Empathy improves human-machine dialogue systems by enhancing the user’s experience. While traditional models have aimed to detect and express users’ emotions from dialogue history, they neglect the crucial and complex interactions among emotion, emotion causes, and commonsense. To address this, we introduce the ECC (Emotion, Cause, and Commonsense) framework, which leverages specialized encoders to capture the key features of emotion, cause, and commonsense and collaboratively models these through a Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder. ECC further employs novel loss functions to refine the interplay of three factors and generates empathetic responses using an energy-based model supported by ODE sampling. Empirical results on the EmpatheticDialogues dataset demonstrate that ECC outperforms existing baselines, offering a robust solution for empathetic dialogue generation.

Role-playing systems powered by large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly influential in emotional communication applications. However, these systems are susceptible to character hallucinations, where the model deviates from predefined character roles and generates responses that are inconsistent with the intended persona. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of character hallucination from an attack perspective, introducing the RoleBreak framework. Our framework identifies two core mechanisms—query sparsity and role-query conflict—as key factors driving character hallucination. Leveraging these insights, we construct a novel dataset, RoleBreakEval, to evaluate existing hallucination mitigation techniques. Our experiments reveal that even enhanced models trained to minimize hallucination remain vulnerable to attacks. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose a novel defence strategy, the Narrator Mode, which generates supplemental context through narration to mitigate role-query conflicts and improve query generalization. Experimental results demonstrate that Narrator Mode significantly outperforms traditional refusal-based strategies by reducing hallucinations, enhancing fidelity to character roles and queries, and improving overall narrative coherence.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to exhibit various biases and stereotypes in their generated content. While extensive research has investigated biases in LLMs, prior work has predominantly focused on explicit bias, with minimal attention to implicit bias and the relation between these two forms of bias. This paper presents a systematic framework grounded in social psychology theories to investigate and compare explicit and implicit biases in LLMs.We propose a novel self-reflection-based evaluation framework that operates in two phases: first measuring implicit bias through simulated psychological assessment methods, then evaluating explicit bias by prompting LLMs to analyze their own generated content. Through extensive experiments on advanced LLMs across multiple social dimensions, we demonstrate that LLMs exhibit a substantial inconsistency between explicit and implicit biases: while explicit bias manifests as mild stereotypes, implicit bias exhibits strong stereotypes.We further investigate the underlying factors contributing to this explicit-implicit bias inconsistency, examining the effects of training data scale, model size, and alignment techniques. Experimental results indicate that while explicit bias declines with increased training data and model size, implicit bias exhibits a contrasting upward trend. Moreover, contemporary alignment methods effectively suppress explicit bias but show limited efficacy in mitigating implicit bias.

Using Large Language Model agents to simulate human game behaviors offers valuable insights for human social psychology in anthropomorphic AI research. While current models rely on static personality traits, real-world evidence shows personality evolves through environmental feedback. Recent work introduced dynamic personality traits but lacked natural selection processes and direct psychological metrics, failing to accurately capture authentic dynamic personality variations. To address these limitations, we propose an enhanced framework within the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a socially significant scenario. By using game payoffs as environmental feedback, we drive adaptive personality evolution and analyze correlations between personality metrics and behavior. Our framework reveals new behavioral patterns of agents and evaluates personality-behavior relationships, advancing agent-based social simulations and human-AI symbiosis research.

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced document-level relation extraction (DocRE), but DocRE is more complex than sentence-level relation extraction (SentRE), facing challenges like diverse relation types, coreference resolution and long-distance dependencies. Traditional pipeline methods, which detect relations before generating triplets, often propagate errors and harm performance. Meanwhile, fine-tuning methods require extensive human-annotated data, and in-context learning (ICL) underperforms compared to supervised approaches. We propose an iterative reflection framework for DocRE, inspired by human non-linear reading cognition. The framework leverages explicit and implicit relations between triplets to provide feedback for LLMs refinement. Explicit feedback uses logical rules-based reasoning, while implicit feedback reconstructs triplets into documents for comparison. This dual-process iteration mimics human semantic cognition, enabling dynamic optimization through self-generated supervision. For the first time, this achieves zero-shot performance comparable to fully supervised models. Experiments show our method surpasses existing LLM-based approaches and matches state-of-the-art BERT-based methods.

Personalized Dialogue Generation (PDG) aims to create coherent responses according to roles or personas. Traditional PDG relies on external role data, which can be scarce and raise privacy concerns. Approaches address these issues by extracting role information from dialogue history, which often fail to generically model roles in continuous space. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel framework Models Roles from Personalized Dialogue History by Exploring and Utilizing Latent Space (MORPHEUS) through a three-stage training process. Specifically, we create a persona codebook to represent roles in latent space compactly, and this codebook is used to construct a posterior distribution of role information. This method enables the model to generalize across roles, allowing the generation of personalized dialogues even for unseen roles. Experiments on both Chinese and English datasets demonstrate that MORPHEUS enhances the extraction of role information, and improves response generation without external role data. Additionally, MORPHEUS can be considered an efficient fine-tuning for large language models.

While extensive work has examined the explicit and implicit biases in large language models (LLMs), little research explores the relation between these two types of biases. This paper presents a comparative study of the explicit and implicit biases in LLMs grounded in social psychology. Social psychology distinguishes between explicit and implicit biases by whether the bias can be self-recognized by individuals. Aligning with this conceptualization, we propose a self-evaluation-based two-stage measurement of explicit and implicit biases within LLMs. First, the LLM is prompted to automatically fill templates with social targets to measure implicit bias toward these targets, where the bias is less likely to be self-recognized by the LLM. Then, the LLM is prompted to self-evaluate the templates filled by itself to measure explicit bias toward the same targets, where the bias is more likely to be self-recognized by the LLM. Experiments conducted on state-of-the-art LLMs reveal human-like inconsistency between explicit and implicit occupational gender biases. This work bridges a critical gap where prior studies concentrate solely on either explicit or implicit bias. We advocate that future work highlight the relation between explicit and implicit biases in LLMs.

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a field that aims to classify the emotion of each utterance within conversational contexts. This presents significant challenges, particularly in handling emotional ambiguity across various speakers and contextual factors. Existing ERC approaches have primarily focused on modeling conversational contexts while incorporating only superficial speaker attributes such as names, memories, and interactions. Recent works introduce personality as an essential deep speaker factor for emotion recognition, but relies on static personality, overlooking dynamic variability during conversations. Advances in personality psychology conceptualize personality as dynamic, proposing that personality states can change across situations. In this paper, we introduce ERC-DP, a novel model considering the dynamic personality of speakers during conversations. ERC-DP accounts for past utterances from the same speaker as situation impacting dynamic personality. It combines personality modeling with prompt design and fine-grained classification modules. Through a series of comprehensive experiments, ERC-DP demonstrates superior performance on three benchmark conversational datasets.

The personalized dialogue explores the consistent relationship between dialogue generation and personality. Existing personalized dialogue agents model persona profiles from three resources: sparse or dense persona descriptions and dialogue histories. However, sparse structured persona attributes are explicit but uninformative, dense persona texts contain rich persona descriptions with much noise, and dialogue history query is both noisy and uninformative for persona modeling. In this work, we combine the advantages of the three resources to obtain a richer and more accurate persona. We design a Contrastive Latent Variable-based model (CLV) that clusters the dense persona descriptions into sparse categories, which are combined with the history query to generate personalized responses. Experimental results on Chinese and English datasets demonstrate our model’s superiority in personalization.

Target-oriented dialogue guides the dialogue to a target quickly and smoothly. The latest approaches focus on global planning, which plans toward the target before the conversation instead of adopting a greedy strategy during the conversation. However, the global plan in existing works is fixed to certain turns by generating paths with certain nodes, which limits the optimization of turns and coherence of the target-oriented process. Toward flexible global planning, we propose to generate a global path as a natural language sentence instead of a sequence of nodes. With this path, the dialog is guided to the target with flexible turns of dialog. For model training, we also extract targetoriented dialogues from the chit-chat corpus with a knowledge graph. We conduct experiments on three datasets and simulate scenarios with and without user participation. The results show that our method has fewer turns, more coherent semantics, and a higher success rate in reaching the target than baselines.

In the target-oriented dialogue, the representation and achievement of targets are two interrelated essential issues. In current approaches, the target is typically supposed to be a single object represented as a word, which makes it relatively easy to achieve the target through dialogue with the help of a knowledge graph (KG). However, when the target has complex semantics, the existing knowledge graph is often incomplete in tracking complex semantic relations. This paper studies target-oriented dialog where the target is a topic sentence. We combine the methods of knowledge retrieval and relationship prediction to construct a context-related dynamic KG. On dynamic KG, we can track the implicit semantic paths in the speaker’s mind that may not exist in the existing KGs. In addition, we also designed a novel metric to evaluate the tracked path automatically. The experimental results show that our method can control the agent more logically and smoothly toward the complex target.

Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) aim to determine a goal item by sequentially tracking users’ interests through multi-turn conversation. In CRS, implicit patterns of user interest sequence guide the smooth transition of dialog utterances to the goal item. However, with the convenient explicit knowledge of knowledge graph (KG), existing KG-based CRS methods over-rely on the explicit separate KG links to model the user interests but ignore the rich goal-aware implicit interest sequence patterns in a dialog. In addition, interest sequence is also not fully used to generate smooth transited utterances. We propose CR-GIS with a parallel star framework. First, an interest-level star graph is designed to model the goal-aware implicit user interest sequence. Second, a hierarchical Star Transformer is designed to guide the multi-turn utterances generation with the interest-level star graph. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of CR-GIS in achieving more accurate recommended items with more fluent and coherent dialog utterances.

Target-oriented dialog aims to reach a global target through multi-turn conversation. The key to the task is the global planning towards the target, which flexibly guides the dialog concerning the context. However, existing target-oriented dialog works take a local and greedy strategy for response generation, where global planning is absent. In this work, we propose global planning for target-oriented dialog on a commonsense knowledge graph (KG). We design a global reinforcement learning with the planned paths to flexibly adjust the local response generation model towards the global target. We also propose a KG-based method to collect target-oriented samples automatically from the chit-chat corpus for model training. Experiments show that our method can reach the target with a higher success rate, fewer turns, and more coherent responses.

Human conversations of recommendation naturally involve the shift of interests which can align the recommendation actions and conversation process to make accurate recommendations with rich explanations. However, existing conversational recommendation systems (CRS) ignore the advantage of user interest shift in connecting recommendation and conversation, which leads to an ineffective loose coupling structure of CRS. To address this issue, by modeling the recommendation actions as recommendation paths in a knowledge graph (KG), we propose DICR (Dual Imitation for Conversational Recommendation), which designs a dual imitation to explicitly align the recommendation paths and user interest shift paths in a recommendation module and a conversation module, respectively. By exchanging alignment signals, DICR achieves bidirectional promotion between recommendation and conversation modules and generates high-quality responses with accurate recommendations and coherent explanations. Experiments demonstrate that DICR outperforms the state-of-the-art models on recommendation and conversation performance with automatic, human, and novel explainability metrics.