Beyond the Assistant Turn: User Turn Generation as a Probe of Interaction Awareness in Language Models
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866910098882822144 |
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| author | Shekkizhar, Sarath Cosentino, Romain Earle, Adam |
| author_facet | Shekkizhar, Sarath Cosentino, Romain Earle, Adam |
| contents | Standard LLM benchmarks evaluate the assistant turn: the model generates a response to an input, a verifier scores correctness, and the analysis ends. This paradigm leaves unmeasured whether the LLM encodes any awareness of what follows the assistant response. We propose user-turn generation as a probe of this gap: given a conversation context of user query and assistant response, we let a model generate under the user role. If the model's weights encode interaction awareness, the generated user turn will be a grounded follow-up that reacts to the preceding context. Through experiments across $11$ open-weight LLMs (Qwen3.5, gpt-oss, GLM) and $5$ datasets (math reasoning, instruction following, conversation), we show that interaction awareness is decoupled from task accuracy. In particular, within the Qwen3.5 family, GSM8K accuracy scales from $41\%$ ($0.8$B) to $96.8\%$ ($397$B-A$17$B), yet genuine follow-up rates under deterministic generation remain near zero. In contrast, higher temperature sampling reveals interaction awareness is latent with follow up rates reaching $22\%$. Controlled perturbations validate that the proposed probe measures a real property of the model, and collaboration-oriented post-training on Qwen3.5-2B demonstrates an increase in follow-up rates. Our results show that user-turn generation captures a dimension of LLM behavior, interaction awareness, that is unexplored and invisible with current assistant-only benchmarks. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_02315 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Beyond the Assistant Turn: User Turn Generation as a Probe of Interaction Awareness in Language Models Shekkizhar, Sarath Cosentino, Romain Earle, Adam Artificial Intelligence Standard LLM benchmarks evaluate the assistant turn: the model generates a response to an input, a verifier scores correctness, and the analysis ends. This paradigm leaves unmeasured whether the LLM encodes any awareness of what follows the assistant response. We propose user-turn generation as a probe of this gap: given a conversation context of user query and assistant response, we let a model generate under the user role. If the model's weights encode interaction awareness, the generated user turn will be a grounded follow-up that reacts to the preceding context. Through experiments across $11$ open-weight LLMs (Qwen3.5, gpt-oss, GLM) and $5$ datasets (math reasoning, instruction following, conversation), we show that interaction awareness is decoupled from task accuracy. In particular, within the Qwen3.5 family, GSM8K accuracy scales from $41\%$ ($0.8$B) to $96.8\%$ ($397$B-A$17$B), yet genuine follow-up rates under deterministic generation remain near zero. In contrast, higher temperature sampling reveals interaction awareness is latent with follow up rates reaching $22\%$. Controlled perturbations validate that the proposed probe measures a real property of the model, and collaboration-oriented post-training on Qwen3.5-2B demonstrates an increase in follow-up rates. Our results show that user-turn generation captures a dimension of LLM behavior, interaction awareness, that is unexplored and invisible with current assistant-only benchmarks. |
| title | Beyond the Assistant Turn: User Turn Generation as a Probe of Interaction Awareness in Language Models |
| topic | Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02315 |