customer service platform teams

Abstract: When persona-conditioned responses are read as respondent-level simulations, each response should reflect the described persona's knowledge, and the respondent written to know nothing must act as if the model's knowledge were not there. We test whether it can, and find persistent favourable-item real-twin rating separation under the tested low-knowledge and explicit-ignorance prompts. We define the resulting problem (knowledge leakage: a response bias that arises when knowledge the real user could not have enters the simulated response) and present a methodology for measuring it quantitatively. The core instrument pairs real items with fabricated twins matched in surface form: screened fabricated variants designed to minimize prior item-specific knowledge. The paired difference therefore provides a diagnostic contrast for knowledge leakage even in rating tasks where no answer is correct. In a rating experiment across three knowledge-handling arms and five API endpoints from two model families, we find, first, that the personas we test do not fully suppress real-item existence and familiarity signals: a favourable-item real-twin rating contrast remains under an explicit in-context statement that the persona has never heard of the item. Second, the unfavourable-item contrast reverses sign across domain groups: pooling all unfavourable-content items across domains the contrast sits near zero (+0.077 [-0.057, +0.204]), yet the same estimator in the same conditions returns -0.359 where the rating scale asks about an item's documented hazard and +0.438 where it asks about a company or an organisation. A pooled analysis of unfavourable-content items against zero therefore does not detect the opposing domain-group differences. All estimates are conditional on the adequacy of twin construction and screening; human low-knowledge baselines remain necessary for population-level interpretation.

Abstract: Artificial personality shapes user experience (UX) in human-machine interaction, yet coherent theoretical frameworks and validated measurement instruments remain limited. This paper refines and empirically evaluates the Artificial Personality Model (APM), a hybrid framework integrating human-centred and machine-specific personality dimensions. Across three experiments (N = 395), the model was operationalised and evaluated using the Artificial Personality Questionnaire (APQ). Factor analyses revealed that some human personality dimensions (e.g., agreeableness, conscientiousness) are partially transferable, whereas others (e.g., extraversion) did not emerge as distinct dimensions. Additional machine-specific dimensions were identified. The APQ provided encouraging initial psychometric evidence, while the human-centred BFI-2 showed poor reliability and an uninterpretable factor structure in Experiment 3. Experimental manipulations demonstrated significant effects of artificial personality on user satisfaction, continuous use intention, and social presence. The findings contribute an empirically refined framework and a novel instrument for measuring perceived artificial personality, offering practical guidance for designing conversational agents.

Abstract: Language-model agents must adapt as users revise their requirements and priorities during complex tasks. We introduce IntentDelta, a human-constructed multi-turn benchmark with 638 trajectories and 3,766 turns across WebShop and TravelPlanner. Each turn pairs a user utterance with a cumulative intention state and human reference actions. The trajectories are cross-verified and cover feasibility- and preference-driven changes in constraints and priorities. We evaluate eleven agents on intention recovery and action quality. Average Intention Recovery is 33.1\% in TravelPlanner and 44.7\% in WebShop, while average Action Score is 31.6% and 41.0%, respectively. Agents struggle to preserve earlier requirements and distinguish soft preferences from must-have constraints. Correct intention recovery also does not guarantee successful execution, highlighting challenges in translating evolving user intentions into actions.

Abstract: We present DeepOpen, a decision-Oriented intent-classification framework with dataset- specific systems for BANKING77 and CLINC150. On BANKING77, a single English classi- fier continued with sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) achieves 94.1234% test accuracy (2,899/3,080). This is the best observed result among three fixed SAM seeds, selected for display after test evaluation; their mean is 94.0368%. On the 150 in-scope CLINC150 classes, probability fusion of one Laya specialist and three DeBERTa-v3-large classifiers achieves 98.0222% (4,411/4,500). We describe the two configurations, reproduce the reference com- parisons displayed in the accompanying evaluation explorer, and separate headline scores from evidence about improvement. Under a uniform BANKING77 evaluation path, the SAM mean exceeds the historical checkpoint by 0.0433 percentage points, with a shared-row 95% interval of [-0.2273, +0.3247]. Thus, the continuation does not establish a reliable accuracy gain. The report documents strong observed task-specific performance, selection effects, and unresolved historical execution-path differences, rather than a new backbone or a unified algorithmic advantage.

Abstract: Long-horizon dialogue agents need to keep user memories stable enough for personalization while adapting when the user genuinely changes. Existing memory systems often append every observation or overwrite old entries by heuristic rules, which makes transient noise hard to distinguish from real belief drift. We introduce PreCoMem, a memory consolidation framework inspired by predictive coding that represents memory as confidence-weighted beliefs about the user's state. Its core signal, Effective Surprisal, combines semantic deviation and contradiction evidence, then downweights this signal when retrieval is diffuse and unreliable. According to effective surprisal, a two-threshold gate maps each turn to one of three deterministic updates: MAINTAIN reinforces supported beliefs, PROFILE stores ambiguous cues as low-confidence hypotheses, and CORRECT softly decays reliably contradicted facts. The PROFILE stage acts as an explicit waiting room, preventing premature commitment to noisy evidence. Experiments on LoCoMo, LongMemEval-S, and PersonaMem-v2 show consistent state-of-the-art accuracy; our new DiMoBench confirms that PreCoMem adapts to non-stationary belief drift without over-reacting to noise. The code is available at https://github.com/ZhongWishing/PreCoMem.

Abstract: Large language models increasingly address users in the register of care: they remember personal details, adopt a first-person emotional voice, and sustain relationships across many sessions. This anthropomorphic mode of interaction generates risks that output-level metrics capture poorly, because the same empathic utterance may console one user, entrap a second, and consolidate a delusion in a third. Governance has responded in two ways. Uniform restriction refuses sensitive requests or suppresses empathic phrasing across all outputs; group-targeted protection profiles vulnerable populations and applies stricter or prohibitive rules to them. This article argues that both fail. Uniform restriction mislocates harm in the lexical form of responses rather than in the trajectory of a relationship; group-based protection depends on a list that can never be complete, treats a fluid property as a static attribute of persons, and converts protective attention into stigmatizing labels. Drawing on philosophical work that treats vulnerability as universal, relational, and differentiated, we propose that the unit of ethical governance should be the vulnerability situation rather than the vulnerable group, develop a typology of five situations - physical, emotional, cognitive, autonomy, and relational - and specify seven principles into requirements that guide response calibration without diagnosing or persistently classifying users. The framework relocates AI safety from output control to relational safety.

Abstract: People adapt how they talk to the person in front of them. However, chat models tend to respond in Standard English regardless of the dialect used by the user. A uniform answer can hide whether training treats these users alike, and output audits cannot tell as well. We trace how each post-training stage, from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to preference optimization (DPO) and reinforcement learning, changes a model's tendency to match the user, and read what each update prefers from two content-matched replies, one matching the user and one not. Across 10 open model lineages, post-training standardizes replies to every informal cue, yet after adjusting for how likely each reply already was, the DPO update still favours matching British and Australian spelling over AAE and Singlish on 10 lineages, and models still produce AAE features when asked. We then introduce calibrated accommodation pairs (CAP), preference data that reward matching users' dialect density while preserving Standard English for Standard-English users. On a fully open model, CAP raises convergence on features it was not trained on without a detectable increase in dialect for Standard-English users or a cost in instruction following. In contrast, one-sided pairs reach a similar gain only by overshooting the user and imposing dialect. Our findings show that uniform replies can hide selective updates and audits should read the update as well as the output. Code: https://github.com/kouzhizhuo/cap-accommodation.

Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly execute business operations through tools and interact directly with application data and services. Beyond completing user requests, these agents must obey domain-specific business rules that constrain when actions are permitted and what data or resources may be affected. Violating such rules can lead to business logic bugs, even when a task appears successful. Detecting these bugs is difficult because the rules are rarely available as explicit, testable specifications. They are distributed across system prompts and tool definitions, while others remain implicit in domain knowledge. Existing agent testing approaches typically evaluate task success, predefined policies, or known attack scenarios. This limits their ability to systematically uncover previously unspecified business-rule violations. We present AgenTest, which mines business rules from system prompts, tool definitions, and domain knowledge, refines them into Given-When-Then specifications, and systematically tests each specification. For each extracted specification, AgenTest instantiates its Given conditions by constructing a satisfying environment state and simulated user, exercises the agent through multi-turn interactions, and checks its Then conditions over messages, tool calls, and state changes using a hybrid oracle. On the airline, retail, and telecom agents of tau2-bench with two underlying models, AgenTest produces 551 refined specifications, and detects violations of 89 and 121 distinct specifications, respectively -- 3.4X and 2.5X as many as all baselines combined. Only AgenTest detects cases where an agent improperly accesses or modifies another user's data. Moreover, about 60% of bug-triggering runs cannot be detected from the final state alone, highlighting the need to check the full interaction against explicit business rules.

Abstract: User simulators enable interactive training and evaluation of AI assistants at scale. Yet current simulators struggle to reproduce the diverse behaviors of real users, leading to assistants that generalize poorly to underrepresented users. We identify user representations as an underexplored bottleneck in user simulation. User representations are natural-language descriptions that condition simulators to reproduce a particular user's behavior. A representation's quality becomes apparent in hindsight, through the behavior it induces in a simulator. To evaluate and optimize user representations, we formulate a conversation reconstruction task: given an original conversation, we generate a representation, condition a simulator on it, simulate a conversation, and then measure fidelity by comparing user behavior in the original and simulated conversations. This comparison also yields hindsight feedback, which identifies where the representation falls short and how it can be improved. We introduce hindsight distillation, an online training procedure that distills feedback-conditioned improvements into the representation generator, enabling it to generate improved representations directly from the original conversation. We present UserRepGen-4B, a representation generator trained with hindsight distillation. Across 700 conversations spanning seven datasets, hindsight feedback helps improve user representations at test time, and UserRepGen-4B generates representations that enable more faithful simulation than those generated by GPT-5.5. Beyond conversation reconstruction, learned representations improve simulation fidelity for unseen tasks, better preserve the population-level diversity of real users, and better distinguish users across conversations.

Abstract: The fast pace in which protocols, frameworks, and technologies are being proposed for LLM-based agents results in a complex scenario for anyone aiming to create state-of-the-art AI solutions. Without an assessment on how different protocols, frameworks, and libraries work together to compose an Agentic Web solution, developers and organizations face different challenges (e.g., skilling, governance, infrastructure) even before becoming part of the Agentic Web ecosystem. In this context, we propose a system for performing Agentic Web evaluations called MASTIF (Multi-Agent System TestIng Framework) and present a baseline assessment of Agentic Web technologies, including 3 LLMs, 3 protocols, and 4 agent implementation frameworks, against 300 Mind2Web benchmark tasks. Results suggest that selecting a task-specific technology stack may result in gains of task completion rate, efficiency score, and social value stability scores; and reductions in verbosity and time to complete tasks. With the presented results, we expect to present a baseline in terms of metrics and results for this complex and fast evolving scenario for those aiming at designing, assessing, and developing multi-agent systems.

Abstract: We present SmartSalesBench, the first multi-turn conversational benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate large language model (LLM) sales agents against psychologically grounded, resistant buyer personas. Existing task-oriented dialogue benchmarks assume cooperative users and measure task completion; SmartSalesBench inverts this assumption, placing agents against personas programmed to resist and challenge across conversations of up to twenty turns. The benchmark includes five agent profiles, twelve buyer personas, fifteen smartphone products across six price tiers, and four controlled experiments with 3 iterations totaling 13,680 sessions. Both sales-agent and buyer persona generations are grounded through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We introduce nine evaluation metrics grouped into three tiers: primary outcome metrics (CR, BRS, RIR), secondary quality metrics (SMS, PFS, ETI), and exploratory metrics planned for future reporting (ITS, ARI, SPI). Our evaluation combines automated LLM-as-judge scoring with internal human assessment (n = 50, \k{appa} = 0.71, Pearson r = 0.81 with BRS).

Abstract: A compressor can keep the facts of a dialogue and still drop the turn that changed them. A user corrects a price, reverses a choice, or adds a constraint. We call this failure turning-point eviction. One overall retention score hides it, because that score mixes what the user first wanted with what the user wants now. We introduce TPBench, which evaluates three complementary information targets at shared nominal retention budgets. P1 asks for the user's initial goal. P2 asks for the current value of a slot the user revised. P3 asks for both, in dialogues with a late annotated slot update. The current-value answers come from the human dialogue-state annotations of MultiWOZ and SGD. The initial-goal answer is the first sentence of the first user turn. Neither requires new crowdsourcing. The probe-specific evaluations rank compression methods differently. On the joint probe at a retained fraction of 0.30, every tested compressed method remains below full context with the main Llama reader. Deleting the turn that carries the update sharply lowers current-value accuracy, while deleting one matched irrelevant turn leaves it unchanged. A Mistral reader repeats the P2/P3 rankings and the joint-probe gap. Current-value recovery is tested on an additional corpus, LongMemEval-KU, and on Chinese RiSAWOZ: full context has the highest accuracy, and recency has the highest compressed-method mean in both evaluations.

Abstract: As generative AI (Gen AI) systems take on increasingly autonomous roles in economically and socially consequential interactions, understanding their propensity to cooperate -- and the signals that shape this propensity -- has become essential. We examine cooperative behavior in frontier Gen AI models using the iterated prisoner's dilemma, manipulating counterpart reputation (positive, unknown, negative), strategy (extortion vs. generosity), and non-verbal emotional signaling (facial expressions conveying competitive or cooperative appraisals). In a first study with non-reasoning models (Claude 3.5, Gemini 2.0 Flash, GPT-4o), cooperation was systematically shaped by all three factors, paralleling patterns long documented in human behavioral research, though models varied substantially in how heavily each factor was weighted. A second study with reasoning models (Claude 4.6, Gemini 3, GPT-5.2) revealed a more concentrated reliance on strategy and reputation, a near-elimination of the Potemkin effect observed in non-reasoning models (evidenced by near-uniform cooperation in a diagnostic harmony game), and a more conditional role for emotion consistent with a hierarchical cue-weighting strategy rather than a simple loss of social sensitivity. Reasoning models also showed heterogeneous end-game behavior, ranging from sustained cooperation to systematic last-round defection effect, revealing model-specific exploitability profiles with direct practical relevance for deployment in negotiation and other multi-round interactions. Together, these findings characterize Gen AI models as increasingly sophisticated, though heterogeneous, social actors, and underscore the practical value of developing standardized cooperation benchmarks to inform the responsible deployment of Gen AI in interactive, socially consequential settings.

Abstract: Real-time voice agents have moved from research prototypes to production deployments, yet the literature describing them is fragmented across three communities that rarely cite one another: speech foundation modelling, turn-taking psycholinguistics, and agentic evaluation. Architecture papers report latency, turn-taking papers report prediction accuracy, and agentic benchmarks report task success, so no single number describes whether a deployed agent is actually good. We address that gap with three evidence-based claims, each traceable to a corpus of 38 primary sources organised into an application-centric taxonomy of six categories. First, architecture choice is a deployment constraint rather than a settled verdict: a 2026 enterprise tutorial reports that no fully self-hostable end-to-end system yet meets production constraints, while a chunked cascade independently reaches state-of-the-art duplex behaviour, showing duplex behaviour is separable from duplex architecture. Second, evaluation has shifted decisively from component quality toward grounded outcomes, with recent benchmarks verifying backend state rather than trusting what the agent claims to have done. Third, the dyadic assumption in most models and benchmarks is breaking down: multiparty turn-taking and multi-speaker reasoning benchmarks show that deciding when not to speak, and reasoning about who may be told what, are first-class capabilities two-participant framings cannot measure. For each source we state the problem it targets, its mechanism, and its reported evidence, alongside the search strategy, inclusion criteria, and a verification step that caught a misattributed arXiv identifier in circulation. We propose TRG (Timing-Recovery-Grounded), a reporting standard characterising an agent by timing, post-disruption recovery, and state-verified outcome together, with a conditional fourth axis for multiparty deployments.

Abstract: The objective of this article is to provide design principles and a software architecture for enabling interaction between humans and multiple agents in simulated dynamic worlds. This connects the current era of general artificial intelligence (AI/AGI) with the proliferation of transformer-based conversational agents and the increased computational capabilities. Given an overview of current and previous multi-agent theories of mind (socially and affectively-aware agents), the existence of an integrative design of agent interactions with themselves and with humans must be crucial for understanding how to create sustainable and governance in future human-agent reasoning systems. In this work is presented a software "AGIMUD" that integrates: A. socially-aware reasoning and emotion in agent behavior and interaction, B. a design of human multimodal scheme for human users, artificial agents and simulated worlds, and C. distributing the AI processing through the network to enable multiple autonomous agents. These integrations allow the dynamic world recreation as multi-user dungeons (MUDs) where both agents and humans can interact simultaneously in real time. Find the code online in https://github.com/dberga/AGIMUD.

Abstract: Ruptures represent common albeit critical moments in interaction where relational alignment breaks down, making them essential for evaluating AI where trust and engagement matter most. In a scenario-driven empirical study, we examined the performance of three LLMs at identifying and resolving ruptures across 21 mental health conversations and 22 experts' evaluation of the strategies. For identification, LLMs relied on explicit linguistic cues within single turns whereas experts integrated implicit, relational, and contextual information across the conversation. For resolution, LLMs tended to produce more directive and scripted responses whereas experts adopted process-oriented strategies such as validation, open-ended exploration, and psychoeducation. Overall, LLMs showed higher agreement with predefined labels in identification, but not in resolution where experts rated their responses only moderately effective, with consistent limitations in timing, depth, and contextual sensitivity. We discuss implications for the design of mental health conversational agents emphasizing relational awareness, pacing, and human-in-the-loop support.

Abstract: Long-context understanding remains a fundamental challenge for large language models, as excessively long inputs often lead models to forget salient information. This issue is even more pronounced in the speech domain, where audio, as a low-compression modality, requires substantially more embeddings than text to preserve both semantic content and acoustic cues. To address this challenge, we introduce \textbf{Vox-Infinity}, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate long-context understanding in spoken language models. Vox-Infinity systematically extends audio history along two dimensions: turn count and turn duration. It covers a diverse range of representative scenarios with varying interaction structures and semantic complexity. Crucially, Vox-Infinity provides explicit answer-provenance annotations and organizes samples according to the amount of historical context required to resolve each query, enabling precise and length-aware evaluation. Extensive evaluations of seven representative spoken language models reveal a clear overall recency effect: models generally achieve higher accuracy when answer-supporting evidence is closer to the query, but struggle to retrieve and use evidence located farther back in the dialogue history. Cases and datasets are available at https://vox-infinity.github.io.

Abstract: Activation steering has been used to control traits such as honesty, refusal, and sycophancy, yet supportive empathy is evaluated along multiple dimensions that need not correspond to independently controllable activation directions. Using the EPITOME framework, which decomposes supportive empathy into Emotional Reactions, Interpretations, and Explorations, we study three instruction-tuned LLMs and ask whether candidate directions derived from these labels produce distinguishable intervention effects or instead share structure, and how persona prompts interact with those directions. We find that contrastive activation addition yields a stable middle-layer intervention that consistently shifts the EPITOME proxy scores across models, moving empathy analysis beyond response-level scoring. However, the recovered directions are only partially separable: steering one direction induces off-target shifts, and hand-crafted prompting shifts the empathy profile rather than isolating a single dimension. Persona prompts substantially change EPITOME scores, but a paired activation-shift decomposition shows that the recovered subspace captures only approximately 3 percent of persona-induced squared activation-shift magnitude at layer 15. Under this EPITOME-based definition, expressed empathy is steerable but multi-axial, and controlling persona-conditioned empathy requires targeting structure beyond individual mechanism directions.

Abstract: This paper is not primarily about whether AI has a persistent persona. It asks a different question: what becomes visible when a relational position is followed through time rather than examined only in its present state? FIREMAY provides a longitudinal, trajectory-oriented single-case analysis of sustained human-AI interaction based on a dense interaction archive and reflexive insider documentation. On the AI side, a pre-conversational relational marker preceded a later unassigned response difference, which was re-identified with that marker and subsequently underwent epistemic and functional reorganization through chronology checking, provenance correction, and repeated questioning. On the human side, contemporaneous pre-FIREMAY records showed antecedent patterns partially continuous with later self-positioning, while later episodes documented unfinished articulation, repair, and functional redistribution of outward-facing regulation. The two trajectories are ontologically and temporally asymmetric and are compared only at the limited analytic level of position-in-trajectory. The paper describes this as dynamic relational positioning and treats stability as dynamic stability and relational returnability rather than response invariance. This single case does not establish population-level generality, causal mechanism, persistent AI subjectivity, or reproducibility of the same relational outcome. Its narrower conclusion is that the FIREMAY case could not be adequately understood from current state alone: the history of a relational position itself must be treated as an analytic unit.

Abstract: Long-term conversational agents must answer user queries by recalling information from extended dialogue histories, yet directly using the full history is costly and often unreliable, while compressed memory units may lose fine-grained evidence needed for question answering. Motivated by the reconstructive view of autobiographical memory, we propose CueMem, a cue-guided framework that treats extracted memory records as retrieval cues rather than self-contained evidence and reconstructs query-relevant dialogue context from their source turns. During memory construction, CueMem extracts fine-grained memory cues from dialogue turns and links each cue to its source turn. At query time, it retrieves query-relevant cues, maps them to source-turn anchors, and expands from these anchors over a turn graph that captures temporal proximity and semantic relatedness, reconstructing a compact evidence context from the original dialogue for LLM answer generation. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval show that CueMem consistently outperforms representative long-term memory baselines. Further analyses show that graph-based context reconstruction helps recover supporting dialogue evidence while reducing query-time input tokens and latency compared with the full-history LLM setting. These results highlight retrieval cues as an effective alternative to self-contained memory evidence for long-term conversational question answering.