DialogXpert: Driving Intelligent and Emotion-Aware Conversations Through Online Value-Based Reinforcement Learning with LLM Priors

Tazeek Bin Abdur Rakib; Ambuj Mehrish; Lay-Ki Soon; Wern Han Lim; Soujanya Poria

AAAI 2026technical0 citations

DialogXpert: Driving Intelligent and Emotion-Aware Conversations Through Online Value-Based Reinforcement Learning with LLM Priors

Tazeek Bin Abdur Rakib, Ambuj Mehrish, Lay-Ki Soon, Wern Han Lim, Soujanya Poria

Abstract

Large-language-model (LLM) agents excel at reactive dialogue but struggle with proactive, goal-driven interactions due to myopic decoding and costly planning. We introduce DialogXpert, which leverages a frozen LLM to propose a small, high-quality set of candidate actions per turn and employs a compact Q-network over fixed BERT embeddings trained via temporal-difference learning to select optimal moves within this reduced space. By tracking the user

BibTeX

@inproceedings{aaai2026_dialogxpertdrivi,
  title = {DialogXpert: Driving Intelligent and Emotion-Aware Conversations Through Online Value-Based Reinforcement Learning with LLM Priors},
  author = {Tazeek Bin Abdur Rakib and Ambuj Mehrish and Lay-Ki Soon and Wern Han Lim and Soujanya Poria},
  booktitle = {AAAI 2026},
  year = {2026}
}