Reinforcing Real-world Service Agents: Balancing Utility and Cost in Task-oriented Dialogue
This work is significant for businesses and service providers aiming to deploy cost-effective yet empathetic AI agents for customer interaction, offering strong specific gains in balancing utility and cost.
This paper addresses the challenge of balancing empathetic communication and budget-aware decision-making in task-oriented dialogue agents. The proposed InteractCS-RL framework, which uses a multi-granularity reinforcement learning approach, significantly outperforms existing baselines in customized real business scenarios and demonstrates robustness across diverse domains.
The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has accelerated the transition from conversational chatbots to general agents. However, effectively balancing empathetic communication with budget-aware decision-making remains an open challenge. Since existing methods fail to capture these complex strategic trade-offs, we propose InteractCS-RL, a framework that reframes task-oriented dialogue as a multi-granularity reinforcement learning process. Specifically, we first establish a User-centric Interaction Framework to provide a high-fidelity training gym, enabling agents to dynamically explore diverse strategies with persona-driven users. Then, we introduce Cost-aware Multi-turn Policy Optimization (CMPO) with a hybrid advantage estimation strategy. By integrating generative process credits and employing a PID-Lagrangian cost controller, CMPO effectively guides the policy to explore Pareto boundary between user reward and global cost constraints. Extensive experiments on customized real business scenarios demonstrate that InteractCS-RL significantly outperform other baselines across three evaluation dimensions. Further evaluation on tool-agent-user interaction benchmarks verify InteractCS-RL robustness across diverse domains.