@inproceedings{lee-lee-2025-limits,
    title = "The Limits of Post-hoc Preference Adaptation: A Case Study on {DSTC}12 Clustering",
    author = "Lee, Jihyun  and
      Lee, Gary",
    editor = "Hedayatnia, Behnam  and
      Chen, Vivian  and
      Chen, Zhang  and
      Gupta, Raghav  and
      Galley, Michel",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Twelfth Dialog System Technology Challenge",
    month = aug,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Avignon, France",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-10/2025.dstc-1.4/",
    pages = "36--43",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-330-2",
    abstract = "Understanding user intent in dialogue is essential for controllable and coherent conversational AI. In this work, we present a case study on controllable theme induction in dialogue systems using the DSTC12 Track 2 dataset. Our pipeline integrates LLM-based summarization, utterance clustering, and synthetic preference modeling based on should-link and cannot-link predictions. While preference signals offer moderate improvements in cluster refinement, we observe that their effectiveness is significantly constrained by coarse initial clustering. Experiments on the Finance and Insurance domains show that even authentic human labeled preference struggle when initial clusters do not align with human intent. These findings highlight the need to incorporate preference supervision earlier in the pipeline to ensure semantically coherent clustering."
}