User-Aware Active Knowledge Acquisition for Emotional Support Dialogue

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Xu, Mufan, Chen, Kehai, Hu, Jiahao, Xu, Xinchao, Yang, Muyun, Zhao, Tiejun, Zhang, Min
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866913170066505728
author Xu, Mufan
Chen, Kehai
Hu, Jiahao
Xu, Xinchao
Yang, Muyun
Zhao, Tiejun
Zhang, Min
author_facet Xu, Mufan
Chen, Kehai
Hu, Jiahao
Xu, Xinchao
Yang, Muyun
Zhao, Tiejun
Zhang, Min
contents Emotional support plays an important role in dialogue systems, and its success depends on adapting to a user's evolving and implicit needs across multi-turn interactions while leveraging the strong reasoning capacity of large language models. However, since signals about user needs are often weak, indirect, and can only be disambiguated through multi-turn interaction, existing emotional support methods often struggle to acquire and generalize relevant conversational knowledge efficiently. To bridge this gap, we introduce User-Aware Active Knowledge Acquisition (UKA), a gradient-free active dialogue learning framework that explicitly represents uncertainty about user needs and incorporates active learning into both knowledge acquisition and response selection.We propose a Theory-of-Mind uncertainty estimation mechanism that allows the model to prioritize responses, thereby eliciting more informative user feedback. UKA is capable of efficiently exploring user-aligned conversational knowledge during training while maintaining robustness at test time. Experiments across multiple dialogue benchmarks and model architectures demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines in dialogue quality and user alignment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_29715
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle User-Aware Active Knowledge Acquisition for Emotional Support Dialogue
Xu, Mufan
Chen, Kehai
Hu, Jiahao
Xu, Xinchao
Yang, Muyun
Zhao, Tiejun
Zhang, Min
Computation and Language
Emotional support plays an important role in dialogue systems, and its success depends on adapting to a user's evolving and implicit needs across multi-turn interactions while leveraging the strong reasoning capacity of large language models. However, since signals about user needs are often weak, indirect, and can only be disambiguated through multi-turn interaction, existing emotional support methods often struggle to acquire and generalize relevant conversational knowledge efficiently. To bridge this gap, we introduce User-Aware Active Knowledge Acquisition (UKA), a gradient-free active dialogue learning framework that explicitly represents uncertainty about user needs and incorporates active learning into both knowledge acquisition and response selection.We propose a Theory-of-Mind uncertainty estimation mechanism that allows the model to prioritize responses, thereby eliciting more informative user feedback. UKA is capable of efficiently exploring user-aligned conversational knowledge during training while maintaining robustness at test time. Experiments across multiple dialogue benchmarks and model architectures demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines in dialogue quality and user alignment.
title User-Aware Active Knowledge Acquisition for Emotional Support Dialogue
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29715