# ProactiveEval: A Unified Evaluation Framework for Proactive Dialogue Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20973 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20973/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (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 29 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Aug 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, 29 of 29)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12045/) (2024)
- [MT-Bench-101: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Turn Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14762/) (2024)
- [Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Good](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06725/) (2019)
- [Hello Again! LLM-powered Personalized Agent for Long-term Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05925/) (2024)
- [Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13626/) (2023)
- [Proactive Agent: Shifting LLM Agents from Reactive Responses to Active Assistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12361/) (2024)
- [Plug-and-Play Policy Planner for Large Language Model Powered Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00262/) (2023)
- [Tell Me More! Towards Implicit User Intention Understanding of Language Model Driven Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09205/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Proactive Dialogue Systems: Problems, Methods, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02750/) (2023)
- [Ask-before-Plan: Proactive Language Agents for Real-World Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12639/) (2024)
- [How should my chatbot interact? A survey on human-chatbot interaction design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02743/) (2019)
- [When Thinking Fails: The Pitfalls of Reasoning for Instruction-Following in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11423/) (2025)
- [DuRecDial 2.0: A Bilingual Parallel Corpus for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08877/) (2021)
- [ESCoT: Towards Interpretable Emotional Support Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10960/) (2024)
- [Creating General User Models from Computer Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10831/) (2025)
- [Need Help? Designing Proactive AI Assistants for Programming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04596/) (2024)
- [Satori: Towards Proactive AR Assistant with Belief-Desire-Intention User Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16668/) (2024)
- [SocialMind: LLM-based Proactive AR Social Assistive System with Human-like Perception for In-situ Live Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04036/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Dialogue State Tracking Models through LLM-backed User-Agents Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13037/) (2024)
- [ComPeer: A Generative Conversational Agent for Proactive Peer Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18064/) (2024)
- [Target-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems with Personalization: Problem Formulation and Dataset Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07397/) (2023)
- [Strength Lies in Differences! Improving Strategy Planning for Non-collaborative Dialogues via Diversified User Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06769/) (2024)
- [RevisEval: Improving LLM-as-a-Judge via Response-Adapted References](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05193/) (2024)
- [Automated Creativity Evaluation for Large Language Models: A Reference-Based Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15784/) (2025)
- [Explore-Instruct: Enhancing Domain-Specific Instruction Coverage through Active Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09168/) (2023)
- [AiGet: Transforming Everyday Moments into Hidden Knowledge Discovery with AI Assistance on Smart Glasses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16240/) (2025)
- [Dynamic benchmarking framework for LLM-based conversational data capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04349/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [ProAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents for Proactive Assistance with Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04482/) (2026)
- [PM-Bench: Evaluating Prospective Memory in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12385/) (2026)
- [TriggerBench: Investigating Prospective Memory for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23459/) (2026)
- [ProactBench: Beyond What The User Asked For](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09228/) (2026)
- [ProActor: Timing-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Proactive Task Scheduling Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24900/) (2026)
- [Do Proactive Agents Really Need an LLM to Decide When to Wake and What to Anchor?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30152/) (2026)
- [Proactive Service Agents: A Unified Decision Framework, Methods, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03727/) (2026)
- [Simulating Teams with LLM Agents: Interactive 2D Environments for Studying Human-AI Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08242/) (2025)
- [DyMT-ESB: Dynamic Multi-Turn Evaluation of Social Bias in User-LLM Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18649/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Proactive dialogue has emerged as a critical and challenging research problem in advancing large language models (LLMs). Existing works predominantly focus on domain-specific or task-oriented scenarios, which leads to fragmented evaluations and limits the comprehensive exploration of models' proactive conversation abilities. In this work, we propose ProactiveEval, a unified framework designed for evaluating proactive dialogue capabilities of LLMs. This framework decomposes proactive dialogue into target planning and dialogue guidance, establishing evaluation metrics across various domains. Moreover, it also enables the automatic generation of diverse and challenging evaluation data. Based on the proposed framework, we develop 328 evaluation environments spanning 6 distinct domains. Through experiments with 22 different types of LLMs, we show that DeepSeek-R1 and Claude-3.7-Sonnet exhibit exceptional performance on target planning and dialogue guidance tasks, respectively. Finally, we investigate how reasoning capabilities influence proactive behaviors and discuss their implications for future model development.