Wenge Liu

Yi Cheng, Wenge Liu, Wenjie Li et al.

Providing Emotional Support (ES) to soothe people in emotional distress is an essential capability in social interactions. Most existing researches on building ES conversation systems only considered single-turn interactions with users, which was over-simplified. In comparison, multi-turn ES conversation systems can provide ES more effectively, but face several new technical challenges, including: (1) how to adopt appropriate support strategies to achieve the long-term dialogue goal of comforting the user's emotion; (2) how to dynamically model the user's state. In this paper, we propose a novel system MultiESC to address these issues. For strategy planning, drawing inspiration from the A* search algorithm, we propose lookahead heuristics to estimate the future user feedback after using particular strategies, which helps to select strategies that can lead to the best long-term effects. For user state modeling, MultiESC focuses on capturing users' subtle emotional expressions and understanding their emotion causes. Extensive experiments show that MultiESC significantly outperforms competitive baselines in both dialogue generation and strategy planning. Our codes are available at https://github.com/lwgkzl/MultiESC.

Yi Cheng, Wenge Liu, Jian Wang et al.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in exploring dialogues with more complex goals, such as negotiation, persuasion, and emotional support, which go beyond traditional service-focused dialogue systems. Apart from the requirement for much more sophisticated strategic reasoning and communication skills, a significant challenge of these tasks lies in the difficulty of objectively measuring the achievement of their goals in a quantifiable way, making it difficult for existing research to directly optimize the dialogue procedure towards them. In our work, we emphasize the multifaceted nature of complex dialogue goals and argue that it is more feasible to accomplish them by comprehensively considering and jointly promoting their different aspects. To this end, we propose a novel dialogue framework, Cooper, which coordinates multiple specialized agents, each dedicated to a specific dialogue goal aspect separately, to approach the complex objective. Through this divide-and-conquer manner, we make complex dialogue goals more approachable and elicit greater intelligence via the collaboration of individual agents. Experiments on persuasion and emotional support dialogues demonstrate the superiority of our method over a set of competitive baselines.

Yi Cheng, Wenge Liu, Kaishuai Xu et al.

Previous research has demonstrated the potential of AI agents to act as companions that can provide constant emotional support for humans. In this paper, we emphasize the necessity of autonomous adaptation in personal AI companionship, an underexplored yet promising direction. Such adaptability is crucial as it can facilitate more tailored interactions with users and allow the agent to evolve in response to users' changing needs. However, imbuing agents with autonomous adaptability presents unique challenges, including identifying optimal adaptations to meet users' expectations and ensuring a smooth transition during the adaptation process. To address them, we devise a hierarchical framework, AutoPal, that enables controllable and authentic adjustments to the agent's persona based on user interactions. A personamatching dataset is constructed to facilitate the learning of optimal persona adaptations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AutoPal and highlight the importance of autonomous adaptability in AI companionship.