@inproceedings{zhang-jaitly-2025-sage,
    title = "{SAGE}: Steering Dialog Generation with Future-Aware State-Action Augmentation",
    author = "Zhang, Yizhe  and
      Jaitly, Navdeep",
    editor = "Abercrombie, Gavin  and
      Basile, Valerio  and
      Frenda, Simona  and
      Tonelli, Sara  and
      Dudy, Shiran",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the The 4th Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.nlperspectives-1.11/",
    pages = "123--132",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-350-0",
    abstract = "Recent advances in large language models have enabled impressive task-oriented applications, yet building emotionally intelligent chatbots for natural, strategic conversations remains challenging. Current approaches often assume a single ``ground truth'' for emotional responses, overlooking the subjectivity of human emotion. We present a novel perspectivist approach, SAGE, that models multiple perspectives in dialogue generation using latent variables. At its core is the State-Action Chain (SAC), which augments standard fine-tuning with latent variables capturing diverse emotional states and conversational strategies between turns, in a future-looking manner. During inference, these variables are generated before each response, enabling multi-perspective control while preserving natural interactions. We also introduce a self-improvement pipeline combining dialogue tree search, LLM-based reward modeling, and targeted fine-tuning to optimize conversational trajectories. Experiments show improved LLM-based judgments while maintaining strong general LLM performance. The discrete latent variables further enable search-based strategies and open avenues for state-level reinforcement learning in dialogue systems, where learning can occur at the state level rather than the token level."
}