Recursive self-improvement (RSI) in production agents involves transforming accumulated experience into reliable model updates while adapting to evolving business policies. We present CARE (Customer-service Agent Retrospective and Evolve), a grounded RSI framework that operationalizes this process in customer service. Its goal is to replace a frontier proprietary incumbent with an in-house mid-sized model that continues learning after deployment. After a one-time cold start on governed production traces, the current model serves production traffic alongside the incumbent, and its own failures drive the next update. A 24/7 inspection process establishes failures through evidence-blinded, independently reviewed judgments. Attribution separates model errors from defects in Skills, tools, or the harness, routing component failures to repair. Model-attributable trajectories are truncated at the first erroneous decision and paired with verified repairs. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) then updates the model using the same model as teacher, with the diagnosis and repair supplied as privileged information unavailable to the student. To support continued evolution as business requirements change, training mixes failures from different Skill/SOP versions, each judged against the policy in force when it occurred. Candidates run an executable simulation test compiled from the latest SOP and then frozen, followed by offline inspection of the resulting traces. Promotion requires a combined simulation-and-inspection score at least at parity with the deployed version, confirmation through an online comparison with the incumbent, and human approval.
Dingyang Lyu, Zhengjia Xu, Jey Han Lau, Jianzhong Qi
Human mobility prediction, a core task of location-based web services, forecasts a user's next Point of Interest (POI) visit from historical trajectories, supporting applications from recommendation to urban planning. A general perception in the literature has been that visits to popular POIs are relatively easy to predict. Our analysis challenges this perception and shows that, even for visits to popular POIs, many predictions fail. The underlying cause is often transition-level sparsity, where a transition is a move from a source POI to a destination POI. While a POI may be popular, its transitions from other POIs may still be very sparse, since there are many POIs in a dataset. As a result, predicting a popular next POI can still be challenging if the transition from the source POI to it never appears in the training data. We therefore argue that a core bottleneck in human mobility prediction lies in the transition-level long tail, and propose REtrieval Combined with pArametric memory for next-POI prediction (RECAP). RECAP learns frequent transitions in the parameters of a small Transformer trained from scratch. Long-tail transitions give the parameters little or no training signal. RECAP retrieves evidence for them from two sources: (i) multi-hop transitivity learned from a global transition graph of all users, and (ii) revisit evidence from a target user's historical trajectory. RECAP further uses two-stage training to let the revisit component also learn from frequently seen transitions. Experiments on three real-world check-in datasets show that RECAP improves prediction accuracy, with clear gains on tail transitions. Our code is available at https://github.com/NiallLDY/RECAP.
Ming-Bin Chen, Jey Han Lau The University of Melbourne, Lea Frermann University of Melbourne
Measuring the quality of public deliberation requires evaluating not only civility or argument structure, but also the informational progress of a conversation. We introduce a framework for Conversational Information Gain (CIG) that evaluates each utterance in terms of how it advances collective understanding of the target topic. To operationalize CIG, we model an evolving semantic memory of the discussion: the system extracts atomic claims from utterances and incrementally consolidates them into a structured memory state. Using this memory, we score each utterance along three interpretable dimensions: Novelty, Relevance, and Implication Scope. We annotate 80 segments from two moderated deliberative settings (TV debates and community discussions) with these dimensions and show that memory-derived dynamics (e.g., the number of claim updates) correlate more strongly with human-perceived CIG than traditional heuristics such as utterance length or TF–IDF. We develop effective LLM-based CIG predictors paving the way for information-focused conversation quality analysis in dialogues and deliberative success.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yanbei Jiang, Amr Keleg Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Ryandito Diandaru, Jey Han Lau The University of Melbourne, Lea Frermann University of Melbourne, Biaoyan Fang Oracle, Fajri Koto Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
While the real world is inherently stochastic, Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly evaluated on single-round inference against fixed ground truths. In this work, we shift the lens to distribution alignment: assessing whether LLMs, when prompted repeatedly, can generate outputs that adhere to a desired target distribution, e.g. reflecting real-world statistics or a uniform distribution. We formulate distribution alignment using the attributes of gender, race, and sentiment within occupational contexts. Our empirical analysis reveals that off-the-shelf LLMs and standard alignment techniques, including prompt engineering and Direct Preference Optimization, fail to reliably control output distributions. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel fine-tuning framework that couples Steering Token Calibration with Semantic Alignment. We introduce a hybrid objective function combining Kullback-Leibler divergence to anchor the probability mass of latent steering tokens and Kahneman-Tversky Optimization to bind these tokens to semantically consistent responses. Experiments across six diverse datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms baselines, achieving precise distributional control in attribute generation tasks.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表