# Report on The 1st Workshop on Human-Centered Proactive and Personalized Agents for Interactive Information Access at CHIIR 2026

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18638 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18638/

## 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.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Abstract (arXiv)

Interactive information access is increasingly moving beyond reactive query-response paradigms toward agentic systems that can personalize interaction, retain context, infer latent needs, recommend next steps, and initiate support. This shift creates new opportunities for adaptive and context-aware assistance, while also raising important questions about autonomy, privacy, trust, transparency, user welfare, and evaluation. The First Workshop on Human-Centered Proactive and Personalized Agents for Interactive Information Access provided an interdisciplinary forum for examining these questions across information retrieval, human-computer interaction, dialogue systems, AI ethics, cognitive science, learning technologies, and human-centered AI. Through invited talks, paper presentations, and open discussion, the workshop engaged with topics including calibrated initiative, knowledge-gap navigation, long-term memory, value-sensitive design, implicit personalization, AI-mediated care, proactive dialogue, and evaluation beyond task accuracy. A central theme across the workshop was that proactivity should not be understood only as earlier action or improved prediction, but as a form of initiative that must be appropriately timed, transparent, contestable, and aligned with user goals. This report summarizes the workshop and synthesizes the research challenges it surfaced for designing proactive and personalized agents in interactive information access.