A Desideratum for Conversational Agents: Capabilities, Challenges, and Future Directions

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16939v1
• Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2025 21:01:25 GMT
• Title: A Desideratum for Conversational Agents: Capabilities, Challenges, and Future Directions
• Authors: Emre Can Acikgoz, Cheng Qian, Hongru Wang, Vardhan Dongre, Xiusi Chen, Heng Ji, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tur,
• Abstract summary: Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled conversational AI from traditional dialogue systems into sophisticated agents capable of autonomous actions, contextual awareness, and multi-turn interactions with users.<n>This survey paper presents a desideratum for next-generation Conversational Agents - what has been achieved, what challenges persist, and what must be done for more scalable systems that approach human-level intelligence.
• Score: 51.96890647837277
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled conversational AI from traditional dialogue systems into sophisticated agents capable of autonomous actions, contextual awareness, and multi-turn interactions with users. Yet, fundamental questions about their capabilities, limitations, and paths forward remain open. This survey paper presents a desideratum for next-generation Conversational Agents - what has been achieved, what challenges persist, and what must be done for more scalable systems that approach human-level intelligence. To that end, we systematically analyze LLM-driven Conversational Agents by organizing their capabilities into three primary dimensions: (i) Reasoning - logical, systematic thinking inspired by human intelligence for decision making, (ii) Monitor - encompassing self-awareness and user interaction monitoring, and (iii) Control - focusing on tool utilization and policy following. Building upon this, we introduce a novel taxonomy by classifying recent work on Conversational Agents around our proposed desideratum. We identify critical research gaps and outline key directions, including realistic evaluations, long-term multi-turn reasoning skills, self-evolution capabilities, collaborative and multi-agent task completion, personalization, and proactivity. This work aims to provide a structured foundation, highlight existing limitations, and offer insights into potential future research directions for Conversational Agents, ultimately advancing progress toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). We maintain a curated repository of papers at: https://github.com/emrecanacikgoz/awesome-conversational-agents.

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