Towards Automated Error Discovery: A Study in Conversational AI

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Petrak, Dominic, Tran, Thy Thy, Gurevych, Iryna
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Petrak, Dominic
Tran, Thy Thy
Gurevych, Iryna
author_facet Petrak, Dominic
Tran, Thy Thy
Gurevych, Iryna
contents Although LLM-based conversational agents demonstrate strong fluency and coherence, they still produce undesirable behaviors (errors) that are challenging to prevent from reaching users during deployment. Recent research leverages large language models (LLMs) to detect errors and guide response-generation models toward improvement. However, current LLMs struggle to identify errors not explicitly specified in their instructions, such as those arising from updates to the response-generation model or shifts in user behavior. In this work, we introduce Automated Error Discovery, a framework for detecting and defining errors in conversational AI, and propose SEEED (Soft Clustering Extended Encoder-Based Error Detection), as an encoder-based approach to its implementation. We enhance the Soft Nearest Neighbor Loss by amplifying distance weighting for negative samples and introduce Label-Based Sample Ranking to select highly contrastive examples for better representation learning. SEEED outperforms adapted baselines -- including GPT-4o and Phi-4 -- across multiple error-annotated dialogue datasets, improving the accuracy for detecting unknown errors by up to 8 points and demonstrating strong generalization to unknown intent detection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_10833
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Automated Error Discovery: A Study in Conversational AI
Petrak, Dominic
Tran, Thy Thy
Gurevych, Iryna
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
Although LLM-based conversational agents demonstrate strong fluency and coherence, they still produce undesirable behaviors (errors) that are challenging to prevent from reaching users during deployment. Recent research leverages large language models (LLMs) to detect errors and guide response-generation models toward improvement. However, current LLMs struggle to identify errors not explicitly specified in their instructions, such as those arising from updates to the response-generation model or shifts in user behavior. In this work, we introduce Automated Error Discovery, a framework for detecting and defining errors in conversational AI, and propose SEEED (Soft Clustering Extended Encoder-Based Error Detection), as an encoder-based approach to its implementation. We enhance the Soft Nearest Neighbor Loss by amplifying distance weighting for negative samples and introduce Label-Based Sample Ranking to select highly contrastive examples for better representation learning. SEEED outperforms adapted baselines -- including GPT-4o and Phi-4 -- across multiple error-annotated dialogue datasets, improving the accuracy for detecting unknown errors by up to 8 points and demonstrating strong generalization to unknown intent detection.
title Towards Automated Error Discovery: A Study in Conversational AI
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10833