataset by leveraging unlabeled event knowledge from a temporal commonsense knowledge graph and employing a large language model (LLM) to synthesize 55K event-driven dialogues. We then train Timer, a dialogue agent designed to proactively predict time intervals and generate timely responses that align with those intervals. Experimental results show that Timer outperforms prompting-based LLMs and other fine-tuned baselines in both turn-level and dialogue-level evaluations. We publicly release our data, model, and code.