While effect sizes are unstable due to sample size, direction consistency supports the hypothesis that optimising prompt formulation front-end is a critical lever for human-AI collaboration.
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are integral to complex intellectual tasks, yet output quality remains constrained by user-provided prompts. Iterative multi-turn prompting often leads to context degradation and diminishing cognitive returns. We present PAWNI (Prompt Architecture Wizard using Neural Intelligence), an agentic conversational interface of eight agents that transforms unstructured queries into structured prompts through guided question-and-answer dialogue informed by a self-evolving knowledge base. Rather than optimising the model's response, PAWNI optimises the question itself by front-loading intent clarification. We also propose a three-tier framework of 18 prompt elements across Essential, Enhancement, and Elevation categories. To evaluate system behaviour and validate a measurement protocol, we conducted an exploratory within-subjects study (N=4) across four complex tasks, integrating 32-channel EEG, NASA-TLX workload, and behavioural metrics. Participants produced more structurally complete prompts with PAWNI (42% to 91% of assessed elements), rated LLM outputs higher across all quality dimensions, and reported lower workload (39.6 vs. 21.7 NASA-TLX). Every participant reached satisfactory output in a single turn, compared to 1-12 turns unaided. While effect sizes are unstable due to sample size, direction consistency supports the hypothesis that optimising prompt formulation front-end is a critical lever for human-AI collaboration.
An isolated final user message is often treated as the query in evaluations of AI systems. In a conversation, however, the actionable request may be distributed across preceding turns. We directly test whether that omitted within-conversation context changes answers. For each of 180 English multi-turn conversations sampled from a governed commercial corpus and the public PRISM dataset, we hold the final user message and requested answer model constant while generating three answers: one from the full role-labelled conversation, one from the final message alone, and one from the final message plus a prefix-only reconstruction capped at 160 words. A separately requested judge model evaluates answers under randomized labels. The prespecified primary endpoint is a material difference that could change what the user does, rather than a difference in style or detail. After inverse-probability weighting to the eligible cohorts, the full-conversation and isolated-final answers differ materially in 44.7% of cases (95% bootstrap CI 33.8% to 56.1%). Full-conversation answers score 0.49 points higher on a 0 to 4 request-satisfaction scale (0.32 to 0.67). Adding the compressed prefix reduces the material-difference rate to 30.8% (20.2% to 42.1%), a 13.9-point reduction (4.9% to 24.1%), and reduces the mean satisfaction gap to 0.01 points (-0.12 to 0.13). Yet compression is not equivalent to the complete dialogue context: almost one third of answers remain materially different. An order-swapped repeat on 48 cases yields 91.7% agreement and kappa = 0.83 for the primary decision. The study concerns preceding turns in the same conversation and does not test persistent memory across separate conversations.
Human-like private chat requires more than fluent response generation: a system must preserve persona, relationship, memory, bounded knowledge, medium-specific timing, and a coherent multi-turn arc. We present AnthroDial, a closed-loop framework that formulates anthropomorphic dialogue as a joint problem of system architecture, executable evaluation, and diagnostic alignment. It combines (1) a role-conditioned scheduled dialogue runtime with persona and scenario cards, long-term memory, virtual time, and single-draft message decisions; (2) an executable benchmark with an L0 validity gate, five per-turn dimensions, and five dialogue-level dimensions; and (3) a post-training pipeline that filters 16,436 scheduled-decision examples for SFT and applies GRPO with a cognitive-diagnostic, ZPD-aware reward. The reward maintains Kalman-filtered capability estimates for each behavioral dimension, upweights dimensions with larger capability deficits, and uses rollout scores as task-level ZPD matches to focus optimization on learnable weak skills. On a benchmark with 55 personas, 50 scenarios, 50 persona-scenario bindings, and 100 role-conditioned cases per model, we evaluate 16 systems spanning frontier baselines, open models, thinking/no-think variants, and SFT/RL ablations. The strongest non-trained baseline reaches 32.00% strict ACC, while Qwen3.6-27B-SFT+RL reaches 39.00% strict ACC and a 98.5 overall score. In the 9B no-think setting, SFT and RL improve strict ACC from 0.00% to 13.00% and 18.37%. These results show that anthropomorphic dialogue benefits when generation, evaluation, and reward shaping share the same behavioral dimensions.
Wentao Liu, Siyu Song, Xi Chen et al.· 0 citations
Traditional conversational Question Answering (QA) systems focus on isolated information retrieval and lack the ability to maintain goal persistence across multi-turn interactions. Current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches operate passively, retrieving information turn-by-turn without tracking whether the overall task objective has been achieved, and are typically evaluated using linguistic similarity metrics rather than functional task outcomes. We introduce GSC-QA (Goal-based Sequential Conversation QA), a framework that integrates three complementary components into a unified enterprise dialogue architecture: 1) persistent Goal Tracking Module (GTM) that maintains task state across turns in external databases (Redis + PostgreSQL), decoupled from the LLM context window; 2) Expert Instruction Layer that injects domain-curated procedural constraints into every response generation step; and 3) proactive slot detection that identifies and elicits missing required information before proceeding. Unlike prior task-oriented systems that assume static ontologies or session-scoped memory, GSC-QA combines retrieval, instruction enforcement, and goal persistence in a single coordinated loop built on LangGraph. Evaluated on 1,516 annotated dialogue records in Vietnamese spanning ten enterprise domains (principally beauty services, professional services, fashion & retail, spa & wellness, and language education, with smaller deployments in marketing, healthcare, banking, and lighting & electrical equipment), GSC-QA achieves a Task Success Rate (TSR) of 87.1% and a Goal Consistency Score (GCS) of 0.78 on the combined 1,516-record evaluation set, and an Error Recovery Rate (ERR) of 79.5% on 205 organic pivot transitions, substantially outperforming standard RAG (58.7% TSR, GCS 0.62). All baselines including Instruct-Only are evaluated on the same dataset for fair comparison. Cross-domain evaluation across 980 records from 14 enterprise deployments shows the mechanism transfers with little loss: on a curated 299-record subset scored under the same judge and rubric as the primary set, task success reaches 62.2% against 63.2% in-domain. Against four external baselines, including an agentic ReAct system, a memory-augmented long-context model, a SimpleTOD-style tracker and a graph-structured stateful agent, GSC-QA leads on task success, faithfulness and answer relevancy alike, and its lead in task success holds under four independent judge families. An LLM-as-judge metric (gpt-5.4) achieves 94% agreement with human annotations. Ablation studies confirm that goal persistence and expert instructions are complementary; removing either component causes significant performance degradation.
Evaluating large language models (LLMs) as multi-turn conversational partners requires probing capabilities that single-turn benchmarks miss: persona consistency, evolving intent tracking, emotional dynamics, and goal completion across many turns. We introduce EYT-Bench, a human-centered benchmark whose evaluation protocol is built around a decoupled three-party design: a persona-grounded user simulator, a target model evaluated on both intent perception and response generation, and an independent, configurable ensemble of LLM judges. Across 3,400 dialogues with 17 target models, EYT-Bench reveals four findings that previous benchmarks miss: (i) state-of-the-art closed and open-source models are statistically indistinguishable on subjective dimensions, but separate by up to 9x on objective intent-tracking; (ii) reasoning is a phase transition for objective tracking on long-context personas but is essentially flat on subjective scores; (iii) persona format strongly affects trajectory spread, FICR (final-intent completion rate) saturates above 0.95 on Nemotron-USA but ranges from 0.53 to 0.88 on PersonaMem-v2; and (iv) the warm-up effect is observed in 16 of 17 models.
Jing Gong, Jiefan Lu, Hewei Guo et al.· 0 citations
Conversational AI is moving beyond isolated text prompts toward sustained, multimodal interaction. In real conversations, users clarify goals, revise requests, interrupt responses, switch topics, and introduce new evidence while expecting systems to preserve context across turns. This makes multi-turn dialogue a distinct challenge requiring systems to maintain and update memory, ground responses across modalities, tools, and external knowledge, and adapt across languages and cultures. This study reviews multi-turn conversational AI across text-only dialogue, AudioLLMs and speech-native systems, multimodal and omni-modal systems, and tool-augmented agents. We organize the literature around datasets and benchmarks, modeling paradigms, training strategies, evaluation setups, and cross-cutting challenges. Our analysis shows that support for multiple modalities has advanced faster than the ability to sustain coherent interaction across a session. Despite stronger capabilities to perceive, speak, and act across modalities, current systems still struggle with persistent memory, cross-turn grounding, full-duplex interaction, robust evaluation, and cultural alignment. We conclude with a research agenda for systems that can remember, revise, ground, speak, listen, act, and adapt across turns, modalities, and cultures. (https://github.com/faiza-sfa/multiturn-conversational-ai-survey)
Syeda Faiza Ahmed, Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti et al.· 2 citations
A unified taxonomy of 8 categories covering ambiguous and unanswerable questions is addressed, a multi-agent generation pipeline with a two-stage process (NLQ generation followed by SQL grounding) and an explicit Category Conformance validation stage are addressed.
Giovanni Sullutrone, Luca Sala, Sania Aftar et al.· 0 citations