Rethinking Conversational Agents in the Era of LLMs: Proactivity, Non-collaborativity, and Beyond

as LLMs are trained to follow users’ instructions, LLM-augmented conversational systems typically overlook the design of an essential property in intelligent conversations, i.e., goal awareness. In this tutorial, we will introduce the recent advances on the design of agent’s awareness of goals in a wide range of conversational systems, including proactive, non-collaborative, and multi-goal conversational systems.

Derived from the definition of proactivity in organizational behaviors [23] and its dictionary definitions, conversational agents’ proactivity can be defined as the capability to create or control the conversation by taking the initiative and anticipating impacts on themselves or human users.

Proactive ODD systems can consciously change topics [49] and lead directions [45, 48] for improving user engagement in the conversation. We will present the existing methods for topic shifting and planning in open-domain dialogues, including keyword-based discourse-level topic planning [45], graph-based topic planning [38, 52], and learning from interactions with users [28].