Conventional online surveys provide limited personalization, often resulting in low engagement and superficial responses. Although AI survey chatbots improve convenience, most are still reactive: they rely on fixed dialogue trees or static prompt templates and therefore cannot adapt within a session to fit individual users, which leads to generic follow-ups and weak response quality. We address these limitations with AURA (Adaptive Understanding through Reinforcement Learning for Assessment), a reinforcement learning framework for AI-driven adaptive conversational surveys. AURA quantifies response quality using a four-dimensional LSDE metric (Length, Self-disclosure, Emotion, and Specificity) and selects follow-up question types via an epsilon-greedy policy that updates the expected quality gain within each session. Initialized with priors extracted from 96 prior campus-climate conversations (467 total chatbot-user exchanges), the system balances exploration and exploitation across 10-15 dialogue exchanges, dynamically adapting to individual participants in real time. In controlled evaluations, AURA achieved a +0.076 mean gain in response quality and a statistically significant improvement over non-adaptive baselines (p=0.044, d=0.66), driven by a 63% reduction in specification prompts and a 10x increase in validation behavior. These results demonstrate that reinforcement learning can give survey chatbots improved adaptivity, transforming static questionnaires into interactive, self-improving assessment systems.
Yunqi Zhu, Wen Tang, Jinghao Niu, Wensheng Zhang, Xuebing Yang
原文摘要
Evaluation of medical artificial intelligence (AI) agents remains predominantly answer-centric, assessing only the correctness of final outputs while overlooking the quality of intermediate reasoning. We propose MedTraj, a framework that treats reasoning trajectories as primary objects for modeling the progressive refinement of clinical evidence toward diagnostic decisions. A reasoning trajectory captures the state transitions among medical concepts---from clinical observations through evidential reasoning to a final conclusion---making the implicit reasoning chain of a medical agent explicit and inspectable. Each trajectory is scored across five quality dimensions: coherence, evidence support, hallucination, completeness, and traceability. Controlled error injection introduces targeted faults into otherwise correct trajectories to establish causal links between specific reasoning failures and measurable quality degradation. Step-level filtering based on marginal contribution identifies which individual reasoning steps drive or undermine reasoning trajectory quality. Quality-weighted reasoning trajectory context feeds these evaluations back into the model at inference time. Experiments across CareQA, PubMedQA, and CECMed demonstrate that reasoning trajectory context consistently improves reasoning coherence. For the severity assessment on the CECMed, quality-weighted reasoning trajectory context nearly doubles the correctness over the zero-shot baseline while cutting the hallucination ratio by 87%. Experiments show that 15.3% of reasoning steps carry most of the quality signal, and that extending chains beyond four steps yields diminishing returns.
Wei Zhu, Jian Zhang, Lixing Yu Yunnan University, Kun Yue Yunnan University, Zhiwen Tang Yunnan University
原文摘要
Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance through extended inference-time deliberation, yet how their reasoning failures arise remains poorly understood. By analyzing model-generated reasoning trajectories, we find that errors are not uniformly distributed but often originate from a small number of early transition points, after which reasoning remains locally coherent but globally incorrect. These transitions coincide with localized spikes in token-level entropy, and alternative continuations from the same intermediate state can still lead to correct solutions. Based on these observations, we introduce GUARD, a targeted inference-time framework that probes and redirects critical transitions using uncertainty signals. Empirical evaluations across multiple benchmarks confirm that interventions guided by these failure dynamics lead to more reliable reasoning outcomes. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding when and how reasoning first deviates, complementing existing approaches that focus on scaling inference-time computation.
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表