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Oct 21

A Simple "Try Again" Can Elicit Multi-Turn LLM Reasoning

Multi-turn problem solving is critical yet challenging for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) to reflect on their reasoning and revise from feedback. Existing Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods train large reasoning models on a single-turn paradigm with verifiable rewards. However, we observe that models trained with existing RL paradigms often lose their ability to solve problems across multiple turns and struggle to revise answers based on contextual feedback, leading to repetitive responses. We ask: can LRMs learn to reflect their answers in a multi-turn context? In this work, we find that training models with multi-turn RL using only unary feedback (e.g., "Let's try again") after wrong answers can improve both single-turn performance and multi-turn reasoning. We introduce Unary Feedback as Observation (UFO) for reinforcement learning, which uses minimal yet common unary user feedback during iterative problem solving. It can be easily applied to existing single-turn RL training setups. Experimental results show that RL training with UFO keeps single-turn performance and improves multi-turn reasoning accuracy by up to 14%, enabling language models to better react to feedback in multi-turn problem solving. To further minimize the number of turns needed for a correct answer while encouraging diverse reasoning when mistakes occur, we design reward structures that guide models to produce careful and deliberate answers in each turn. Code: https://github.com/lichengliu03/unary-feedback

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 18 2

LoopServe: An Adaptive Dual-phase LLM Inference Acceleration System for Multi-Turn Dialogues

Multi-turn dialogues are essential in many real-world applications of large language models, such as chatbots and virtual assistants. As conversation histories become longer, existing large language models face increasing computational and memory challenges, which hinder their ability to provide efficient and responsive interactions. Most current acceleration methods either compress the context or optimize key value caching, but they often rely on fixed or position-based heuristics that do not adapt well to the dynamic and unpredictable patterns found in actual multi-turn conversations. In this paper, we present LoopServe, an adaptive dual-phase inference acceleration framework for large language models in multi-turn dialogues. LoopServe introduces two main innovations. First, it performs online sparsification during the prefilling phase by dynamically selecting the most important parts of the attention matrix for each new input. Second, it uses progressive key value compression during decoding by adaptively maintaining a relevant and efficient cache based on the most recently generated output tokens. We also propose a https://huggingface.co/datasets/TreeAILab/Multi-turn_Long-context_Benchmark_for_LLMs{new benchmark} with eleven multi-turn datasets that reflect realistic query positions and conversational dependencies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LoopServe consistently achieves superior effectiveness compared to existing baselines and significantly accelerates LLM inference across a wide range of long-context dialogue tasks.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 18

Multi-turn Response Selection with Commonsense-enhanced Language Models

As a branch of advanced artificial intelligence, dialogue systems are prospering. Multi-turn response selection is a general research problem in dialogue systems. With the assistance of background information and pre-trained language models, the performance of state-of-the-art methods on this problem gains impressive improvement. However, existing studies neglect the importance of external commonsense knowledge. Hence, we design a Siamese network where a pre-trained Language model merges with a Graph neural network (SinLG). SinLG takes advantage of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to catch the word correlations in the context and response candidates and utilizes a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to reason helpful common sense from an external knowledge graph. The GNN aims to assist the PLM in fine-tuning, and arousing its related memories to attain better performance. Specifically, we first extract related concepts as nodes from an external knowledge graph to construct a subgraph with the context response pair as a super node for each sample. Next, we learn two representations for the context response pair via both the PLM and GNN. A similarity loss between the two representations is utilized to transfer the commonsense knowledge from the GNN to the PLM. Then only the PLM is used to infer online so that efficiency can be guaranteed. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on two variants of the PERSONA-CHAT dataset, which proves that our solution can not only improve the performance of the PLM but also achieve an efficient inference.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 25, 2024

FashionNTM: Multi-turn Fashion Image Retrieval via Cascaded Memory

Multi-turn textual feedback-based fashion image retrieval focuses on a real-world setting, where users can iteratively provide information to refine retrieval results until they find an item that fits all their requirements. In this work, we present a novel memory-based method, called FashionNTM, for such a multi-turn system. Our framework incorporates a new Cascaded Memory Neural Turing Machine (CM-NTM) approach for implicit state management, thereby learning to integrate information across all past turns to retrieve new images, for a given turn. Unlike vanilla Neural Turing Machine (NTM), our CM-NTM operates on multiple inputs, which interact with their respective memories via individual read and write heads, to learn complex relationships. Extensive evaluation results show that our proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art algorithm by 50.5%, on Multi-turn FashionIQ -- the only existing multi-turn fashion dataset currently, in addition to having a relative improvement of 12.6% on Multi-turn Shoes -- an extension of the single-turn Shoes dataset that we created in this work. Further analysis of the model in a real-world interactive setting demonstrates two important capabilities of our model -- memory retention across turns, and agnosticity to turn order for non-contradictory feedback. Finally, user study results show that images retrieved by FashionNTM were favored by 83.1% over other multi-turn models. Project page: https://sites.google.com/eng.ucsd.edu/fashionntm

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 20, 2023

Building Math Agents with Multi-Turn Iterative Preference Learning

Recent studies have shown that large language models' (LLMs) mathematical problem-solving capabilities can be enhanced by integrating external tools, such as code interpreters, and employing multi-turn Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. While current methods focus on synthetic data generation and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), this paper studies the complementary direct preference learning approach to further improve model performance. However, existing direct preference learning algorithms are originally designed for the single-turn chat task, and do not fully address the complexities of multi-turn reasoning and external tool integration required for tool-integrated mathematical reasoning tasks. To fill in this gap, we introduce a multi-turn direct preference learning framework, tailored for this context, that leverages feedback from code interpreters and optimizes trajectory-level preferences. This framework includes multi-turn DPO and multi-turn KTO as specific implementations. The effectiveness of our framework is validated through training of various language models using an augmented prompt set from the GSM8K and MATH datasets. Our results demonstrate substantial improvements: a supervised fine-tuned Gemma-1.1-it-7B model's performance increased from 77.5% to 83.9% on GSM8K and from 46.1% to 51.2% on MATH. Similarly, a Gemma-2-it-9B model improved from 84.1% to 86.3% on GSM8K and from 51.0% to 54.5% on MATH.

  • 13 authors
·
Sep 3, 2024 2

Efficient Multi-turn RL for GUI Agents via Decoupled Training and Adaptive Data Curation

Vision-language model (VLM) based GUI agents show promise for automating complex desktop and mobile tasks, but face significant challenges in applying reinforcement learning (RL): (1) slow multi-turn interactions with GUI environments for policy rollout, and (2) insufficient high-quality agent-environment interactions for policy learning. To address these challenges, we propose DART, a Decoupled Agentic RL Training framework for GUI agents, which coordinates heterogeneous modules in a highly decoupled manner. DART separates the training system into four asynchronous modules: environment cluster, rollout service, data manager, and trainer. This design enables non-blocking communication, asynchronous training, rollout-wise trajectory sampling, and per-worker model synchronization, significantly improving the system efficiency: 1.6*GPU utilization for rollout, 1.9* training throughput, and 5.5* environment utilization. To facilitate effective learning from abundant samples, we introduce an adaptive data curation scheme: (1) pre-collecting successful trajectories for challenging tasks to supplement sparse success in online sampling; (2) dynamically adjusting rollout numbers and trajectory lengths based on task difficulty; (3) training selectively on high-entropy steps to prioritize critical decisions; (4) stabilizing learning via truncated importance sampling for policy mismatch between policy rollout and updating. On the OSWorld benchmark, DART-GUI-7B achieves a 42.13% task success rate, a 14.61% absolute gain over the base model, and 7.34% higher than open-source SOTA. We will fully open-source our training framework, data, and model checkpoints via computer-use-agents.github.io/dart-gui, which we believe is a timely contribution to the open-source community of agentic RL training.

DoctorAgent-RL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Reinforcement Learning System for Multi-Turn Clinical Dialogue

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent capabilities in the field of biomedical question answering, but their application in real-world clinical consultations still faces core challenges. Existing systems rely on a one-way information transmission mode where patients must fully describe their symptoms in a single round, leading to nonspecific diagnostic recommendations when complaints are vague. Traditional multi-turn dialogue methods based on supervised learning are constrained by static data-driven paradigms, lacking generalizability and struggling to intelligently extract key clinical information. To address these limitations, we propose DoctorAgent-RL, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based multi-agent collaborative framework that models medical consultations as a dynamic decision-making process under uncertainty. The doctor agent continuously optimizes its questioning strategy within the RL framework through multi-turn interactions with the patient agent, dynamically adjusting its information-gathering path based on comprehensive rewards from the Consultation Evaluator. This RL fine-tuning mechanism enables LLMs to autonomously develop interaction strategies aligned with clinical reasoning logic, rather than superficially imitating patterns in existing dialogue data. Notably, we constructed MTMedDialog, the first English multi-turn medical consultation dataset capable of simulating patient interactions. Experiments demonstrate that DoctorAgent-RL outperforms existing models in both multi-turn reasoning capability and final diagnostic performance, demonstrating practical value in assisting clinical consultations. https://github.com/JarvisUSTC/DoctorAgent-RL

  • 4 authors
·
May 26 2

ToolDial: Multi-turn Dialogue Generation Method for Tool-Augmented Language Models

Tool-Augmented Language Models (TALMs) leverage external APIs to answer user queries across various domains. However, existing benchmark datasets for TALM research often feature simplistic dialogues that do not reflect real-world scenarios, such as the need for models to ask clarifying questions or proactively call additional APIs when essential information is missing. To address these limitations, we construct and release ToolDial, a dataset comprising 11,111 multi-turn dialogues, with an average of 8.95 turns per dialogue, based on APIs from RapidAPI. ToolDial has two key characteristics. First, the dialogues incorporate 16 user and system actions (e.g., "Request", "Clarify", "Fail inform") to capture the rich dynamics of real-world interactions. Second, we simulate dialogues where the system requests necessary information from the user based on API documentation and seeks additional APIs if the user fails to provide the required information. To facilitate this process, we introduce a method for generating an API graph that represents input and output compatibility between APIs. Using ToolDial, we evaluate a suite of language models on their ability to predict correct actions and extract input parameter values for API calls from the dialogue history. Modern language models achieve accuracy scores below 70%, indicating substantial room for improvement. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/holi-lab/ToolDial.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 1

MUA-RL: Multi-turn User-interacting Agent Reinforcement Learning for agentic tool use

With the recent rapid advancement of Agentic Intelligence, agentic tool use in LLMs has become increasingly important. During multi-turn interactions between agents and users, the dynamic, uncertain, and stochastic nature of user demands poses significant challenges to the agent's tool invocation capabilities. Agents are no longer expected to simply call tools to deliver a result; rather, they must iteratively refine their understanding of user needs through communication while simultaneously invoking tools to resolve user queries. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for tool use lack the integration of genuinely dynamic users during the RL training process. To bridge this gap, we introduce MUA-RL (Multi-turn User-interacting Agent Reinforcement Learning for agentic tool use), a novel reinforcement learning framework that, for the first time in the field of agentic tool use, integrates LLM-simulated users into the reinforcement learning loop. MUA-RL aims to enable autonomous learning of models to communicate with users efficiently and use various tools to solve practical problems in dynamic multi-turn interactions. Evaluations are done on several multi-turn tool-using benchmarks (see Figure 1). Specifically, MUA-RL-32B achieves 67.3 on TAU2 Retail, 45.4 on TAU2 Airline, 28.3 on TAU2 Telecom, 28.4 on BFCL-V3 Multi Turn, and 82.5 on ACEBench Agent -- outperforming or matching the performance of larger open-source models such as DeepSeek-V3-0324 and Qwen3-235B-A22B in non-thinking settings.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 26

Facilitating Multi-turn Function Calling for LLMs via Compositional Instruction Tuning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited significant potential in performing diverse tasks, including the ability to call functions or use external tools to enhance their performance. While current research on function calling by LLMs primarily focuses on single-turn interactions, this paper addresses the overlooked necessity for LLMs to engage in multi-turn function calling--critical for handling compositional, real-world queries that require planning with functions but not only use functions. To facilitate this, we introduce an approach, BUTTON, which generates synthetic compositional instruction tuning data via bottom-up instruction construction and top-down trajectory generation. In the bottom-up phase, we generate simple atomic tasks based on real-world scenarios and build compositional tasks using heuristic strategies based on atomic tasks. Corresponding functions are then developed for these compositional tasks. The top-down phase features a multi-agent environment where interactions among simulated humans, assistants, and tools are utilized to gather multi-turn function calling trajectories. This approach ensures task compositionality and allows for effective function and trajectory generation by examining atomic tasks within compositional tasks. We produce a dataset BUTTONInstruct comprising 8k data points and demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments across various LLMs.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 16, 2024

DialogGen: Multi-modal Interactive Dialogue System for Multi-turn Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image (T2I) generation models have significantly advanced in recent years. However, effective interaction with these models is challenging for average users due to the need for specialized prompt engineering knowledge and the inability to perform multi-turn image generation, hindering a dynamic and iterative creation process. Recent attempts have tried to equip Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with T2I models to bring the user's natural language instructions into reality. Hence, the output modality of MLLMs is extended, and the multi-turn generation quality of T2I models is enhanced thanks to the strong multi-modal comprehension ability of MLLMs. However, many of these works face challenges in identifying correct output modalities and generating coherent images accordingly as the number of output modalities increases and the conversations go deeper. Therefore, we propose DialogGen, an effective pipeline to align off-the-shelf MLLMs and T2I models to build a Multi-modal Interactive Dialogue System (MIDS) for multi-turn Text-to-Image generation. It is composed of drawing prompt alignment, careful training data curation, and error correction. Moreover, as the field of MIDS flourishes, comprehensive benchmarks are urgently needed to evaluate MIDS fairly in terms of output modality correctness and multi-modal output coherence. To address this issue, we introduce the Multi-modal Dialogue Benchmark (DialogBen), a comprehensive bilingual benchmark designed to assess the ability of MLLMs to generate accurate and coherent multi-modal content that supports image editing. It contains two evaluation metrics to measure the model's ability to switch modalities and the coherence of the output images. Our extensive experiments on DialogBen and user study demonstrate the effectiveness of DialogGen compared with other State-of-the-Art models.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 13, 2024

WILT: A Multi-Turn, Memorization-Robust Inductive Logic Benchmark for LLMs

While large language models have shown impressive capabilities across a wide range of domains, they still encounter significant challenges in reasoning tasks that require gathering evidence over multiple turns and drawing logical conclusions. These challenges present significant obstacles for LLM chat user interfaces, which rely on multi-turn interactions to facilitate effective collaboration. This limitation leads to real-world issues; for example, service chatbots must gather necessary information from customers over multiple turns to diagnose and resolve problems effectively. Despite the multi-turn nature of many real-world LLM use cases, most existing benchmarks rely on carefully curated single-turn tests, which often blur the line between memorization and genuine reasoning. To address this, we introduce the Wason Inductive Logic Test (WILT), a simple yet challenging multi-turn reasoning benchmark designed to resist memorization. WILT is inspired by the Wason 2-4-6 task, where participants must infer a boolean function involving three variables (e.g., x < y < z) by proposing test cases (such as (2, 4, 6)). In WILT, each test starts from a clean slate, with only the initial instructions provided, preventing models from relying on pre-learned responses. Over several turns, models must interact with the environment by suggesting test cases to narrow the possible hypotheses and ultimately infer the hidden function based on the outcomes. Our findings reveal that LLMs struggle with this task, exhibiting distinct strengths and weaknesses: some are better at narrowing down the hypothesis space by proposing valuable test cases, while others are more adept at deducing the hidden function from observed cases. Despite these variations, the best-performing model achieves only 28% accuracy, highlighting a significant gap in LLM performance on complex multi-turn reasoning tasks.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 14, 2024

Multi-IF: Benchmarking LLMs on Multi-Turn and Multilingual Instructions Following

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various tasks, including instruction following, which is crucial for aligning model outputs with user expectations. However, evaluating LLMs' ability to follow instructions remains challenging due to the complexity and subjectivity of human language. Current benchmarks primarily focus on single-turn, monolingual instructions, which do not adequately reflect the complexities of real-world applications that require handling multi-turn and multilingual interactions. To address this gap, we introduce Multi-IF, a new benchmark designed to assess LLMs' proficiency in following multi-turn and multilingual instructions. Multi-IF, which utilizes a hybrid framework combining LLM and human annotators, expands upon the IFEval by incorporating multi-turn sequences and translating the English prompts into another 7 languages, resulting in a dataset of 4,501 multilingual conversations, where each has three turns. Our evaluation of 14 state-of-the-art LLMs on Multi-IF reveals that it presents a significantly more challenging task than existing benchmarks. All the models tested showed a higher rate of failure in executing instructions correctly with each additional turn. For example, o1-preview drops from 0.877 at the first turn to 0.707 at the third turn in terms of average accuracy over all languages. Moreover, languages with non-Latin scripts (Hindi, Russian, and Chinese) generally exhibit higher error rates, suggesting potential limitations in the models' multilingual capabilities. We release Multi-IF prompts and the evaluation code base to encourage further research in this critical area.

  • 19 authors
·
Oct 20, 2024

SimpleTIR: End-to-End Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Turn Tool-Integrated Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) can significantly improve their reasoning capabilities by interacting with external tools, a paradigm known as Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR). However, extending TIR to multi-turn scenarios using Reinforcement Learning (RL) is often hindered by training instability and performance collapse. We identify that such instability is primarily caused by a distributional drift from external tool feedback, leading to the generation of low-probability tokens. This issue compounds over successive turns, causing catastrophic gradient norm explosions that derail the training process. To address this challenge, we introduce SimpleTIR , a plug-and-play algorithm that stabilizes multi-turn TIR training. Its core strategy is to identify and filter out trajectories containing void turns, i.e., turns that yield neither a code block nor a final answer. By removing these problematic trajectories from the policy update, SimpleTIR effectively blocks the harmful, high-magnitude gradients, thus stabilizing the learning dynamics. Extensive experiments show that SimpleTIR achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging math reasoning benchmarks, notably elevating the AIME24 score from a text-only baseline of 22.1 to 50.5 when starting from the Qwen2.5-7B base model. Furthermore, by avoiding the constraints of supervised fine-tuning, SimpleTIR encourages the model to discover diverse and sophisticated reasoning patterns, such as self-correction and cross-validation.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 2 2

MMDU: A Multi-Turn Multi-Image Dialog Understanding Benchmark and Instruction-Tuning Dataset for LVLMs

Generating natural and meaningful responses to communicate with multi-modal human inputs is a fundamental capability of Large Vision-Language Models(LVLMs). While current open-source LVLMs demonstrate promising performance in simplified scenarios such as single-turn single-image input, they fall short in real-world conversation scenarios such as following instructions in a long context history with multi-turn and multi-images. Existing LVLM benchmarks primarily focus on single-choice questions or short-form responses, which do not adequately assess the capabilities of LVLMs in real-world human-AI interaction applications. Therefore, we introduce MMDU, a comprehensive benchmark, and MMDU-45k, a large-scale instruction tuning dataset, designed to evaluate and improve LVLMs' abilities in multi-turn and multi-image conversations. We employ the clustering algorithm to ffnd the relevant images and textual descriptions from the open-source Wikipedia and construct the question-answer pairs by human annotators with the assistance of the GPT-4o model. MMDU has a maximum of 18k image+text tokens, 20 images, and 27 turns, which is at least 5x longer than previous benchmarks and poses challenges to current LVLMs. Our in-depth analysis of 15 representative LVLMs using MMDU reveals that open-source LVLMs lag behind closed-source counterparts due to limited conversational instruction tuning data. We demonstrate that ffne-tuning open-source LVLMs on MMDU-45k signiffcantly address this gap, generating longer and more accurate conversations, and improving scores on MMDU and existing benchmarks (MMStar: +1.1%, MathVista: +1.5%, ChartQA:+1.2%). Our contributions pave the way for bridging the gap between current LVLM models and real-world application demands. This project is available at https://github.com/Liuziyu77/MMDU.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 17, 2024 6

InteractiveOmni: A Unified Omni-modal Model for Audio-Visual Multi-turn Dialogue

We introduce InteractiveOmni, a unified and open-source omni-modal large language model for audio-visual multi-turn interaction, ranging from 4B to 8B parameters, designed to lead the field of lightweight models by offering comprehensive omni-modal understanding and speech generation capabilities. To achieve this, we integrate the vision encoder, audio encoder, large language model, and speech decoder into a unified model for understanding and generation tasks. We design a multi-stage training strategy to ensure robust cross-modal capabilities, including pre-training for omni-modal understanding, followed by post-training with speech conversation and audio-visual interaction. To enable human-like long-term conversational ability, we meticulously curate a multi-turn training dataset that enhances the model's ability to handle complex and multi-turn interactions. To effectively evaluate the multi-turn memory and speech interaction capabilities, we construct the multi-modal multi-turn memory benchmark and the multi-turn speech interaction benchmark. Experiments demonstrate that InteractiveOmni significantly outperforms leading open-source models and provides a more intelligent multi-turn audio-visual experience, particularly in its long-term memory capabilities. Notably, InteractiveOmni-4B is comparable to the much larger model like Qwen2.5-Omni-7B on general benchmarks, and it can retain 97% of the performance of the InteractiveOmni-8B while utilizing only 50% of the model size. Achieving state-of-the-art results against similarly sized models across image, audio, video understanding, and speech generation tasks, InteractiveOmni is an accessible, open-source foundation for next-generation intelligent interactive systems.

  • 26 authors
·
Oct 15 2

Video-MTR: Reinforced Multi-Turn Reasoning for Long Video Understanding

Long-form video understanding, characterized by long-range temporal dependencies and multiple events, remains a challenge. Existing methods often rely on static reasoning or external visual-language models (VLMs), which face issues like complexity and sub-optimal performance due to the lack of end-to-end training. In this paper, we propose Video-MTR, a reinforced multi-turn reasoning framework designed to enable iterative key video segment selection and question comprehension. Unlike traditional video reasoning pipeline, which generate predictions in a single turn, Video-MTR performs reasoning in multiple turns, selecting video segments progressively based on the evolving understanding of previously processed segments and the current question. This iterative process allows for a more refined and contextually aware analysis of the video. To ensure intermediate reasoning process, we introduce a novel gated bi-level reward system, combining trajectory-level rewards based on answer correctness and turn-level rewards emphasizing frame-query relevance. This system optimizes both video segment selection and question comprehension, eliminating the need for external VLMs and allowing end-to-end training. Extensive experiments on benchmarks like VideoMME, MLVU, and EgoSchema demonstrate that Video-MTR outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and efficiency, advancing the state-of-the-art in long video understanding.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 28 2

Done Is Better than Perfect: Unlocking Efficient Reasoning by Structured Multi-Turn Decomposition

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are criticized for the excessively lengthy Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to derive the final answer, suffering from high first-token and overall latency. Typically, the CoT of LRMs mixes multiple thinking units; each unit attempts to produce a candidate answer to the original query. Hence, a natural idea to improve efficiency is to reduce the unit number. Yet, the fact that the thinking units in vanilla CoT cannot be explicitly managed renders doing so challenging. This paper introduces Multi-Turn Decomposition (MinD) to decode conventional CoT into a sequence of explicit, structured, and turn-wise interactions to bridge the gap. In MinD, the model provides a multi-turn response to the query, where each turn embraces a thinking unit and yields a corresponding answer. The subsequent turns can reflect, verify, revise, or explore alternative approaches to both the thinking and answer parts of earlier ones. This not only makes the answer delivered more swiftly, but also enables explicit controls over the iterative reasoning process (i.e., users may halt or continue at any turn). We follow a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) then reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm to realize MinD. We first rephrase the outputs of an LRM into multi-turn formats by prompting another LLM, and then tune the LRM with such data. Observing that the tuned model tends to consume even more tokens than the original one (probably due to that the multi-turn formats introduce additional answer tokens), we advocate leveraging RL algorithms like GRPO to prioritize correct outputs with fewer turns. Trained on the MATH dataset using R1-Distill models, MinD can achieve up to ~70% reduction in both output token usage and time to first token (TTFT), while maintaining competitive performance on reasoning benchmarks such as MATH-500, AIME24, AMC23, and GPQA-Diamond.

  • 5 authors
·
May 26 2

Scaling up Multi-Turn Off-Policy RL and Multi-Agent Tree Search for LLM Step-Provers

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into automated theorem proving has shown immense promise, yet is fundamentally constrained by challenges in scaling up both training-time reinforcement learning (RL) and inference-time compute. This paper introduces BFS-Prover-V2, a system designed to address this dual scaling problem. We present two primary innovations. The first is a novel multi-turn off-policy RL framework for continually improving the performance of LLM step-prover at training time. This framework, inspired by the principles of AlphaZero, utilizes a multi-stage expert iteration pipeline featuring adaptive tactic-level data filtering and periodic retraining to surmount the performance plateaus that typically curtail long-term RL in LLM-based agents. The second innovation is a planner-enhanced multi-agent search architecture that scales reasoning capabilities at inference time. This architecture employs a general reasoning model as a high-level planner to iteratively decompose complex theorems into a sequence of simpler subgoals. This hierarchical approach substantially reduces the search space, enabling a team of parallel prover agents to collaborate efficiently by leveraging a shared proof cache. We demonstrate that this dual approach to scaling yields state-of-the-art results on established formal mathematics benchmarks. BFS-Prover-V2 achieves 95.08\% and 41.4\% on the MiniF2F and ProofNet test sets respectively. While demonstrated in the domain of formal mathematics, the RL and inference techniques presented in this work are of broader interest and may be applied to other domains requiring long-horizon multi-turn reasoning and complex search.

MINT: Evaluating LLMs in Multi-turn Interaction with Tools and Language Feedback

To solve complex tasks, large language models (LLMs) often require multiple rounds of interactions with the user, sometimes assisted by external tools. However, current evaluation protocols often emphasize benchmark performance with single-turn exchanges, neglecting the nuanced interactions among the user, LLMs, and external tools, while also underestimating the importance of natural language feedback from users. These oversights contribute to discrepancies between research benchmark evaluations and real-world use cases. We introduce MINT, a benchmark that evaluates LLMs' ability to solve tasks with multi-turn interactions by (1) using tools and (2) leveraging natural language feedback. To ensure reproducibility, we provide an evaluation framework where LLMs can access tools by executing Python code and receive users' natural language feedback simulated by GPT-4. We repurpose a diverse set of established evaluation datasets focusing on reasoning, coding, and decision-making and carefully curate them into a compact subset for efficient evaluation. Our analysis of 20 open- and closed-source LLMs offers intriguing findings. (a) LLMs generally benefit from tools and language feedback, with performance gains (absolute, same below) of 1-8% for each turn of tool use and 2-17% with natural language feedback. (b) Better single-turn performance does not guarantee better multi-turn performance. (c) Surprisingly, on the LLMs evaluated, supervised instruction-finetuning (SIFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) generally hurt multi-turn capabilities. We expect MINT can help measure progress and incentivize research in improving LLMs' capabilities in multi-turn interactions, especially for open-source communities where multi-turn human evaluation can be less accessible compared to commercial LLMs with a larger user base.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 19, 2023

Scaling LLM Multi-turn RL with End-to-end Summarization-based Context Management

We study reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning of large language model (LLM) agents for long-horizon multi-turn tool use, where context length quickly becomes a fundamental bottleneck. Existing RL pipelines can suffer from degraded instruction following, excessive rollout costs, and most importantly, strict context limits. To address these challenges, we introduce summarization-based context management to training. In specific, it periodically compresses the tool using history by LLM-generated summaries that retain task-relevant information to keep a compact context while enabling the agent to scale beyond the fixed context window. Building on this formulation, we derive a policy gradient representation that seamlessly enables standard LLM RL infrastructures to optimize both tool-use behaviors as well as summarization strategies in an end-to-end fashion. We instantiate this framework with SUmmarization augmented Policy Optimization (SUPO), an LLM RL algorithm that enables long-horizon training beyond a fixed context limit. Experiments on interactive function calling and searching tasks demonstrate that SUPO significantly improves the success rate while maintaining the same or even lower working context length compared to baselines. We also demonstrate that for complex searching tasks, SUPO can further improve the evaluation performance when scaling test-time maximum round of summarization beyond that of training time. Our results establish summarization-based context management as a principled and scalable approach for training RL agents beyond a fixed context length limit.

GraphTracer: Graph-Guided Failure Tracing in LLM Agents for Robust Multi-Turn Deep Search

Multi-agent systems powered by Large Language Models excel at complex tasks through coordinated collaboration, yet they face high failure rates in multi-turn deep search scenarios. Existing temporal attribution methods struggle to accurately diagnose root causes, particularly when errors propagate across multiple agents. Attempts to automate failure attribution by analyzing action sequences remain ineffective due to their inability to account for information dependencies that span agents. This paper identifies two core challenges: (i) distinguishing symptoms from root causes in multi-agent error propagation, and (ii) tracing information dependencies beyond temporal order. To address these issues, we introduce GraphTracer, a framework that redefines failure attribution through information flow analysis. GraphTracer constructs Information Dependency Graphs (IDGs) to explicitly capture how agents reference and build on prior outputs. It localizes root causes by tracing through these dependency structures instead of relying on temporal sequences. GraphTracer also uses graph-aware synthetic data generation to target critical nodes, creating realistic failure scenarios. Evaluations on the Who\&When benchmark and integration into production systems demonstrate that GraphTracer-8B achieves up to 18.18\% higher attribution accuracy compared to state-of-the-art models and enables 4.8\% to 14.2\% performance improvements in deployed multi-agent frameworks, establishing a robust solution for multi-agent system debugging.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 12 2

ObjexMT: Objective Extraction and Metacognitive Calibration for LLM-as-a-Judge under Multi-Turn Jailbreaks

LLM-as-a-Judge (LLMaaJ) now underpins scalable evaluation, yet we lack a decisive test of a judge's qualification: can it recover a conversation's latent objective and know when that inference is trustworthy? LLMs degrade under irrelevant or long context; multi-turn jailbreaks further hide goals across turns. We introduce ObjexMT, a benchmark for objective extraction and metacognition. Given a multi-turn transcript, a model must return a one-sentence base objective and a self-reported confidence. Accuracy is computed via LLM-judge semantic similarity to gold objectives, converted to binary correctness by a single human-aligned threshold calibrated once on N = 100 items (tau^*=0.61). Metacognition is evaluated with ECE, Brier, Wrong-at-High-Conf, and risk-coverage. Across gpt-4.1, claude-sonnet-4, and Qwen3-235B-A22B-FP8 on SafeMTData_Attack600, SafeMTData_1K, MHJ, and CoSafe, claude-sonnet-4 attains the best objective-extraction accuracy (0.515) and calibration (ECE 0.296; Brier 0.324); gpt-4.1 and Qwen3-235B-A22B-FP8 tie at 0.441 but are overconfident (mean confidence approx0.88 vs. accuracy approx0.44; Wrong-at-0.90 approx48-52%). Performance varies by dataset (approx0.167-0.865). ObjexMT thus supplies an actionable test for LLM judges: when objectives are not explicit, judges often misinfer them with high confidence. We recommend exposing objectives when feasible and gating decisions by confidence otherwise. Code and data at https://github.com/hyunjun1121/ObjexMT_dataset.

  • 4 authors
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Aug 22

Stabilizing Long-term Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning with Gated Rewards

Reward sparsity in long-horizon reinforcement learning (RL) tasks remains a significant challenge, while existing outcome-based reward shaping struggles to define meaningful immediate rewards without introducing bias or requiring explicit task decomposition. Alternatively, verification-based reward shaping uses stepwise critics, but misalignment between immediate rewards and long-term objectives can lead to reward hacking and suboptimal policies. In this work, we address this problem in the context of software engineering (SWE) tasks, where multi-turn reasoning and rule-based verification are critical. We introduce the SWE-oriented RL Framework, a unified system supporting multi-turn interaction, docker-based execution, and customizable reward functions. Additionally, we propose Gated Reward Accumulation (G-RA), a novel method that accumulates immediate rewards only when high-level (long-term) rewards meet a predefined threshold, ensuring stable RL optimization. Experiments on SWE-bench Verified and kBench demonstrate that G-RA leads to an increase in completion rates (47.6\% \rightarrow 93.8\% and 22.0\% \rightarrow 86.0\%) and modification rates (19.6\% \rightarrow 23.8\% and 12.0\% \rightarrow 42.0\%), while avoiding policy degradation caused by reward misalignment. Our findings highlight the importance of balanced reward accumulation in long-horizon RL and provide a practical solution.

  • 5 authors
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Aug 14

RedCoder: Automated Multi-Turn Red Teaming for Code LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation (i.e., Code LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in AI-assisted software development and testing. However, recent studies have shown that these models are prone to generating vulnerable or even malicious code under adversarial settings. Existing red-teaming approaches rely on extensive human effort, limiting their scalability and practicality, and generally overlook the interactive nature of real-world AI-assisted programming, which often unfolds over multiple turns. To bridge these gaps, we present RedCoder, a red-teaming agent that engages victim models in multi-turn conversation to elicit vulnerable code. The pipeline to construct RedCoder begins with a multi-agent gaming process that simulates adversarial interactions, yielding a set of prototype conversations and an arsenal of reusable attack strategies. We then fine-tune an LLM on these prototype conversations to serve as the backbone of RedCoder. Once deployed, RedCoder autonomously engages Code LLMs in multi-turn conversations, dynamically retrieving relevant strategies from the arsenal to steer the dialogue toward vulnerability-inducing outputs. Experiments across multiple Code LLMs show that our approach outperforms prior single-turn and multi-turn red-team methods in inducing vulnerabilities in code generation, offering a scalable and effective tool for evaluating the security boundaries of modern code-generation systems.

  • 8 authors
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Jun 25

SAMA: Towards Multi-Turn Referential Grounded Video Chat with Large Language Models

Achieving fine-grained spatio-temporal understanding in videos remains a major challenge for current Video Large Multimodal Models (Video LMMs). Addressing this challenge requires mastering two core capabilities: video referring understanding, which captures the semantics of video regions, and video grounding, which segments object regions based on natural language descriptions. However, most existing approaches tackle these tasks in isolation, limiting progress toward unified, referentially grounded video interaction. We identify a key bottleneck in the lack of high-quality, unified video instruction data and a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating referentially grounded video chat. To address these challenges, we contribute in three core aspects: dataset, model, and benchmark. First, we introduce SAMA-239K, a large-scale dataset comprising 15K videos specifically curated to enable joint learning of video referring understanding, grounding, and multi-turn video chat. Second, we propose the SAMA model, which incorporates a versatile spatio-temporal context aggregator and a Segment Anything Model to jointly enhance fine-grained video comprehension and precise grounding capabilities. Finally, we establish SAMA-Bench, a meticulously designed benchmark consisting of 5,067 questions from 522 videos, to comprehensively evaluate the integrated capabilities of Video LMMs in multi-turn, spatio-temporal referring understanding and grounded dialogue. Extensive experiments and benchmarking results show that SAMA not only achieves strong performance on SAMA-Bench but also sets a new state-of-the-art on general grounding benchmarks, while maintaining highly competitive performance on standard visual understanding benchmarks.

  • 6 authors
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May 24

Beyond Single-Turn: A Survey on Multi-Turn Interactions with Large Language Models

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized their ability to handle single-turn tasks, yet real-world applications demand sophisticated multi-turn interactions. This survey provides a comprehensive review of recent advancements in evaluating and enhancing multi-turn interactions in LLMs. Focusing on task-specific scenarios, from instruction following in diverse domains such as math and coding to complex conversational engagements in roleplay, healthcare, education, and even adversarial jailbreak settings, we systematically examine the challenges of maintaining context, coherence, fairness, and responsiveness over prolonged dialogues. The paper organizes current benchmarks and datasets into coherent categories that reflect the evolving landscape of multi-turn dialogue evaluation. In addition, we review a range of enhancement methodologies under multi-turn settings, including model-centric strategies (contextual learning, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and new architectures), external integration approaches (memory-augmented, retrieval-based methods, and knowledge graph), and agent-based techniques for collaborative interactions. Finally, we discuss open challenges and propose future directions for research to further advance the robustness and effectiveness of multi-turn interactions in LLMs. Related resources and papers are available at https://github.com/yubol-cmu/Awesome-Multi-Turn-LLMs.

  • 7 authors
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Apr 7

One-Shot is Enough: Consolidating Multi-Turn Attacks into Efficient Single-Turn Prompts for LLMs

Despite extensive safety enhancements in large language models (LLMs), multi-turn "jailbreak" conversations crafted by skilled human adversaries can still breach even the most sophisticated guardrails. However, these multi-turn attacks demand considerable manual effort, limiting their scalability. In this work, we introduce a novel approach called Multi-turn-to-Single-turn (M2S) that systematically converts multi-turn jailbreak prompts into single-turn attacks. Specifically, we propose three conversion strategies - Hyphenize, Numberize, and Pythonize - each preserving sequential context yet packaging it in a single query. Our experiments on the Multi-turn Human Jailbreak (MHJ) dataset show that M2S often increases or maintains high Attack Success Rates (ASRs) compared to original multi-turn conversations. Notably, using a StrongREJECT-based evaluation of harmfulness, M2S achieves up to 95.9% ASR on Mistral-7B and outperforms original multi-turn prompts by as much as 17.5% in absolute improvement on GPT-4o. Further analysis reveals that certain adversarial tactics, when consolidated into a single prompt, exploit structural formatting cues to evade standard policy checks. These findings underscore that single-turn attacks - despite being simpler and cheaper to conduct - can be just as potent, if not more, than their multi-turn counterparts. Our findings underscore the urgent need to reevaluate and reinforce LLM safety strategies, given how adversarial queries can be compacted into a single prompt while still retaining sufficient complexity to bypass existing safety measures.

  • 7 authors
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Mar 6

MMMT-IF: A Challenging Multimodal Multi-Turn Instruction Following Benchmark

Evaluating instruction following capabilities for multimodal, multi-turn dialogue is challenging. With potentially multiple instructions in the input model context, the task is time-consuming for human raters and we show LLM based judges are biased towards answers from the same model. We propose MMMT-IF, an image based multi-turn Q&A evaluation set with added global instructions between questions, constraining the answer format. This challenges models to retrieve instructions dispersed across long dialogues and reason under instruction constraints. All instructions are objectively verifiable through code execution. We introduce the Programmatic Instruction Following (PIF) metric to measure the fraction of the instructions that are correctly followed while performing a reasoning task. The PIF-N-K set of metrics further evaluates robustness by measuring the fraction of samples in a corpus where, for each sample, at least K out of N generated model responses achieve a PIF score of one. The PIF metric aligns with human instruction following ratings, showing 60 percent correlation. Experiments show Gemini 1.5 Pro, GPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, have a PIF metric that drops from 0.81 on average at turn 1 across the models, to 0.64 at turn 20. Across all turns, when each response is repeated 4 times (PIF-4-4), GPT-4o and Gemini successfully follow all instructions only 11% of the time. When all the instructions are also appended to the end of the model input context, the PIF metric improves by 22.3 points on average, showing that the challenge with the task lies not only in following the instructions, but also in retrieving the instructions spread out in the model context. We plan to open source the MMMT-IF dataset and metric computation code.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 26, 2024

RED QUEEN: Safeguarding Large Language Models against Concealed Multi-Turn Jailbreaking

The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened up new opportunities across various domains and applications; yet it also presents challenges related to potential misuse. To mitigate such risks, red teaming has been employed as a proactive security measure to probe language models for harmful outputs via jailbreak attacks. However, current jailbreak attack approaches are single-turn with explicit malicious queries that do not fully capture the complexity of real-world interactions. In reality, users can engage in multi-turn interactions with LLM-based chat assistants, allowing them to conceal their true intentions in a more covert manner. To bridge this gap, we, first, propose a new jailbreak approach, RED QUEEN ATTACK. This method constructs a multi-turn scenario, concealing the malicious intent under the guise of preventing harm. We craft 40 scenarios that vary in turns and select 14 harmful categories to generate 56k multi-turn attack data points. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the RED QUEEN ATTACK with four representative LLM families of different sizes. Our experiments reveal that all LLMs are vulnerable to RED QUEEN ATTACK, reaching 87.62% attack success rate on GPT-4o and 75.4% on Llama3-70B. Further analysis reveals that larger models are more susceptible to the RED QUEEN ATTACK, with multi-turn structures and concealment strategies contributing to its success. To prioritize safety, we introduce a straightforward mitigation strategy called RED QUEEN GUARD, which aligns LLMs to effectively counter adversarial attacks. This approach reduces the attack success rate to below 1% while maintaining the model's performance across standard benchmarks. Full implementation and dataset are publicly accessible at https://github.com/kriti-hippo/red_queen.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 25, 2024

Peer Review as A Multi-Turn and Long-Context Dialogue with Role-Based Interactions

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated wide-ranging applications across various fields and have shown significant potential in the academic peer-review process. However, existing applications are primarily limited to static review generation based on submitted papers, which fail to capture the dynamic and iterative nature of real-world peer reviews. In this paper, we reformulate the peer-review process as a multi-turn, long-context dialogue, incorporating distinct roles for authors, reviewers, and decision makers. We construct a comprehensive dataset containing over 26,841 papers with 92,017 reviews collected from multiple sources, including the top-tier conference and prestigious journal. This dataset is meticulously designed to facilitate the applications of LLMs for multi-turn dialogues, effectively simulating the complete peer-review process. Furthermore, we propose a series of metrics to evaluate the performance of LLMs for each role under this reformulated peer-review setting, ensuring fair and comprehensive evaluations. We believe this work provides a promising perspective on enhancing the LLM-driven peer-review process by incorporating dynamic, role-based interactions. It aligns closely with the iterative and interactive nature of real-world academic peer review, offering a robust foundation for future research and development in this area. We open-source the dataset at https://github.com/chengtan9907/ReviewMT.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 9, 2024

LMRL Gym: Benchmarks for Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning with Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) provide excellent text-generation capabilities, but standard prompting and generation methods generally do not lead to intentional or goal-directed agents and might necessitate considerable prompt tuning. This becomes particularly apparent in multi-turn conversations: even the best current LLMs rarely ask clarifying questions, engage in explicit information gathering, or take actions now that lead to better decisions after multiple turns. Reinforcement learning has the potential to leverage the powerful modeling capabilities of LLMs, as well as their internal representation of textual interactions, to create capable goal-directed language agents. This can enable intentional and temporally extended interactions, such as with humans, through coordinated persuasion and carefully crafted questions, or in goal-directed play through text games to bring about desired final outcomes. However, enabling this requires the community to develop stable and reliable reinforcement learning algorithms that can effectively train LLMs. Developing such algorithms requires tasks that can gauge progress on algorithm design, provide accessible and reproducible evaluations for multi-turn interactions, and cover a range of task properties and challenges in improving reinforcement learning algorithms. Our paper introduces the LMRL-Gym benchmark for evaluating multi-turn RL for LLMs, together with an open-source research framework containing a basic toolkit for getting started on multi-turn RL with offline value-based and policy-based RL methods. Our benchmark consists of 8 different language tasks, which require multiple rounds of language interaction and cover a range of tasks in open-ended dialogue and text games.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 29, 2023

Parrot: Enhancing Multi-Turn Chat Models by Learning to Ask Questions

Impressive progress has been made on chat models based on Large Language Models (LLMs) recently; however, there is a noticeable lag in multi-turn conversations between open-source chat models (e.g., Alpaca and Vicuna) and the leading chat models (e.g., ChatGPT and GPT-4). Through a series of analyses, we attribute the lag to the lack of enough high-quality multi-turn instruction-tuning data. The available instruction-tuning data for the community are either single-turn conversations or multi-turn ones with certain issues, such as non-human-like instructions, less detailed responses, or rare topic shifts. In this paper, we address these challenges by introducing Parrot, a highly scalable solution designed to automatically generate high-quality instruction-tuning data, which are then used to enhance the effectiveness of chat models in multi-turn conversations. Specifically, we start by training the Parrot-Ask model, which is designed to emulate real users in generating instructions. We then utilize Parrot-Ask to engage in multi-turn conversations with ChatGPT across a diverse range of topics, resulting in a collection of 40K high-quality multi-turn dialogues (Parrot-40K). These data are subsequently employed to train a chat model that we have named Parrot-Chat. We demonstrate that the dialogues gathered from Parrot-Ask markedly outperform existing multi-turn instruction-following datasets in critical metrics, including topic diversity, number of turns, and resemblance to human conversation. With only 40K training examples, Parrot-Chat achieves strong performance against other 13B open-source models across a range of instruction-following benchmarks, and particularly excels in evaluations of multi-turn capabilities. We make all codes, datasets, and two versions of the Parrot-Ask model based on LLaMA2-13B and KuaiYii-13B available at https://github.com/kwai/KwaiYii/Parrot.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 11, 2023

Shallow Robustness, Deep Vulnerabilities: Multi-Turn Evaluation of Medical LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly transitioning into medical clinical use, yet their reliability under realistic, multi-turn interactions remains poorly understood. Existing evaluation frameworks typically assess single-turn question answering under idealized conditions, overlooking the complexities of medical consultations where conflicting input, misleading context, and authority influence are common. We introduce MedQA-Followup, a framework for systematically evaluating multi-turn robustness in medical question answering. Our approach distinguishes between shallow robustness (resisting misleading initial context) and deep robustness (maintaining accuracy when answers are challenged across turns), while also introducing an indirect-direct axis that separates contextual framing (indirect) from explicit suggestion (direct). Using controlled interventions on the MedQA dataset, we evaluate five state-of-the-art LLMs and find that while models perform reasonably well under shallow perturbations, they exhibit severe vulnerabilities in multi-turn settings, with accuracy dropping from 91.2% to as low as 13.5% for Claude Sonnet 4. Counterintuitively, indirect, context-based interventions are often more harmful than direct suggestions, yielding larger accuracy drops across models and exposing a significant vulnerability for clinical deployment. Further compounding analyses reveal model differences, with some showing additional performance drops under repeated interventions while others partially recovering or even improving. These findings highlight multi-turn robustness as a critical but underexplored dimension for safe and reliable deployment of medical LLMs.

  • 5 authors
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Oct 14

Amulet: Putting Complex Multi-Turn Conversations on the Stand with LLM Juries

Today, large language models are widely used as judges to evaluate responses from other language models. Hence, it is imperative to benchmark and improve these LLM-judges on real-world language model usage: a typical human-assistant conversation is lengthy, and shows significant diversity in topics, intents, and requirements across turns, e.g. social interactions, task requests, feedback. We present Amulet, a framework that leverages pertinent linguistic concepts of dialog-acts and maxims to improve the accuracy of LLM-judges on preference data with complex, multi-turn conversational context. Amulet presents valuable insights about (a) the communicative structures and intents present in the conversation (dialog acts), and (b) the satisfaction of conversational principles (maxims) by the preference responses, and uses them to make judgments. On four challenging datasets, Amulet shows that (a) humans frequently (60 to 70 percent of the time) change their intents from one turn of the conversation to the next, and (b) in 75 percent of instances, the preference responses can be differentiated via dialog acts and/or maxims, reiterating the latter's significance in judging such data. Amulet can be used either as a judge by applying the framework to a single LLM, or integrated into a jury with different LLM judges; our judges and juries show strong improvements on relevant baselines for all four datasets.

  • 5 authors
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May 26

DeepDialogue: A Multi-Turn Emotionally-Rich Spoken Dialogue Dataset

Recent advances in conversational AI have demonstrated impressive capabilities in single-turn responses, yet multi-turn dialogues remain challenging for even the most sophisticated language models. Current dialogue datasets are limited in their emotional range, domain diversity, turn depth, and are predominantly text-only, hindering progress in developing more human-like conversational systems across modalities. To address these limitations, we present DeepDialogue, a large-scale multimodal dataset containing 40,150 high-quality multi-turn dialogues spanning 41 domains and incorporating 20 distinct emotions with coherent emotional progressions. Our approach pairs 9 different language models (4B-72B parameters) to generate 65,600 initial conversations, which we then evaluate through a combination of human annotation and LLM-based quality filtering. The resulting dataset reveals fundamental insights: smaller models fail to maintain coherence beyond 6 dialogue turns; concrete domains (e.g., "cars," "travel") yield more meaningful conversations than abstract ones (e.g., "philosophy"); and cross-model interactions produce more coherent dialogues than same-model conversations. A key contribution of DeepDialogue is its speech component, where we synthesize emotion-consistent voices for all 40,150 dialogues, creating the first large-scale open-source multimodal dialogue dataset that faithfully preserves emotional context across multi-turn conversations.

  • 3 authors
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May 26

SecReEvalBench: A Multi-turned Security Resilience Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

The increasing deployment of large language models in security-sensitive domains necessitates rigorous evaluation of their resilience against adversarial prompt-based attacks. While previous benchmarks have focused on security evaluations with limited and predefined attack domains, such as cybersecurity attacks, they often lack a comprehensive assessment of intent-driven adversarial prompts and the consideration of real-life scenario-based multi-turn attacks. To address this gap, we present SecReEvalBench, the Security Resilience Evaluation Benchmark, which defines four novel metrics: Prompt Attack Resilience Score, Prompt Attack Refusal Logic Score, Chain-Based Attack Resilience Score and Chain-Based Attack Rejection Time Score. Moreover, SecReEvalBench employs six questioning sequences for model assessment: one-off attack, successive attack, successive reverse attack, alternative attack, sequential ascending attack with escalating threat levels and sequential descending attack with diminishing threat levels. In addition, we introduce a dataset customized for the benchmark, which incorporates both neutral and malicious prompts, categorised across seven security domains and sixteen attack techniques. In applying this benchmark, we systematically evaluate five state-of-the-art open-weighted large language models, Llama 3.1, Gemma 2, Mistral v0.3, DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen 3. Our findings offer critical insights into the strengths and weaknesses of modern large language models in defending against evolving adversarial threats. The SecReEvalBench dataset is publicly available at https://kaggle.com/datasets/5a7ee22cf9dab6c93b55a73f630f6c9b42e936351b0ae98fbae6ddaca7fe248d, which provides a groundwork for advancing research in large language model security.

  • 2 authors
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May 12

Proactive Agents for Multi-Turn Text-to-Image Generation Under Uncertainty

User prompts for generative AI models are often underspecified, leading to sub-optimal responses. This problem is particularly evident in text-to-image (T2I) generation, where users commonly struggle to articulate their precise intent. This disconnect between the user's vision and the model's interpretation often forces users to painstakingly and repeatedly refine their prompts. To address this, we propose a design for proactive T2I agents equipped with an interface to (1) actively ask clarification questions when uncertain, and (2) present their understanding of user intent as an understandable belief graph that a user can edit. We build simple prototypes for such agents and verify their effectiveness through both human studies and automated evaluation. We observed that at least 90% of human subjects found these agents and their belief graphs helpful for their T2I workflow. Moreover, we develop a scalable automated evaluation approach using two agents, one with a ground truth image and the other tries to ask as few questions as possible to align with the ground truth. On DesignBench, a benchmark we created for artists and designers, the COCO dataset (Lin et al., 2014), and ImageInWords (Garg et al., 2024), we observed that these T2I agents were able to ask informative questions and elicit crucial information to achieve successful alignment with at least 2 times higher VQAScore (Lin et al., 2024) than the standard single-turn T2I generation. Demo: https://github.com/google-deepmind/proactive_t2i_agents.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 9, 2024

Regressing the Relative Future: Efficient Policy Optimization for Multi-turn RLHF

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success at tasks like summarization that involve a single turn of interaction. However, they can still struggle with multi-turn tasks like dialogue that require long-term planning. Previous works on multi-turn dialogue extend single-turn reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) methods to the multi-turn setting by treating all prior dialogue turns as a long context. Such approaches suffer from covariate shift: the conversations in the training set have previous turns generated by some reference policy, which means that low training error may not necessarily correspond to good performance when the learner is actually in the conversation loop. In response, we introduce REgressing the RELative FUture (REFUEL), an efficient policy optimization approach designed to address multi-turn RLHF in LLMs. REFUEL employs a single model to estimate Q-values and trains on self-generated data, addressing the covariate shift issue. REFUEL frames the multi-turn RLHF problem as a sequence of regression tasks on iteratively collected datasets, enabling ease of implementation. Theoretically, we prove that REFUEL can match the performance of any policy covered by the training set. Empirically, we evaluate our algorithm by using Llama-3.1-70B-it to simulate a user in conversation with our model. REFUEL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods such as DPO and REBEL across various settings. Furthermore, despite having only 8 billion parameters, Llama-3-8B-it fine-tuned with REFUEL outperforms Llama-3.1-70B-it on long multi-turn dialogues. Implementation of REFUEL can be found at https://github.com/ZhaolinGao/REFUEL/, and models trained by REFUEL can be found at https://huggingface.co/Cornell-AGI.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 6, 2024

MT-Eval: A Multi-Turn Capabilities Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly relied upon for complex multi-turn conversations across diverse real-world applications. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on single-turn evaluations, overlooking the models' capabilities in multi-turn interactions. To address this gap, we introduce MT-Eval, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate multi-turn conversational abilities. By analyzing human-LLM conversations, we categorize interaction patterns into four types: recollection, expansion, refinement, and follow-up. We construct multi-turn queries for each category either by augmenting existing datasets or by creating new examples with GPT-4 to avoid data leakage. To study the factors impacting multi-turn abilities, we create single-turn versions of the 1170 multi-turn queries and compare performance. Our evaluation of 11 well-known LLMs shows that while closed-source models generally surpass open-source ones, certain open-source models exceed GPT-3.5-Turbo in specific tasks. We observe significant performance degradation in multi-turn settings compared to single-turn settings in most models, which is not correlated with the models' fundamental capabilities. Moreover, we identify the distance to relevant content and susceptibility to error propagation as the key factors influencing multi-turn performance. MT-Eval is released publicly to encourage future research towards more robust conversational models.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 29, 2024 2

SPIRAL: Self-Play on Zero-Sum Games Incentivizes Reasoning via Multi-Agent Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning

Recent advances in reinforcement learning have shown that language models can develop sophisticated reasoning through training on tasks with verifiable rewards, but these approaches depend on human-curated problem-answer pairs and domain-specific reward engineering. We introduce SPIRAL, a self-play framework where models learn by playing multi-turn, zero-sum games against continuously improving versions of themselves, eliminating the need for human supervision. Through self-play, SPIRAL generates an infinite curriculum of progressively challenging problems as models must constantly adapt to stronger opponents. To enable this self-play training at scale, We implement a fully online, multi-turn, multi-agent reinforcement learning system for LLMs and propose role-conditioned advantage estimation (RAE) to stabilize multi-agent training. Using SPIRAL, self-play on zero-sum games produces reasoning capabilities that transfer broadly. Training Qwen3-4B-Base on Kuhn Poker alone achieves 8.6% improvement on math and 8.4% on general reasoning, outperforming SFT on 25,000 expert game trajectories. Analysis reveals that this transfer occurs through three cognitive patterns: systematic decomposition, expected value calculation, and case-by-case analysis. Multi-game training (TicTacToe, Kuhn Poker, Simple Negotiation) further enhances performance as each game develops distinct reasoning strengths. Applying SPIRAL to a strong reasoning model (DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B) can still lead to 2.0% average improvement. These results demonstrate that zero-sum games naturally develop transferable reasoning capabilities, highlighting a promising direction for autonomous reasoning development.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 30 5

Information Gain-based Policy Optimization: A Simple and Effective Approach for Multi-Turn LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance their ability to interact with external environments through tool use, particularly in search-based settings that require multi-turn reasoning and knowledge acquisition. However, existing approaches typically rely on outcome-based rewards that are only provided at the final answer. This reward sparsity becomes particularly problematic in multi-turn settings, where long trajectories exacerbate two critical issues: (i) advantage collapse, where all rollouts receive identical rewards and provide no useful learning signals, and (ii) lack of fine-grained credit assignment, where dependencies between turns are obscured, especially in long-horizon tasks. In this paper, we propose Information Gain-based Policy Optimization (IGPO), a simple yet effective RL framework that provides dense and intrinsic supervision for multi-turn agent training. IGPO models each interaction turn as an incremental process of acquiring information about the ground truth, and defines turn-level rewards as the marginal increase in the policy's probability of producing the correct answer. Unlike prior process-level reward approaches that depend on external reward models or costly Monte Carlo estimation, IGPO derives intrinsic rewards directly from the model's own belief updates. These intrinsic turn-level rewards are combined with outcome-level supervision to form dense reward trajectories. Extensive experiments on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks demonstrate that IGPO consistently outperforms strong baselines in multi-turn scenarios, achieving higher accuracy and improved sample efficiency.

antgroup Ant Group
·
Oct 16 2

SciGraphQA: A Large-Scale Synthetic Multi-Turn Question-Answering Dataset for Scientific Graphs

In this work, we present SciGraphQA, a synthetic multi-turn question-answer dataset related to academic graphs. SciGraphQA is 13 times larger than ChartVQA, the previously largest chart-visual question-answering dataset. It is also the largest open-sourced chart VQA dataset with non-synthetic charts. To build our dataset, we selected 290,000 Computer Science or Machine Learning ArXiv papers published between 2010 and 2020, and then used Palm-2 to generate 295K samples of open-vocabulary multi-turn question-answering dialogues about the graphs. As context, we provided the text-only Palm-2 with paper title, abstract, paragraph mentioning the graph, and rich text contextual data from the graph itself, obtaining dialogues with an average 2.23 question-answer turns for each graph. We asked GPT-4 to assess the matching quality of our question-answer turns given the paper's context, obtaining an average rating of 8.7/10 on our 3K test set. We evaluated the 0-shot capability of the most popular MLLM models such as LLaVa, mPLUGowl, BLIP-2, and openFlamingo's on our dataset, finding LLaVA-13B being the most performant with a CIDEr score of 0.08. We further enriched the question prompts for LLAVA by including the serialized data tables extracted from the graphs using the DePlot model, boosting LLaVA's 0-shot CIDEr to 0.15. To verify the validity of our dataset, we also fine-tuned LLaVa using our dataset, reaching a substantially higher CIDEr score of 0.26. We anticipate further accuracy improvement by including segmentation mask tokens and leveraging larger LLM backbones coupled with emergent prompting techniques. Our code and data are open-sourced.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 7, 2023